After a rough first game of the series, Gen.G bounced back and reverse swept KT Rolster with two decisive wins. This win ends Gen.G’s Spring Split and locks in their first spot in LCK’s Spring Split Standings.
Thanks to their first-place finish, they’ll be seeded directly into the Spring Split playoff finals, where they’ll have to win one best-of-five only in order to obtain the LCK Champion title. This is the first time Gen.G will reach the finals of the LCK since the era of Samsung Blue in 2014.
History has not been kind to those who qualified directly to the finals. The LCK playoff format rewards those who get a worse standing by giving them more best-of-five series to play coming into the finals.
While this seems unintuitive, T1 managed to climb from the Wildcard round during the Summer Split 2019 and sweep all teams, including Griffin, who’d qualified directly. T1 learned a lot from their opponents in each playoff round and adapted coming into the last round, while Griffin was sitting on the bench examining opponents without playing against them in a playoff scenario.
The first game was one-sided, with KT crushing Gen.G and hoping for a quick 2-0 after their decisive victory in the first game. KT’s top laner Kim “SoHwan” Jun-Yeong scored a pentakill with his Jayce pick to crush Gen.G’s hopes of staying in first place.
Once the broadcast came back online after the break, KT subbed out their top laner, who’d scored a pentakill and crushed Gen.G in the first game in favor of Jeon “Ray” Ji-won. Why? It’s not clear. And SoHwan’s impact could not be replicated by Ray and KT got destroyed from the first minutes of the game.
After subbing out their winning top laner SoHwan for the second game, they brought him back for the third game. Gen.G showed respect to his Jayce pick and banned him out in the first round. SoHwan picked up Mordekaiser but was unable to carry as hard as in the first game. The game was pretty close, but Gen.G came out victorious in the end, securing the reverse sweep.
Gen.G had a great split, ending with 14 series wins and 4 losses. They have dominated their competition with one exceptions: T1, who managed to beat them in both clashes this season. Going into the playoffs, Gen.G will most likely study their losses against T1 to understand what went wrong since there’s a high chance they’ll face off in the finals.
The LCK’s Spring Split playoff begins on the 18th of April and the finals round will be held on the 25th of April, 3am CT.
