Following Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng’s return yesterday, Phoenix1’s jungler Rami “Inori” Charagh also made his way back to the LCS today after being away for a few weeks. Check out tonight’s recap to see if Inori won his return game.
Team SoloMid 2-1 Team EnVyUs
Aside from a botched top lane dive in the beginning, Nam “LirA” Tae-yoo completely massacred Team SoloMid in the first game of the series. Pathing much better than Dennis “Svenskeren” Johnsen, LirA was able to create leads all around the map for Team EnVyUs, with little opposition from the TSM jungler. Behind EnVyUs in both kills and gold, TSM tried to make their comeback through teamfights, but these fights produced the exact opposite effect intended by TSM. Winning the next teamfights, EnVyUs had an easy path to end the game.
Game two could be summarized as a battle of execution. While both TSM and EnVyUs tried to make plays around the map, only TSM was able to have success with their attempts. Almost every time EnVyUs tried to pull off a gank or roam, TSM somehow miraculously survived. TSM, on the other hand, found kills left right and center. TSM pushed their lead to the limits, going for tower dives and solo kills. EnVyUs could do almost nothing to stop the fed members of TSM, falling to even out the series.
Game three was the Kevin “Hauntzer” Yarnell show. Getting fed on Nautilus, EnVyUs was faced with the impossible task of killing Hauntzer. Unfortunately for EnVyUs, while they were killing the large tank, the rest of TSM was killing them. Once Hauntzer got three items, the game was over. Too tanky to kill, there was no way for EnVyUs to kill all five members of TSM, thus causing their defeat.
Phoenix1 2-0 Echo Fox
Phoenix1 started out this series with a dominant game one. Out-trading Echo Fox during early skirmishes, P1 quickly found themselves with a huge lead. Having a great initiator like Zac, P1 forced EF into unfavorable teamfights. In between these teamfights, P1 took parts of EF’s base, eventually taking their nexus at a fast 27 minutes.
With neither team finding an early lead, most of game two was a stalemate. Whenever P1 found a kill, EF immediately evened up the score with a kill of their own. The straw that broke the camel’s back came through a teleport engage by Derek “zig” Shao. Almost acing EF, P1 then took control of the game, grabbing the Baron.
Team Dignitas 2-0 Counter Logic Gaming
In what seemed to finish in a blink of an eye, game one was an annihilation of Counter Logic Gaming by Team Dignitas. Winning a single teamfight in the bottom of map early in the game, DIG used their lead to quickly take a Baron and then the game.
Finding themselves with another gold deficit, CLG tried to make their game two comeback with Darshan “Darshan” Upadhyaya’s famous split push. Eventually, the game devolved into a split push between DIG and Darshan. Unfortunately for Darshan, his teammates could not defend against the now Baron-empowered DIG, losing the game before he could reach DIG’s nexus turrets.
Immortals 2-0 FlyQuest
Both games in this series were completely dominated by Immortals. Winning all stages of the game, IMT gave FQ no chance to come back in either game. Instead of playing defensive, FQ chose to keep fighting IMT, resulting in an even greater deficit. This series revealed to the world FQ’s inability to play a standard meta composition. Their overuse of surprise picks has made FQ reliant on “cheese.” It will be interesting to see if FQ spends the next week trying to get better at playing the meta, or if they double down and look to find more off-meta champions.
What was your favorite moment of the night? Let us know by tweeting us @GAMURScom.
Article by Malcolm Abbas. Follow him on Twitter @SmashhLoL.
