As if a day of group stages could have been more cut and dry today, there is nothing new under the sun here. SKT dominates everyone, China looks shaky but comes out ahead, Loulex gets caught, and the wildcard team loses. Luckily for every spectator involved, tomorrow’s games look much better in terms of quality and expectations.

SKT vs EDG

With a half-week’s worth of rest everyone hoped that the Chinese teams would come back in full form, especially EDG but this game ended up being the fastest game thus far without a surrender vote. EDG essentially took Kalista in exchange for SKT getting both Elise and Darius which speaks to how big a victory it was for SKT in drafting phase.

With AmazingJ on Gnar against a Darius, common sense would dictate to pay attention to that matchup but instead, Clearlove ganked bottom and abandoned AmazingJ to Marin’s Darius and Bengi’s Elise, and he died early on repeatedly giving a snowball in Marin’s favor. Had it been Koro1 here on Gnar he might have been self-sufficient enough to survive but it wasn’t the case. Pawn couldn’t do much in his lane as TF against a Ryze, and the snowballed Darius helped SKT as a whole throw a bulldozer right at EDG as they nearly aced them at a Baron right, took it and just pushed to win.

There’s not much else you can say in a one-sided game, except EDG really needs to step it up if they want to do well in the bracket stage.

BKT vs H2K

So far this week at worlds, we’ve unfortunately had a lot of low quality games in terms of overall macro and micro play but this might be one of the few games we’ve had that played out just as low quality as spectators expected going into it. BKT got 3-buffed at the start and just overall stomped in laning phase. It was an extremely quick and brutal win for Europe’s second seed over the wildcard team.

BKT vs EDG

This game should have been a stomp, since BKT has shown us nothing more than what people expected given past performances of wildcard teams. While paiN gaming showed us that Brazil has become a region worth taking notice of, BKT has shown us thus far that they are just as good as every other wildcard team that’s come before them just like Mineski.

At least that’s what it seemed like until they ended up with a 5K gold lead in the early game with impressive Thresh hooks from Moss. This was the nightmare scenario for Chinese fans since EDG was the only non-disappointing Chinese compared to both iG and LGD. For them to lose to the weakest team at Worlds would be the second coming of Kabum and Alliance. The EU “superteam” losing to the weak wildcard team. Disclaimer, I don’t consider either of paiN’s wins as a Kabum victory if only because in evaluating their play, they are a contender even if it’s on the weaker side. This however would have been an upset of astronomical performance.

Keyword, would have. Rest easy EDG fans as they came back from a 5K gold decficit to win the game. It was ungodly messy but at least they came back in full force, even if they walked off the stage with frustrated looks on their faces.

H2K vs SKT

The first thing to note is that this game was played by Easyhoon instead of Faker. Maybe they wanted to play at least one game with Easyhoon at worlds, maybe they wanted to give Faker some rest. Either way, you get to see Easyhoon on the champion he was first famous for: Karthus.

This game wasn’t as one sided as it could have been, but SKT eventually busted down the doors with relative ease after a certain point, despite that H2K put up an okay fight at the beginning. They were still down gold but Ryu kept the team in the game for as long as he could until his team just failed to compete with SKT, especially Marin and Easyhoon.

There was a pretty long pause after a certain point in the game, as Odoamne’s stun as Renekton failed to register with the game on Bengi’s Evelynn. However a decision was made to continue despite the bug, because it wouldn’t have changed the end result as no one on H2K could have killed Bengi even if he was successfully stunned after flashing away.

EDG vs H2K

I’ll keep this one brief all you need to know is that H2K gave EDG both Jinx, Lulu and Tahm Kench. Deft being one of the best Jinx players in the world, at least domestically, it was ridiculous to see this happen since this is not a secret in the slightest. It’s really standard for EDG to run this and it is wildly successful so if you add the Kench to the formula you’re just never going to get to Deft’s Jinx when it matters, and this was a relatively standard win for EDG even if it wasn’t a complete stomp. With that game it’s definitive that H2K will be sent home.

SKT vs BKT

Just like yesterday, the last game ends with the wildcard team but it doesn’t end well for BKT today like it did for paiN yesterday. I almost thought I would be unable to give BKT any praise today but really 007x stepped up a little and gave fans a little something to be proud of, but that isn’t much against SKT and there really is nothing more to say about this game. Very standard SKT game, Marin is given a lot of the gold, cue teamfights, ensue slaughter. Roll credits.