Please hear me out before any hatred comment! I want to open a topic that I hardly see anyone talk about.
First of all, I’m not fan of both team or have anything negative toward any, I just want to talk about mental aspect in competitive game.
SofM, a former jungle of 2020 Sunning team (finished 2nd in Worlds 2020, only lost to DWG in Finals) and Bin’s former teammate, once said while watching BLG vs WBG in Worlds 2023 that Bin lost his mind in the first game, then disappeared for the rest of the BO5. Why?
Long story short, Bin played well, but Xun’s mistake is the reason why Bin suffered (a lot) in game 1. Players with high ego like Bin and Khan (I’ll talk about Khan later in post) are the one who being impact the most by mental statement, when they are high they will hard carry, but when in a bad mood they are just happen to be there like a minion. The feeling “I played my best but other’s mistakes took me down” burdened Bin, even in game 2 that BLG won, Bin still lost his confident, then he tilted for the other 3, completely shutdown by The Shy. And yes we all saw how easy it is for T1 to beat WBG, and I honestly thought bad mental care cost BLG a chance to go further.
That reminds me of Khan while he was in 2019 SKT T1 team. Cannot find the game but I remember 1 game similar to BLG vs WGB, Khan played well but because of Clid’s misplay, top then suffered hard, then you know what, Kkoma spent entirely break time between 2 game to chat, to take a snack together with Khan, to comfort Khan that he knew it was not Khan’s fault, just relax and keep a good mental statement for upcoming games. Every aspects effect players’s performance, and I think minor details like that is the different between “good” and “great”!
What do you guys think about that?
In my opinion KT, LNG and GenG were better teams than WBG, the series vs BLG gave the same vibe of the two first games of the series GenG vs BLG “What are they doing? What’s this garbage gameplay” not fully convince on them, the 3-0 was expected and one of the faster world series for a reason.
Mental boom for an entire series definitely happens. Huni was on an episode of JLXP (Jatt’s show) recently, and he talked about how tilted he was for a series cause Reignover (his jungler at the time) went in after Huni told him not to.