One thing that gets overlooked at worlds and what shapes the tournament is the behind-the-scenes scrim partners for teams going into quarters and later stages. The best years for EU and NA were when multiple teams made it to later stages with significant drop off of quality of play and draft after most of the other regional teams get eliminated. Many Chinese and Korean teams tend to only play their regional teams when we get to later stages and since they’re better regions usually they have at least 1 good scrim partner for finals.

The best worlds for EU was 2018/2019 when we made finals back to back. In both of those years EU teams have made it to semis and none stayed to help the other regional team go to finals. For 2019 it looked esp dire looked like their drafting and play was extremely poor compared to the rest of the year. Would be interesting to know who our teams play just before their elimination. I wonder how NRG was also affected for this quarters and who they had as scrim partners.

It looks like unless you have 2 really good teams staying until the end of the tournament like the asian teams do you have no chance in doing anything. MSI is also an interesting case study where this has less of an impact before mainly due to teams having more access to scrims since not all asian teams would be in the tournament.

If anyone has the info who NRG scrimmed before quarters and also who G2 and FNC scrimmed just before finals in 2018,2019. I feel like this probably has so much hidden impact.