I really think this knockout stage was very boring overall compared to other Worlds. It’s being overshadowed a bit by the T1 win and all the narrative that comes with that, but I think this will be remembered as a kind of boring Worlds knockout.

If you think about it, there really wasn’t that many good BO5 series. There maybe 3 to 4-ish and even that’s a stretch.

The final was one of the biggest stomps I have ever seen in Worlds. And even worse is how everyone kind of knew it would be a stomp ahead of time. At least with 2019 G2, people had way more hope.

Here are what I would call the 2 good series:

• T1 vs JDG

The best series of Worlds. Super competitive and T1 had some very clutch plays by Faker and Oner to grab the win. Amazing BO5.

• JDG vs KT

Good series imo. KT winning game 1 was exciting and it wasn’t like it was some mega stomp even if JDG won in the end.

As for the 3-2 series on the other side of the bracket: I don’t think these series were very good even if they were close on paper.

• GenG vs BLG was an exciting upset but it was marred by atrocious drafting and prep by GenG alongside some super bad plays in key moments.

They had the completely wrong meta read and went down 0-2 as a result. In retrospect, them giving Jarvan, Rumble and Orianna so much to BLG has just aged like complete shit. I have no idea how the fuck GenG shit the bed so hard. They must be kicking themselves now.

• BLG vs Weibo was another 3-2 series but I think the level of play was super low for a semifinal.

It was actually depressing to watch sometimes. TheShy popping off was cool but BLG had a very weak day imo. Especially Bin was playing very poorly compared to what we usually see from him.

Here are some reasons why I think this happened.

• The brackets were very uneven. The T1 side was way stronger.

• T1 was just by far the strongest team which makes things a bit boring on its own for neutral viewers.

• GenG choking made that whole side of the super uncompetitive.

• Some otherwise good teams had very weird slumps/uncharacteristic mistakes: LNG, BLG, GenG

• Weibo only had to beat one single LPL/LCK team to make finals and they only barely beat a slumping BLG. This just turned the final into a horror show like we saw.

Overall, I’d say there was only 1 really good series (JDG vs T1), three okay series (KT vs JDG, GenG vs BLG, BLG vs Weibo) and the rest were completely onesided stomps.

3 of the 7 BO5s were ultra onesided stomps. That’s almost half. And the close 3-2 series were just depressing for different reasons I thought.