The four Korean squads have combined for 333 ranked games on their NA accounts, winning 258 of them for a 77.5% win rate. Every one of the 20 players had queued up in the last 13 hours at the time of writing. The volume is far from evenly spread, and neither are the results.
Dplus KIA have played 120 ranked games and won 100 of them, more than three times Gen.G’s total, and four of their five players already sit in Master. Career leads the whole Korean contingent at 512 LP after a 29-5 run on 하이용#1015, inside the top 0.24% of the NA server.
Smash has the highlight reel to go with it, a pentakill on Tristana and three quadrakills across two Aphelios games on 123321#KR12. DK missed Worlds altogether in 2025, and they are playing like a team with time to make up.
Hanwha Life Esports, MSI champions and first in Riot’s latest global power rankings, sit on the exact same 83.3% as DK with 60 wins and 12 losses. Zeus is the only one to have broken into Master so far, at 220 LP after going 20-2 on Austin#lll. The other four sit between Diamond II and Diamond I.
The three-time defending champions have the lowest win rate of the four, 65.7% over 105 games, and their bot lane has played more than half of them. Peyz has used 26 different champions in 30 games on gaesalbuger#aaaa, including a Viego in the bot lane yesterday that ended 19/7/6 with a quadrakill and the MVP grade. Keria was on his team that game, playing jungle, which goes some way to explaining why Lee Sin is the most-played champion on doryunnim#Frank.
Faker sits in Diamond III at 7-6. Yone has gone well for him, with four wins from five, but an account called Hide in bush#NYKR has gone 0-3 on Rengar, a champion built around leaping out of brush.
The LCK champions have logged just 36 ranked games across four accounts, and Duro’s New York#1114 is still unranked. What they have played, they have mostly won. Chovy is a perfect 9-0 on calm down#can. At the other end, Ruler’s proteinmonster#thief is the lowest-ranked of the 20 accounts, still in Diamond III.
Put the 20 champion pools side by side and a handful of names appear on almost every account. Lee Sin has been played 21 times by nine different players. Qiyana shows up on ten accounts for 18 games, Camille on nine for 17. Pantheon has the best record of the lot. Zeus and Siwoo are a combined 13-0 on him, and the champion stands at 16 wins from 18 games across all five players who picked him.
Top26.0% of games51.9% winrate8,158 games
25.4% of games54.4% winrate7,973 games
Locke is the other one to watch. Riot’s only new champion of 2026 arrived on Patch 26.13 in June, which makes this his first World Championship. Six of the 20 players have already taken him into solo queue, for a 7-2 record, with Chovy and Siwoo unbeaten on him and ShowMaker posting a 30.0 KDA in his only game.
Bootcamp accounts are throwaways, and some players name them that way. Kiin’s asdzxcvqwe is the left-hand side of a keyboard typed row by row, and Smash settled for the palindrome 123321. Delight’s 2026sup1 and Oner’s worlds#111 need no explaining.
New York is the clearest theme. Duro’s New York#1114 carries the date of the final, 14 November written the American way, at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Canyon’s Concrete jungle#USA borrows the city’s nickname, made famous by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys on Empire State of Mind, and slips a jungler’s pun in on the way. Faker’s #NYKR tag reads like the same idea from T1’s side.
Gumayusi’s Know my name shares its title with this year’s Worlds anthem, performed by True Damage. ShowMaker plays as Sonny Hayes, Brad Pitt’s character in F1 — a former prodigy who returns to the grid three decades after a crash cut his career short. ShowMaker lifted the Summoner’s Cup with DAMWON Gaming in 2020. Siwoo’s account, meanwhile, stretches Cristiano Ronaldo’s goal celebration to fit his own name. The “Siuuu” was first heard in 2013, at a pre-season final against Chelsea played in the United States.
Some references travel less well outside Korea. Keria’s doryunnim is 도련님, the Korean word for a young master of the house. Doran’s buriburii most likely points to Buriburizaemon, the cowardly pig samurai from Crayon Shin-chan. Zeka’s DAZBEEE is one letter away from DAZBEE, the Daegu-born singer best known for her J-pop covers.
A fresh account on a foreign server measures volume and routine more than level. A Diamond III badge after 13 games says little about Faker’s form, and a 9-0 only so much about Chovy’s. Every figure above will have moved by the time the Swiss Stage begins on 23 October. Each player’s full champion pool is on their DPM.LOL profile, the NA leaderboard shows where they stand in real time, and the Live tab — Faker’s here — tells you who is in game right now.
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