First play-in team to win the League of Legends World Championship

Posted: Sep 24, 2023

Before 2022, only qualifying teams won one of the previous 11 League of Legends World Championships. The wildcard for non-qualifying teams was first introduced in 2013 before being replaced by the play-in stages in 2017. Only four teams out of twelve from the play-in will make it to the next phase to play in the World Championship, and DRX was one of them. With the past failures of previous play-in teams, many people gave DRX, a team that barely got into the play-in stage, little chance of winning the tournament, let alone advancing past the group stage.

Instead, DRX went 4-2 in the group stage, tying team Rogue with the best group C record. DRX would beat Rogue in the tiebreaker, and up next was the defending champion EDward Gaming, EDG, in the quarterfinals. Things looked bleak for DRX when EDG took a 2-0 lead in the best-of-5 series. DRX would reverse sweep the 2021 World Champion to face the tournament favorite, Gen.G. Gen.G was the number 1 seed from Korea, while DRX was considered the fourth-best in Korea and the worst Eastern team in Worlds. DRX would prove everyone wrong again by beating Gen.G 3-1 to advance to the finals.

The last opponent standing in the way was T1, a team that had won the most World Championships with 3, and the League of Legends GOAT in Faker. Fittingly, the series would reach a Hollywood-ending take-it-all game 5, where DRX became the first play-in team ever to win the League of Legends World Championship.

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Quotes

It was fun to go up one by one as an underdog, [and] if people think that we are the underdog, we are fine.

Kim "Deft" Hyuk-kyu
References