This article is part of our LoL Previews series.
After a month of grueling competition, we've finally made it to the least surprising possible end to what many have taken to calling the most surprising Worlds of the LCS era. A wildcard team made it to quarterfinals; Europe reprised the semifinal appearance, and yet the finals still consists of two Korean teams clashing over the Summoner's Cup. The only surprise was the two teams that ended up making it to the end. Samsung and SKT T1 will square off at the Staples Center, while the ROX Tigers -- favorites heading into the event -- will now watch the series on Twitch along with countless hordes of other fans.
Many are dismissing this series as a formality, and pointing towards the semifinal clash between SKT T1 and ROX as the "true" finals of the event, much like Royal vs. SKT T1 at MSI and even the mythical match between Samsung Blue and Samsung White back in Season 4. Our team, however, largely disagrees with this assessment -- and not wholly due to my partiality towards Samsung. Dismissing Samsung as just another domino to get knocked over on SKT T1's quest for a third Worlds title would be dismissing the remarkable accomplishments they've made thus far to get to this position.
The only team to best Samsung in any notable number of statistics throughout Worlds was H2K, who had almost certainly the easiest path into the semifinals of this tournament and perhaps the in the history of the game. SKT T1 have, by comparison, been often sluggish and have a very obvious vulnerability to being blown out in the early game. While they are the best team in the world at playing from behind, having to be in that position so often in the first place is a worrying sign, especially when the late game is also historically Samsung's greatest strength.
More alarmingly for SKT, we must look back at how the clashes between these teams have gone in the past. While Samsung has a comically bad win rate against the top three teams in the LCK -- a fact which makes it a top three, not a top four including Samsung themselves -- the balance of those defeats came from horrific early game blowouts. During the regular season, Samsung's early game was their weakest point, which stands in stark contrast to the team we now see making their way to the finals on the back of the tightest early game play of the assembled teams.
This is not to say that Samsung are the favorites heading into the finals. Far from it. Until they defeated KT Rolster in the Regional Finals, they hadn't won a match against the top 3 LCK teams in a year -- something that even the lower tier teams like MVP or the Freecs managed with regularity. Even with Samsung in the greatest form we've ever seen them, the specter of their past can't be fully ignored. Both teams have a distinct path to victory, and we'll explore those in a hopefully unbiased way below. The main takeaway should be that while this looks on paper like an egregious mismatch for the World finals, it only looks that way due to the perception of invincibility that we as a community have learned to ascribe to SKT T1.
Paths to Victory - Samsung
1. Snowball the early game
This is Samsung's most obvious path to victory, as it exploits both their strengths and SKT T1's weaknesses at once. Samsung is completely dominant during the first 15 minutes of gameplay, clocking in with an overwhelming 1.1k gold differential on average throughout their games by that point, a number that is depressed slightly due to their crushing loss to TSM early in the tournament. While SKT T1 is no slouch early on in the game, they have shown signs of being very momentum based early on, especially with Kang "Blank" Sun-gu on the roster.
Thus, if Samsung manages to find an early lead, they can be expected to keep it for some time, especially if that lead materializes in either of the solo lanes. SKT have shown remarkable resiliency to deficits from their bot lane, but many of their biggest losses have come when either Lee "Duke" Ho-Seong or, God forbid; Lee "Faker" Sang-hyeok get shut down. Furthermore, Samsung is a good enough late game team to be able to match SKT T1, especially around the Baron that proved the thorn in the side for many of SKT T1's previous opponents. If Samsung can both take an early lead and the proceed to dictate the pace of the game, they have a very reasonable chance of taking home the Summoner's Cup.
2. Exploit the mismatched top lane
Going into Worlds, Song "Smeb" Kyung-ho was the talk of the analyst desk. His back-to-back LCK MVPs made him certainly seem to be the best player in the world, yet his performance at the event itself -- with some very notable exceptions, especially for fans of Europe -- was largely muted. While Jang "Looper" Hyeong-seok was able to straight up murder Duke in the quarterfinals, Smeb seemed content just to try to out-teamfight the SKT top laner with constant Rumble picks that had little impact in the games ROX lost.
The real player who has risen to the top throughout Worlds has been Lee "CuVee" Seong-jin. In the short span of a couple of months, he's gone from one of the worst performing top laners in his region to leading the World Championship in solo kills and gold differentials -- and it's not particularly close in either case once you eliminate outlier games for players like Andrei "Odoamne" Pascu. While Duke's laning and teleport usage have come into major question over the course of the elimination stages, CuVee has excelled in both with little resources helping him along the way. If these two find themselves locked into a straight 1-vs-1, there's little question, statistically speaking, of who will come out on top. Thus, isolating the top lane or outright camping it may well be a path to victory for Samsung, as taking Duke out of the game will make it incredibly difficult for SKT T1 to ride the 1-3-1 they used against ROX to victory.
3. "Simply" outplay SKT T1 in the late game
This is the least likely of all the scenarios mentioned, but there are certainly glimmers of hope for Samsung that make this sound feasible. The dominance of SKT T1 in the late game is built around one factor: their unmatched vision control. Not only do SKT T1 know how to keep the map looking more lit up than a family's Christmas tree, they know how to play around the sections of the map they can't see with such precision that they are very rarely caught off guard. If Samsung can break SKT T1's stranglehold on the map, they can certainly take the game, as their prior matches have shown that SKT T1 can very realistically be forced to either make a hasty mistake or give up a critical Baron if they're denied their all-important ward coverage.
Further, it's not as if there's no hope of Samsung straight up out-fighting SKT T1. They are themselves a team that has historically focused on late game engagements, a playstyle that SKT T1 have seemed happy to adopt over the course of this tournament. If Samsung manage to draft a more cohesive teamfighting composition in the balance on the games against SKT T1, that may itself prove a decisive factor -- especially with Duke favoring split-push champions like Jayce that's he's not particularly excelling on relative to his peers.
Samsung winning fights with SKT T1 is something that we have no precedent for, but in a Worlds that has seen so many unlikely occurrences it would hardly cause me to bat an eyelash if Samsung managed to at least pull out one game win via this route. The late game in competitive play can often just be such a crapshoot that such upsets are almost the norm -- the number of times we've seen a Smite or perfectly laid Chaos Storm totally turn a game around is nearly innumerable at this point.
Paths to Victory - SKT T1
1. Smash Jo "CoreJJ" Yong-in and Park "Ruler" Jae-Hyuk
Ruler was amongst one of the worst performing ADCs in the first 20 minutes in all of the LCK, and he averages negatives in both gold and CS throughout the early game. Bang and Wolf, by comparison, are easily the most dominant laners in the region, with a history of being able to survive any matchup, no matter how unfavorable. Furthermore, both have demonstrated a remarkable level of versatility that CoreJJ, in particular, has never had to show. After seeing but a single game of both Zyra and Miss Fortune, two picks that have come to dominate the support meta, Wolf was ready to play both at a level that made it look as though he had been a master of the champion the entire time.
Blank also tends to focus quite a bit of attention on his bottom lane, especially in the Worlds metagame that has primarily revolved around trying to push the bottom lane as hard as possible. Both he and Faker are constantly ready to either gank an overextended enemy bottom lane or dive them if their lane already has the upper hand. Most of SKT T1's early game wins have come from the bottom lane, a trend I wouldn't expect to reverse here. In my eyes, this is the most obvious route to victory for SKT T1, as it seems to have largely been their primary strategy up to this point. While Ruler and CoreJJ have proven remarkably resilient to enemy pressure in the past, with Ruler in particular managing to overperform when denied gold fairly regularly, the "First Brick" gold has totally changed the dynamic of the bottom lane. Merely enduring is hardly enough these days, and SKT T1 have proven they understand they know that better than anyone.
2. Leverage superior mid-game lane pressure
This has been the most common strategy for SKT T1 when facing other Korean teams throughout the last six months. Both their mid laner and top laner are entirely comfortable pushing out a side lane, and usually have the leads moving into the mid game to make such a proposition a winning one. While Duke might be a liability if SKT T1 want to make this plan a reality, there's little doubt that Faker will be able to outstrip Lee "Crown" Min-ho in a similar -- if somewhat less extreme -- fashion to how he defeated Kuro. That would give SKT T1 a point of pressure to play around, and most would agree that if you had to choose one player to base your strategy around, Faker is the man you want for the job.
Thus, this may also be the default strategy for SKT T1 moving into this series, and it seems to be a quite reliable one. If Bae "Bengi" Seong-ung or Blank can keep tabs on Kang "Ambition" Chan-yong, there's a solid argument to be made that Faker will naturally win the mid lane convincingly enough that it spills into the other lanes. If that happened, it would be a repeat of their series against the Tigers and SKT T1 have never been a team to ignore a winning formula. This strategy would prove even more effective if they -- reasonably -- expect their bottom lane to win regardless of what attention is given them, allowing to spend their resources instead on trying to keep down Crown and CuVee, Samsung's major pressure points. Without Crown and CuVee in the game, the number of ways for Samsung to realistically take the series comes quite close to zero.
3. Win the late game
While we previously talked about Samsung being a proficient late game team themselves, their ability to take down SKT T1 was still contingent on quite a few things going right for the presumptive underdogs. The reality is that SKT T1 has a much more proven track record of success in the late game for the simple reason that we've seen them reach that point more often. As counter-intuitive as it might sound, Samsung has utterly crushed their opponents so badly and so regularly that we don't have any idea how their late game will fare if they pass the half hour mark on even footing.
SKT T1's late game, however, is a very well-known quantity at this point, as they've spent virtually the entire tournament holding out for it. Their excellent vision control and mastery of wave management have, thus far, given them the edge against every team they've faced. However, neither the ROX Tigers nor Royal is especially well-known for their mastery of late game strategy, and both rely entirely upon their teamfighting at that stage of the game for victory. There's little evidence that Samsung won't suffer the same fate as them, as while Samsung have been remarkably successful in the late game thus far, that's usually been due to both an early gold lead and the enemy team being perfectly willing to engage them. SKT T1's late game is far more nuanced than that of any competitive Samsung has thus far faced, and it's for that reason that many consider SKT T1 the default victors in this series. It's quite possible that they'll barely need to deviate from the script in order to take down Samsung, and thus many consider the burden of proof to be on Samsung to demonstrate that they are, in fact, a skilled enough team to deserve to share the stage with SKT T1.
