On Saturday, November 6, 2021, the final of the World Championship in League of Legends took place. The tournament favorites DWG KIA faced off against the Chinese team EDward Gaming. 4 million viewers watched the final of the LoL Worlds 2021 at peak: a new record. In the end, a Korean was named the best player, but he played for China.
What a match?
- On Saturday, the final of the LoL Worlds 2021 took place. DWG KIA with Showmaker, Canyon, and Khan faced EDward Gaming. It was a Best-of-5 series, and you needed to win 3 games to become world champion.
- DWG KIA was considered a strong favorite. They had shown hardly any weaknesses throughout the Worlds, only in the semifinals did they drop 2 games against T1 with Faker, winning everything else beforehand. 4 players of the team had already become world champions in 2020, only top laner Khan was still without a title. He had what was probably his last chance on Saturday. Afterward, conscription and career-ending awaited the 25-year-old Korean.
- EDward Gaming surprisingly made it to the final. The Chinese team has good players – but internationally they have never had much success: from 2014 to 2018, they were eliminated in the quarterfinals 4 times and once in the group stage. They didn’t qualify for the Worlds at all in 2019 and 2020.
This is how the match went: DWG KIA and EDward Gaming delivered epic battles in the final. There were matches like game 4, where there were only 9 kills in total, and relatively wild games like game 2, when DWG KIA overwhelmed EDward Gaming with 20-3 kills.
Ultimately, everything was decided in match 5, a battle lasting 41 minutes. Here, EDward Gaming was ahead in the end: precisely because the Korean mid laner Scout was able to win his lane against the player typically considered the best in the world, Showmaker, on behalf of the Chinese.
In the last two games, Scout turned up with the champion Zoe and gave his team the victory. Scout was also voted the Finals MVP.
EDG’s victory was so unlikely that none of the 7.4 million got the LoL prediction game Pick’em 2021 right.
Highest Viewer Numbers at a LoL Worlds
How many people were watching? According to information from Esport-Charts, 4 million viewers watched the final of the LoL Worlds 2021 at peak (via twitter). This is a new overall record. Previously, the record stood at 3.9 million when G2 faced T1 in 2019: the legendary game between Faker and Caps.
Somehow it wasn’t Showmaker’s day:
“We have broken the curse”
This is how the world champions react: After the match, the supporter of EDward Gaming, Meiko, said they had broken the curse.
For years, fans had high expectations for EDward Gaming, but they always disappointed and were eliminated in the quarterfinals. Meiko says: They have disappointed expectations so many times that fans had hardly any expectations for EDward Gaming in 2021. He is now happy to tell the fans: “From now on, you can have high expectations of EDG.”
There is also a recording from the voice comms of the match when the top laner Flandre said: One must avenge their good friends from T1 –who were eliminated against DWG Kia in the semifinals.
This is how the match is discussed: Particularly impressive is the performance of EDward Gaming’s jungler, Jiejie: He managed to almost fully neutralize the nominally best jungler in the world, Canyon. Normally, Canyon is the player who decides such series for DWG KIA (via reddit).
Meiko, the supporter of EDward Gaming, also receives praise: He initiated the decisive team fights with perfect openings.
Ultimately, however, one is simply amazed that the true heir to Faker apparently is not Showmaker, but Scout – who previously was a substitute for Faker at T1.
The Worlds 2021 ended with an emotional speech:
For experts, many matches were already decisively influenced before the start of the match:
LoL nerd explains that coaches and pros have no idea about a central aspect of the game
