Huh? Of course they compete in masters 3 or at least do their best to qualify. Obviously it's not as high stakes for them as it is for other NA teams competing over champions slots, but they're not gonna get complacent and ignore a major tournament with likely a huge prize pool.

It's going to be interesting to see how Sentinel's aggressive yet adaptable playstyle, which won them Masters 1 and qualified them for Reykjavik, will perform against the other regions. Shahzam said that the Sentinels we saw 2 weeks ago is gone, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

I was looking for an article that had the format, teams, schedule, broadcast, and coverage all in the same spot. Perfect.

You were right, my bad. I was going off of what I know about 10-team double elimination brackets, but I guess since TL and SEN have the highest seeds they can't get 9th-10th, which makes sense.

Sharks 2-1 NU

TL 2-1 V1

VKS 2-0 X10

SEN 2-1 FNC

V1 2-0 CR

FNC 2-1 KRU

Nice prediction, You took half of the 4 total possible outcomes. Great effort and analysis.

Wow, props for planning it out this much. Besides the fact the 10 hour group stage days are a bit long, I don't see why Riot didn't go with something like this. One note, it's possible that some ties could happen between #1 and #2 or #2 and #3 in each group, so you have to factor in some time for those (possible) matches, maybe on Day 6 before the QF.

Yea, I also think it's ridiculous that some teams only get to play two matches, but I think the prize pool and circuit points help out a lot.

Best case scenario: the tournament is two weeks long with group stages players are allowed to stream whenever they want outside of matches.

True. I'm not even sure Riot or the players understand it.

I agree with you, it should've been a 2 group format, but that would mean a lot more matches (about twice as many as a rough estimate) in the same 1 week time frame, so they would probably have to make many of the matches BO1. BO1's are definitely not appropriate for the game's first international LAN as far as competitive integrity, so I can see why Riot chose the bracket that they did. As far as two back-to-back matches, it sounds burdensome but it's not anything too out of the ordinary for eSports and I'm sure the players are used to that sort of thing.

Only two regions, EU and NA, had to try harder in the Challengers Finals because of seeding. Every other region was lumped into one randomized seeding pool no matter how they performed in Challengers Finals (see image below).

Seeding

Additionally, from the way the seeding/bracket turned out, 4 teams have a guaranteed path to at least 7th-8th place, and none of those teams are SEN or Liquid, which are the teams with the theoretically highest seeds. Therefore, seeding not only does not matter, it in some ways works against the highest seeded teams. This is just my understanding, so it could be wrong, but I hope it makes some sense.

No, if sharks loses, they go to lower round 2 and if they lose again, they tie for 7th-8th place. 6 teams, including SEN and Liquid, the two highest seeded teams, are the only ones that can get 9th-10th place, the other 4 teams cannot get below 7th-8th place.

6 teams: SEN, Fnatic, KRU, V1, Crazy Raccoons, and Liquid

4 teams: Vikings, X10, Sharks, and NUTURN

I'm not entirely sure about this, but this is generally the way 10-team double elimination brackets go. Hope it helped.

oh dear me! not an e-girl!!!

ur so fucking dumb holy shit maybe read the alleged victim's doc instead of cherry picking braindead twitter posts that validate ur delusional opinion

im all for waiting for both sides but this is just cancer stfu

True.