London day two: today was LMS’s second shot at making the semi-finals. Sadly for them nobody expected them to win, going against the top favourites of the tournament, SK telecom T1. The Korean juggernaut went undefeated through groupstage and wanted to keep it that way today. Let’s take a look what happened in a packed Wembley Arena.

Drafting phase

Today's drafts were very stale, AHQ was always forced to ban Azir, something they’ve been doing for months. This leaves open plenty of picks for SKT, meaning they get good comps every game without problems. Elise gets first picked every game, botlane always ends up with Kalista vs Tristana. Ziv and Albis got Darius and Thresh every game with Westdoor trying to find a pick he can be relevant on every game. The only surprise of this quarter is Wolf picking up Tahm Kench, a support that is showing its value in competitive play and shuts down AHQ’s aggressive pick comps. I expected the pick to come out today, Albis played it before and this is a perfect chance for SKT to practice it. I’m sure we’ll see more of the big catfish.

Game 1

SKT starts the series very aggressively and cocky, Faker picked ignite to be an insane lane bully versus Westdoor, who always struggles in lane. Marin plays up very far in a lane with no turret. Bang and Wolf are dueling very early but Bengi comes in soon for an easy double kill.

Meanwhile, Mountain put up his tent in top lane, trying to gank Marin and stealing all jungle camps from Bengi. Marin doesn’t fall for it and can even come back in CS against Ziv. AHQ loses dragon pressure because of this and SKT get a small but steady lead with dragon advantage.

The game gets slowed down until about 20 minutes when SKT can find a good flank in the botlane securing 2 kills. AHQ has a slight teamfight win later and can secure a dragon giving them some room to breath but SKT doesn’t stop the pressure. Any over aggression from AHQ gets immediately punished and Bang is showing that he can carry if the team needs him to.

Tristana and Lulu -- a deadly combo -- starts snowballing the game for SKT, sieging inner turret after turret and growing their lead. Great vision around baron forces AHQ to facecheck constantly and SKT eventually find a pick on Westdoor following into a semi risky baron. Wolf is on form and keeps Mountain away from the pit until his team can secure it. SKT wins the following fight and can end the game afterwards with one big baron push, ending the game in roughly 30 minutes. One teamfight error is the only real flaw this far in SKT’s play, AHQ is already sweating in their seats.  

Game 2

Game two is just a more destructive game one with less mistakes, Marin just keeps Ziv busy in lane while Bang on Kalista and Faker on his now unbanned Ryze go off. The Tahm Kench of Wolf is also huge, he and Bang win 2v2’s with no problem and keep each other alive easily. A pretty similar early game goes over in a similar 20 minutes midgame. Bengi can get a lot of ganks off during this time to push AHQ off baron and SKT can easily secure it with Kalista. In game 1, AHQ was actively warding one area were they wanted to fight but they didn’t even get the opportunity in this one, a dark map means free reign for SKT. After they secure baron, the game is over in 26 minutes.

Game 3

Game three was slow, boring and frankly a bit of disrespect from SKT, or more to say, from Faker. They force Westdoor on Fizz, but instead of picking a ranged lane shover to deny Fizz a lot of CS, Faker wants to brawl and locks in the slow scaling Kassadin, a highly unfavorable matchup for the midlane diety. Faker makes good use of his tp to get first blood in botlane at lvl 3 but gets punished for his recklessness later in lane. Westdoor all-ins him in lane with ignite and one kill turns into more. Bengi, usually a tank/supportive player, goes runeglaive again on Elise and with no sufficient back up from his lanes finds himself getting picked off on occasion.

Overall AHQ can never pull out a clear lead except in dragon. SKT goes 4-1 putting Marin on splitpush duty with Faker pushing toplane when the wave gets big. Westdoor’s ignite brought him advantages in the laning phase but right now when AHQ is clearly a bit stronger they can’t force SKT in a bad position. He can’t ever splitpush alone without TP and they don’t put enough emphasis on clearing vision around baron. SKT still is in control of that objective. AHQ keeps dragon pressure though and can secure their 4th one, opening up this long game for a 5th dragon play. It looks even better when Marin fails to dive Ziv turning the game into a 5v4 for about 50 seconds. But SKT has always dictated the pace of this series and even now they are looking to secure Baron. They can’t but AHQ gets greedy and when Marin is almost respawn they go for a desperate and unneeded baron attempt. They never controlled vision here and SKT immediately collapses. Marin respawns in time and has TP up, Ahq loses the fight 4-0 and the game afterwards. Four dragons are meaningless if your nexus is destroyed. Ahq should have continued to play slow and play the 5th dragon, but their greed abruptly ends the game in a matter of minutes.

SKT is our 2nd semi-finalist, facing OG next week and still undefeated at this World Championship. The biggest upside for SKT is that they’ve shown off in three consecutive games how good their synergised logo flash is. Downside: Bang died 3 times this series, greatly reducing his KDA.

Conect with the author at @Antdrioite.

Images courtesy of the Lolesports stream.