Betting: September 12th (LPL Third Place, LCK Regional Gauntlet Round 1)

Rogue Warriors versus JD Gaming

(image from Leaguepedia.com)

(UPDATE: I misread the tiebreaker rules. This was incorrect information. My apologies.)

Let's take a look at the Championship Point situation before we dive into this.

Rogue Warriors hold a minimum finish of 90 Championship Points which means a couple things. First, if Invictus were to lose the finals against Royal Never Give Up they would sit at 120 Championship Points meaning that Rogue Warriors as well as Invictus Gaming would sit at 120 Championship Points while Royal Never Give Up would receive an automatic bid to the World Championship with the #1 seed for China. This would force a tiebreaker which Invictus would win because of the 2-1 win in the only match these two teams played in the regular season. Second, EDward Gaming are locked at 90 Championship Points and they hold the regular season tiebreaker over Rogue Warriors meaning they'd move up to the top seed in the regional gauntlet if Rogue Warriors were to lose. JD Gaming sit at 40 points minimum and can only get up to 70 which locks them into the 5th and final seed for the regional gauntlet no matter what happens.

So what does this all mean? It means the JD Gaming are the last seed in the gauntlet no matter what so unless they want to pick between two teams they've lost to (EDG and RW) they have absolutely no reason to show anything in this series unless they want to use it as practice or try to throw them for a loop with a weird pick. Rogue Warriors must win this series in order to hold the #1 seed for the regional gauntlet, a huge advantage.

The trick with 3rd place matches, as discussed briefly the other day, is that we don't know exactly how these teams want to approach this. While it's rational to think that they'd want to play for the top seed or to "not show anything" they don't always think that way and there's something to be said for momentum and the psyche of your players. Personally all of these teams are excellent and the only five teams the LPL can send to worlds are all elite with maybe EDG being the weakest of the five if you were to evaluate based on recent performance.

JD just took Invictus, in my opinion China's best team or a Top 2 if you like RNG, to a thrilling five game series on Monday morning. Wednesday, only two days removed you'd think maybe they just want to ride the momentum right? I'm actually going against the grain here and I'm going to select Rogue Warriors. JD can't influence their position at all but they could potentially "test" Rogue Warriors with some weird picks to try to pull information out of the drafts. Usually this results in losses but can provide important and useful information. I expect JD to do this. This is a "free" series for JD Gaming to try to get information out of Rogue Warriors and while you could certainly argue that Rogue Warriors might not want to show much either, I'd take a generalized, vanilla approach to a weird approach any day if both teams are just going through the motions.

I'm not taking Rogue Warriors solely because they "must win" but because I think there IS enough incentive in having the top seed in the regional qualifier that they'd badly want to win this especially with JD having such an excellent performance against Invictus they want to stay out of the way of that and see as many matches from them as possible first. I also think these two teams are relatively evenly matched and similarly built so I would think this is even anyway.

Moneyline: Rogue Warriors -115  (5 units)

PROP: Exact RW 3-0 @ +471 (0.5 unit)

PROP: Exact RW 3-1 @ +336 (0.5 unit)

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SK Telecom T1 vs Gen.G eSports

The following are the brackets from Korea's Regional Qualifiers for Worlds.

(2017)

(2016)

(2015)

(2014)

The reason I'm showing this is that historically the Regional Gauntlet RARELY goes as expected. Sure the expected winner sometimes happens, like in 2015 with KT Rolster but some weird stuff happens in the gauntlet. With so much down time a lot of the teams are able to make these matches significantly closer than expected. Even as recently as last year nobody would have expected Samsung to go to the World Championship. As a matter of fact they were a team that had fallen off and showed they were a bit too one dimensional to defeat one of the truly elite Korean teams like KT Rolster. They eventually won the World Championship. Now to do that they completely reinvented themselves, something they didn't do in the gauntlet but I digress.

Gen.G were completely embarassed by the well-coached, and well-prepared Afreeca Freecs after limping into the playoffs with one of the easiest schedules in the final two weeks playing ALL FOUR bottom four teams. Their one dimensional playstyle was exposed and taken advantage of by Afreeca who decisively 2-0'd them in the #4 vs #5 match in the playoffs. Do I expect that team to show up? Not really but the metagame does lean towards their historical tendency and other than a miraculous run at Worlds last year this team has been one to stick to their guns of late game scaling 2-core compositions for their entire time together.

SK Telecom looked like they were finally getting things together with a decent run in the mid to late regular season in the LCK but unfortunately had dug themselves too deep a hole before going into the murderers row of their final four games against Gen.G, Afreeca, Griffin, and Kingzone and didn't make playoffs because they were too far behind Hanwha to have a shot at even a top six finish. The team was having a lot of success playing Pirean over Faker and Pirean was quite with a few exceptions. 

Both teams have glaring weaknesses. But both teams have also had a lot of time to prepare for this match. SK Telecom hasn't played a professional game since August 9th and Gen.G were eliminated on August 12th giving both teams about a month. While it'd be easy to look at this matchup and say "Gen.G are the better team by a wide margain" the truth is that with so much prep time, the historically excellent coaching staff on SK Telecom to make adjustments to the patch they've been watching for more than a month now, Gen.G's frequent stubbornness to try different things even in high pressure situations, and what I'm assuming will be the Return of the King, Faker to the mid lane, I actually like this series to be close and would never EVER rule out SK Telecom with prep time. 

The odds have the lowest line on the Gen.G exact 3-1 meaning that's the final game score they expect. I'll be taking the SK Telecom +1.5 @ -128 for five units and the moneyline itself for three. I'll also be taking the EXACT SKT 3-2 @ +517 for half a unit mostly for fun. I don't think SKT are the better team but I do think with this much preparation time this match will be significantly closer than the lines indiciate.

Moneyline: SK Telecom +166 (3 units)

Handicapped: SK Telecom +1.5 maps @ -128 (5 units)

PROP: Exact SKT 3-2 @ +517  (0.5 units)