Imagine all the matchups we missed this Worlds because of not having double-elimination in the tournament. Comparing the Worlds bracket with the MSI bracket from this year, how can anyone claim that the Worlds one has more hype matchups? If you swapped the brackets everyone would be screaming how the MSI bracket has to be changed and to use double-elimination for the tournament next year.

Worlds bracket 2023

MSI bracket 2023

Not just that, but only having 7 Bo5s across the last 3 weeks of Worlds creates so much dead time between matches it kills the hype leading into he final games. Didn’t we have a Bo5 like every day or every other day while the MSI bracket was going on? Remember how HYPE that was? And thanks to that, we got BLG vs GenG + BLG vs T1 in the lower bracket, giving BLG the chance to run the bracket and face JDG in the final.

Imagine this year we had double-elimination, and we get KT vs LNG and NRG vs GenG in the losers bracket, does GenG bounce back after losing to BLG? Perhaps they run the bracket from that point, who knows…

But we will never know, and I want to change that for next year’s Worlds!

  • FudgeOld6122BEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I really do not want double elim anywhere near worlds knock-outs…

    1. There are more than enough second-chances throughout the whole year, since every other tournament has Double-elim and second-chances just take the stakes away from the BO5s making the BO5s in general less exciting.
    2. I agree that I dislike the dead-space in between the games and I agree that it should be filled with something, but not with more matches in a potential losers bracket, but rather with exciting official worlds content. VLOGS, player interviews, Mini-games (i.e like LEC Pop Quiz), because the more time there is in between the matches, the more anticipation is built up for these matches which makes the matches so much more hype! Also the more time there is in between the matches the more time does the Riot content team have to make amazing Teasers like the one we saw for T1 vs. JDG.
    3. Having a losers bracket always means, that the chances of the favourite teams winning worlds becomes higher, because the chances of a lower seeded team to upset a favourite team twice instead of once are just much lower for several reasons. Therefore a lowerbracket would do nothing but make Worlds more predictable and therefore less exiciting.
      With the current format, we almost never had the actual favourite team win worlds which I think helps the excitement of worlds a lot, because the chances of Upset wins are much higher in this format:
      1. In 2017 SSG won (Not the tournament favourite)
      2. In 2018 IG won (Not the tournament favourite)
      3. In 2019 FPX won (Not the tournament favourite)
      4. In 2021 EDG won (They were favourites at the very beginning, but T1 and DK quickly turned the expectations to themselves)
      5. In 2022 DRX won (KR 4th seed out of Play-ins)

    In conclusion I will say, I don’t think double elimination would improve worlds. It would definitely change it, but I think its more likely to just end up as the less exciting tournament than before, because so many series lose their stakes, many matchups are going to be played multiple times over and over and in the end, the tournament-favourite always wins with double-elim, because they get undeserved second-chances which they will use to their advantage.