WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP 2026 PLAY-IN STAGE

Official Page | Leaguepedia | Liquipedia | Twitch | YouTube | Patch 26.20 | Bo5 Fearless Draft

FURIA 3-1 Cloud9

FURIA will play MVK in Lower Bracket Round 2!
Cloud9 is the first team eliminated from the 2026 World Championship.

• Player of the Series: Ayu
• Game Threads: Game 1 | Game 2 | Game 3

FUR | Leaguepedia | Liquipedia | Website | Twitter | Youtube | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok | BlueSky
C9 | Leaguepedia | Liquipedia | Subreddit | Website | X/TWT | YT | FB | IG | TT

FULL MATCH SUMMARY & STATS

GAME 1: FUR vs. C9

Winner: Cloud9 in 40m | PotG: Tactical
Runes | Game Breakdown

GAME 2: C9 vs. FUR

Winner: FURIA in 35m
Runes | Game Breakdown

GAME 3: FUR vs. C9

Winner: FURIA in 34m
Runes | Game Breakdown

GAME 4: FUR vs. C9

Winner: FURIA in 29m
Runes | Game Breakdown

This thread was created by the Post-Match Team.

WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP 2026 PLAY-IN STAGE

Official Page | Leaguepedia | Liquipedia | Twitch | YouTube | Patch 26.20 | Bo5 Fearless Draft

Karmine Corp 3-0 MVK Esports

KC have defeated MVK!

KC | Leaguepedia | Liquipedia | Website | Twitter | Youtube | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok
MVK | Leaguepedia | Liquipedia | Website | Twitter | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok

FULL MATCH SUMMARY & STATS

GAME 1: KC vs. MVK

Winner: Karmine Corp in 30m
Runes | Game Breakdown

GAME 2: KC vs. MVK

Winner: Karmine Corp in 33m
Runes | Game Breakdown

GAME 3: MVK vs. KC

Winner: Karmine Corp in 36m
Runes | Game Breakdown

This thread was created by the Post-Match Team.

On Phreak's latest video about Classic, Phreak briefly mentions that after it ends, it's VERY likely he is still going to work on League of Legends, specifically, on the SR team again, not anything like modes, for example.

Does this comfort you or scare you?

Most people were not asking to go all the way back so S1.

They wanted the versions of League they actually spent years playing:old Swain draining a fight, old Udyr running at people with four stances, old Graves playing like a short-range bruiser.

A Classic queue misses the point if the champion you came back for is not even in the roster

Would you rather have one stable S3-S6-style patch built around heavily reworked champions, or rotating patches with the full roster from each era?

Transcript for those who can’t watch with audio:

Vedius: I’ll make the prediction, I’ll predict C9 to win KC. That’s my prediction.

Jatt: The first series?

Vedius: Yeah 3-0 C9 vs KC, 3-0. That’s my prediction, C9

Jatt: That’s not a real prediction, you don’t think that’s going to happen. Give me your real prediction.

Vedius: It is [his real prediction]. That’s what I’m doing.

Jatt: Give me your real prediction, give me your real prediction.

Vedius (Calmly): C9… 3-0.

Jatt: You just put every European player on your top 10 list. You didn’t even mention a C9 player, and neither did I.

Vedius: Correct.

Jatt: And you’re going to turn back and tell me C9 is going to win?

Vedius: Yeah!

Jatt (Exasperated): KC IS THE FAVOURITE BRO! KC is the favourite.

Vedius (Smug): Yeah. I know. They should be on paper.

Jatt: KC will win the first series 3-1 against C9, and C9 will have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Go through the lower bracket, and take you down in the future. They are not going to win the first series!

Vedius (Ragebaiting): Yeah nice prediction bro, nice shit prediction.

Vedius: I have said for months now… that if C9 and KC play… I am predicting C9 to win. And Mr History here… sitting on the other side of the screen…

Jatt (Protesting): Yeah, but you don’t believe it though! You’re just doing it for fun!

Vedius: Sir! North America has been sweeping EU all year, when is the last time we have even beaten a North American team?

Once again Lord Jatt prevails in his slightly less wrong prediction. Hail Jatt! #VediusWasMoreWrong

Two quick interesting stats from the first day of Swiss:

• It is hard to believe but yesterday for the first time ever at the international stage we saw game 5 between EU and NA. Interestinghly enough, there was only one 3:1 series before and all the rest NA vs EU series were either 3:0 or 0:3. Wow.
• Chika's yesterday performance on Kog'Maw put him at the second highest DPM in the Worlds history. He hit 1554 DPM. Right above Uzi's Kow'Maw from Worlds-2017 (1521 DPM), but below Sneaky's Caitlyn from the same Worlds-2017 (1781 DPM).

Top 10 DPM in Worlds history (2014–2026, play-ins included)

As you can see, most of DPM records are from 2017 and from way longer games. Which makes Chika absolutely outstanding here.

All NA vs EU best-of-5s:

C9 was placed in the group of death with the tournament favorites in FPX and LCK #1 Damwon, and they started the first day of groups going 0-3.

C9 proceeded to beat the tournament favorites FPX, and beat RGE from EU twice to get out of groups.

Shoutout to that roster: Fudge, Blaber, Perkz, Zven, Vulcan

I feel like the casts get so much better when you feel the highs and lows of the casters whilst the game is ongoing. I find when they have to be neutral, it's obvious you can hear them holding back on what they say.

I can understand this being an issue when both the casters are from the same region, in which case, it needs to be that way, but having a caster from NA and a caster from EU makes it so fun. Now I'm not saying they should be shitting on each other mid cast, but it is just better as a watch and listen.

What're your thoughts?

Shoutout to Anklespankin for this one -

But back when old Pantheon was still around, his old Pantheon video taught be about the old Pantheon bug where before he lands his R, you can spam W to someone and basically stun them in place before landing on them for big damage.

I practically did not see any pro players ever using this but btw. I have never seen any other players doing it. For a little while, it felt like one of my most closely guarded secrets because I didn't even see any Pantheon player in my old lobbies back in the day using this tech.

Also another build/tech I learned:

Arcane comet Sion back when the new runes got introduced. It used to be really annoying to lane against the reworked Sion with this build. Not a lot of people were running him with arcane comet. You used to be able to reliably cheese people with a corrupting potion start and just win lane via using Sion's E and poking the enemies with it + arcane comet damage + corrupting pot ticks. It was insanely busted from what I remember, but I can't recall if a lot of people were using the build. Most people stick with grasp at the time iirc.

Dawidssonek, a former pro player from Poland, is terrorising EUW soloq with AP Kog Maw for a whole season, since Dusk and Dawn was introduced.

Recently, he reached GM 1776 LP with Kog, playing him jg only. He is #1, #2 and #9 on this list.

This guy in general is cracked playing off meta picks, he was known for being also #1 on Kayle, Kassadin and Nasus, making also Nasus JG a viable pick in Chall elo.

As the Worlds 2026 Play-In Day 1 just ended the Pick'ems results are the following:

CHAMPIONS

PLAYERS

TEAMS

EVENTS

You can keep track of the results as we head to the Worlds 2026 Play-In Day 2 here:

https://pem.lol/worlds/2026/pickems

0:00 - Intro
0:07 - League Classic closes in January
1:59 - Upcoming champions
3:33 - New champion: Mordekaiser
9:12 - New champion: Yorick
15:36 - New champion: Lucian
18:40 - New champion: Hecarim
20:26 - Items and bugfixes
29:40 - Champion balance changes

"Is he the protagonist? He is, yes."

"Are we in an anime? I was reborn in another world and now I'm a star League of Legends player."

In preparation for Worlds I have compiled data for the first jungle path of each game in pro LOL across the LCK, LEC, and LCS for the most recent season. Here are some interesting insights that I found. I've provided some descriptions of the types of jungle paths in a bulleted list at the bottom of this post.

• Starting in the top side of your jungle and pathing to you bot side (vertical_bot) is the most common first jungle path at 47%. This is twice as frequent as the next closest pathing style (vertical_top - 23%). Figure 1 shows the frequency of every pathing style.
• The vertical_bot path has decreased in frequency significantly since First Stand going from 78% of all paths to 47%. The single_quadrant path has taken the largest share of this slice going from 2% to 18%. In my last post I mentioned that I thought there was room for more path diversity and I think this new data validates that somewhat. Figure 2 shows the average gold difference change in each lane by path type. Despite an increase in frequency across all the non-vertical_bot path types many of these alternate paths still see a positive team gold difference.
• The vertical_top path continues to perform poorly. I am a little shocked to see that the frequency increased from 14% to 23%. Figure 3 shows the vertical_bot vs. vertical_top matchup by lane. The blue bar shows the gold difference at the moment of recall and the orange bar shows the gold difference at 6:00. On average the team who paths vertical_top goes down 24 gold overall and this effect is especially seen in the bot lane, generally the highest priority lane in pro play.
• Figure 4 shows vertical_bot's average gold difference versus each other path_type. vertical_bot has a disadvantage against single_quad and diagonal while vertical_bot gains gold advantages over the other path types on average. These gold differences look way different than last time, in part this is due to removing the source of some bias in the way data was collected. I will add a comment describing this.
• Path type frequencies vary widely between teams. Here are some path type frequencies for some Worlds teams:
  • GEN - 64% vertical_bot, 17% vertical_top, 7% single_quad, 1% horizontal_bot, 1% horizontal_top
  • G2 - 27% vertical_bot, 54% vertical_top, 12% single_quad, 4% horizontal_bot, 4% horizontal_top
  • TL - 29% vertical_bot, 12% vertical_top, 50% single_quad, 4% horizontal_bot, 4% horizontal_top
• Figure 5 displays the path type frequency for each league (LCK, LEC, LCS). The path frequencies are fairly similar, vertical_bot in particular only varies by 1% across leagues.

Here are the descriptions of each path type:

• vertical_bot - Pathing from top side jungle to bot side on a single team's side of the map
• vertical_top - Pathing from bot side to top side on a single team's side of the map
• horizontal_top - Pathing from one top side quadrant to the other top side quadrant (Example: pathing from blue team's blue jungle to red team's red jungle)
• horizontal_bot - Pathing from one bot side quadrant to the other bot side quadrant
• single_quad - Clearing a single jungle quadrant and then backing (or more commonly ganking and then backing)
• diagonal - Any path not already covered. The most common example is blue team's jungler invades red team's red jungle then paths to blue team's red jungle.

Fun fact: Since MSI, I've seen some Brazilian fans constantly putting FURIA on the same level as TSW, or even above them. Even after TSW beat TES 3-1, some were still arguing that FURIA could've beaten TES too. The funny part is that TSW and FURIA never got to face each other for months, so we never had a direct answer to that debate.

But now, MVK, a team that TSW has been absolutely dominating all year in the LCP, just swept FURIA 3-0 at Worlds. And for those who don't know, MVK is basically the successor to the old Buffalo org. Yes, THAT Buffalo team that used to terrorize G2 at MSI.

I know esports isn't perfectly transitive, but at this point, does TSW really need to beat FURIA themselves to prove anything? Looks like MVK settled that debate for them.

I rarely post on Reddit, but I really wanted to see what the community's opinions are regarding the standard Honor system for players who primarily stick to Arena.

As a League player since Season 1, I personally only play Arena now because I believe it is one of the best modes to ever happen to the game. For years, I consistently held Honor Level 5 by playing ARAM. However, since shifting entirely to Arena, my Honor has dropped from level 5 down to level 3. Because Arena utilizes the Fame system instead of the standard post game voting screen, there is currently no way to maintain or grow your standard Honor level.

My question for the community is: should there be some kind of adapted Honor system integrated into Arena? This would ensure that players who dedicate themselves to this mode still have a fair chance to reach Level 5 and earn the end of season rewards. I am not angry or complaining about this, just genuinely curious if other Arena mains are experiencing the same issue and what your thoughts are on potential solutions.

KC vs C9

MVK vs FUR

Schedule ahead!

2026 WORLDS PLAY-IN STAGE

Lolesports | Leaguepedia | Eventvods.com | New to LoL

Today's matches will be played on Patch 26.20.

Today's Matches

• All matches are a best of 5

Streams

• Stream on Twitch

• Stream on YouTube

• Stream on Lolesports

Bracket

On-Air Team

Format

• 4 teams participate
• Double elimination bracket
• All matches are best of five
• Winner advances to the Bracket Stage

The official Worlds ruleset can be found here.

VoDs

• VoDs on Reddit

• VoDs on Eventvods.com

• VoDs on Lolesports

Live Discussions and Post-Match Threads:

This is our Live Discussion Archive. Here you can find all the old live threads, and the respective PMTs in a stickied comment under the post.