If you thought the 2016 World Championship of League of Legends was going to see a team outside of South Korea come top, that's a cute sentiment. Unfortunately for everyone who thinks that way, that's not exactly how it panned out. Despite heavy competition from Chinese and U.S. counterparts, now that the quarter finals are out of the way, we're down to just four teams and three of them are Korean.
Throughout the past few days the best teams in the world competed in the quarter finals, hoping to secure a space in the top four, but of course that's quite a limited group so we had to say goodbye to four others.
Chinese competitors Royal Never give Up and EDward Gaming made strong showings against Korean team SK Telecom T1 and ROX Tigers, winning a game a piece throughout their best of three stints. Hardly a competitive performance, but they hung in there better than the others. Cloud 9 was the USA's only representative at this stage of the competition and they lost out to previous winners Samsung Galaxy, losing three straight games before their exit.
The only non Korean team in the semi-final contest is H2K which is technically England based, but its players are from all over Europe, as well as including one Korean player of their own.
So in reality, there are four starting players out of 20 in the upcoming semi-finals who aren't South Korean. It's really telling what having a country's national sport by ESports can do for team competitiveness.
The League semifinals take place October 21/22, before the finals at the Staples Center on the 29th.
Source: TSN.ca
