UPDATE (10:57 am): Well so much for that! SKT’s dream of a perfect run at Worlds is officially over, as KOO just trounced them in the third finals match. Did anyone really see that coming?
Original story follows:
For a nail-biting 35 minutes this morning, it seemed like SKT might actually lose a game in the League of Legends World Championships for once. But then challenger KOO Tigers blinked. The game was over before they could even open their eyes again.
The heavyweight Korean League team SKT have played pretty much perfectly for the entire 2015 World Championship, making them an all but undisputed winner of the tournament before it’s even officially ended. The in-game commentators were discussing just how awesome SKT is at the start of their second game against KOO Tigers when two of SKT’s players suddenly—and entirely unexpectedly—stumbled their way into one of the worst plays of the competition. SKT players Bengi and Marin were throwing punches at KOO dangerously close to their opponent’s base barely two minutes into the match. Rather than pulling back and recollecting themselves, they decided to just keep going in...straight into one of KOO’s turrets. This lead to an embarrassing double kill:
KOO was smart enough to respond to the hole in SKT’s armor by pressing their advantage. Four minutes into the game, KOO had already gotten four kills. Their forward momentum didn’t stop there, either. Except for a few impressive feats of outmaneuvering by individual SKT players, KOO actually seemed like it was playing the better game of the top two teams at Worlds.
But then, once again, SKT came back and said: Nope! They took a baron kill from KOO, putting them back on the defensive for a minute. Circling around the outer edges of KOO’s base, SKT went in for the kill. They didn’t look back:
SKT got an ace, killing the entire five-man KOO team in a matter of seconds. Then they swiftly bulldozed their way through KOO’s base and closed out the match.
Will SKT ever lose? Can SKT ever lose? That’s what everyone was wondering at the end of game 2. Then everything took a 180-degree turn. In game 3, KOO used an aggressive split-pushing strategy where they sent Smeb, playing as the melee fencing warrior Fiora, to push against SKT’s bottom lane pretty much nonstop. This managed to keep SKT distracted for the entire game, forcing them to pull a teammate or two out of fights to take care of Smeb’s nonstop pressure.
SKT was already losing pretty badly to this strategy by the 34-minute mark. But an impressive 1-v-2 by Smeb finalized their defeat. He managed to kill two opponents who ran back to base to try and stop him from taking out the inner bottom towers. And once he was done with them, he took out the last turret and burst a hole into SKT’s base.
The game was over a few minutes later.
I still can’t really believe this just happened. SKT was supposed to be invincible. And for a long time, they really were.