Looking Ahead to the LoL Worlds Play-Ins in South Korea
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The Worlds will return to South Korea this year, one of the global homes of Esports, and it will take more than a month until we have a Worlds winner, as the three phases of the tournament need to be battled out. The start of the tournament will be in Seoul, and then Busan will host a phase before we return to Seoul to see who will be the new champions.
The three different phases of the Worlds take some explaining for those people who have never experienced LoL before or who haven’t watched an Esports tournament, so we're looking forward to the tournament as a whole, and firstly the play-in phase.
The Esports Gambling Scene Looks Ahead to the Worlds
League of Legends is one of the biggest esports when it comes to gambling, and this is largely down to the fact that there are many different markets when compared with other esports. People have more options to choose from like betting on the first dragon slayed or the first baron slayed. There are more conventional markets which include the outright winners, correct score in matches, and more.
The Esports gambling scene is full of tech-savvy individuals who are adopting cryptocurrency as their main payment method for gambling. Some estimates say that the majority of all Bitcoin transactions are now gambling transactions and crypto betting sites allow people to bet on League of Legends securely and quickly with Bitcoin. Crypto offers a faster way to deposit money with low fees, and it is also a secure and anonymous method. Rather than having to use a bank transfer or credit card to put money into a betting account, people can quickly move their Bitcoin.
These Bitcoin casinos such as Thunderpick give users the chance to bet on the outright winners of tournaments such as the Worlds, but also provide markets on the individual matches and the phases of the tournaments such as the play-in phase that will start next month.
At its peak in 2022, the tournament last year saw over five million people watching. Plenty of those people follow along or make a wager using casinos, including cryptocurrency casinos.
The Phases of the Worlds
The Worlds is one of the biggest tournaments in the Esports scene. In 2022, an impressive $2,225,000 USD made up the prize pot, and a great performance from DRX saw them win the tournament, taking home almost $500,000 of that as well as being able to claim the Summoner's Cup.
To get their hands on that cup, teams have to make it through the phases and to a much-anticipated grand final. The stages of the tournament have altered somewhat over the years, League of Legends was released back in 2009 and the first Worlds took place in 2011, and if you have been around since the very start you’ll be able to name quite a few changes as well as dramatic events in the LoL scene.
The play-in stage can be seen as a qualifying round. In Stage One, the play-in stage, we see eight teams entering the tournament. They are then drawn into two different brackets. The matches that take place are all best of three to decide a winner.
The upper bracket winner from one group then plays the second-placed team in the next group. They play off to see which two teams will advance to the next stage of the World tournament, and this is in a best-of-five match.
In the next stages of the tournament, the big guns are introduced as all of the prequalified teams are entered into a group stage which is termed “the Swiss stage”. In Stage Three, the final, there are knockout matches to determine the overall winner.
The teams that will make up the play-in stage for 2023 are:
● PSG Talon
● CTBC Flying Oyster
● GAM Esports
● Team Whales
● DetonatioN FocusMe
● LOUD
● Movistar R7
● One more undetermined team (yet to qualify)
How to Follow the LoL World Play-Ins
Dedicated fans will want to watch every single phase of the tournament including the play-ins, and the matchups between the teams above could provide some serious entertainment.
Riot Games, the developers of League of Legends, have a good track record of streaming the events along with high-quality summarizing for their hoards of followers on YouTube and Twitch. The Twitch channel to follow is simply called Riot Games and you can stream the LoL Worlds matches, including the play-in phase. Plus, you can check out the whole tournament for free courtesy of the developers, as it is all available to stream on the LoL Esports website (lolesports.com).
As well as following via the official Riot Games channels, plenty of the teams involved are also on YouTube, Twitch, and other social media, so this could be a cool chance to see some of the behind-the-scenes media and get a glimpse of what the tournament is like. 50 co-streamers have been recruited by Riot Games, and you can check out all of their unique journeys through the tournament. When the Worlds are underway the Esports world will go into full LoL mode, so Twitch and YouTube to be awash with content from some of the biggest names in the League of Legends scene.
The LoL play-in phase finally gets started on October 10th at LoL Park in Seoul, South Korea.