(*) If we exclude unofficial 2011 “Phreak Basement” tournament with only first NA and EU teams, then Faker is the youngest player to win Worlds. He won S3 Worlds in the age of 17 years 4 months and 27 days.
Yesterday he with a big margin became the oldest one too bypassing last year’s Deft result by more than one year (Deft was a bit over 26 years old). Faker won a title in the age of 27 years 6 months and 12 days.
10 years difference and a decent gap from both sides, what a legend.
(*) If we count “S1”, then the youngest one should be ShuShei, he was only 16 years old when Fnatic won that tournament, which now is even illegal to play this game at the competitive level.
Incorrect? In which part? In not calling “Phreak basement” as non-Worlds? Well, guess what, it was “officially” not even named as “Worlds” back in the day.
It was just random Season One event hosted in June (!) at the side of other event, when most of servers were not even created. There were no splits, no regions, nothing. If you open “Qualifier” for this “Worlds” you will notice that it was called “Dreamhack Qualifier”, basically Riot decides to make it “end of season 1” tournament already after qualification, but at the original time it was just a tournament at Dreamhack festival.
Not to say that tournament was hosted in early June and officially season-1 was ended at the end of September, quite funny to that 4 months later, don’t you find?
Absolutely no one who works with LoL data count it as a full Worlds for their stats and analysis. At that time this tournament has way less status and prestige than winning of let’s say IEM.
The only single reason why it is considered as Worlds, is just because Riot wants it to be
Nah, you and a lot of people in this thread are wrong, it was definitely marketed as a world championship.
The reason you’re seeing “Dreamhack” everywhere is that at the time LANs were still huge and dreamhack specifically was one of the biggest in the world and the name had a lot of clout. It might seem weird looking back now that esports/league have gotten so big but back then having the world finals of your game at DH was pretty big and you’d obviously use that in your marketing as well. This was back when the game was still fairly small and Riot were trying to grow it through esports.