Two more eliminations in Daejeon. LYON opened against Team Secret Whale, then G2 and T1 met in what might be the series of the tournament so far. When the night was over, both Western sides were still standing — and one of the biggest names in the game was not.
LYON were supposed to win this, and they did. TSW are a sharp, skirmish-hungry side, and they had just the opening to rattle their opponents: game one was theirs for the taking before they let it go.
They responded by staying dangerous and losing anyway. Across three games TSW built good early leads and contested the teamfights, but never turned a favourable phase into anything lasting. Every time, a single hinge moment — an objective contest, a defensive play misjudged, map pressure left uncontained — tipped the game back to LYON, who kept closing the gap with precision and collective discipline before snowballing out of reach. Game one set the tone in TSW's own wheelhouse: Saint stole the smite off Hizto's Lee Sin at the pit, the kind of skirmish beat TSW are built to win, turned against them.
Dhokla anchored the series. Usually excellent on the weak side, he showed in game two he can crush a lane outright on Gnar, and finished the set well ahead of his opponent — +30 CS, +1031 gold and +2387 XP at 15 on game 2. Berserker matched him for consistency, dominating his lane opposite number from start to finish.
Some results carry their own weight before a word of analysis. T1 have never finished outside the top four at a major international event — until now, this is the first time in the organisation's history. G2 hadn't beaten them in a best-of-five since the 2019 semi-final. And for Hans Sama, it was a debt years overdue, revenge on the side that knocked him out with Misfits back in 2017. G2 walked off with all three storylines, 3-1.
They won it on preparation. G2 read the one imbalance in T1's game and built the series around it: T1 can't play through Doran, which throws everything onto Peyz, so the answer was to disrupt Doran in lane rather than hope to out-scale the bot. BrokenBlade's exotic picks did exactly that, and he played out of his mind doing it. The Cho'Gath in game two was the perfect fit, a wall of crowd control built around him, and game two was G2's most controlled of the set.
When the drafts weren't enough, the resilience was: this is a roster forged in deciders, and it showed most in game four, where G2 lost nearly every lane and still throttled T1's snowball — BrokenBlade's Kled the anchor, constant cross-map play keeping the map from collapsing. Peyz took his own pentakill in that game to seal it, and BB's Kled closed 15/5/7.
For T1, the series turned on the very dependency G2 targeted. Doran had a nightmare — five solo deaths, 27 across the four games — and with the top side bleeding, T1 leaned harder on Peyz than any team should have to. Even so, Peyz mostly got the better of Hans Sama, +17 CS, +876 gold and +842 XP at 15. It wasn't enough. When the bot lane is the only plan and the map is falling everywhere else, a side as disciplined as this G2 will find the seams.
BrokenBlade summed up where it leaves them:
We are at the level of Eastern teams.
The lower bracket now stages an all-Western semi-final: G2 against LYON, EU against NA, with a spot deeper into MSI on the line. The subplot writes itself in the bot lane, where Berserker made his feelings on the matchup clear to us:
He's the best ADC in EU, but I still think I'm better than him
Before that, the two titans meet for the upper bracket final: BLG against HLE, the tournament's two heavyweights, with a direct path to the grand final for the winner and a drop to the lower bracket for the loser.
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