Worlds 2016: The Defending Champs Win Again

The second game of Group B today pit NA’s Cloud9 against the defending champions from South Korea, SK Telecom T1.

Here is how it all went down:

                          C9                                           SKT

TOP:                  Impact-Kennen                         Duke-Jayce
JNG:                  Meteos-Olaf                              Blank-Lee Sin
MID:                  Jensen-Ryze                              Faker-Viktor
ADC:                 Sneaky-Ezreal                           Bang-Jhin
SUP:                Smoothie-Alistar                        Wolf-Zyra
BANS:              Karma/Elise/Nidalee                  Aurelion Sol/Syndra/Caitlyn 

Early Game: C9 Play for an Early Advantage

After learning from their mistakes against SKT before, C9 turned on the heat and aggressively pushed towards bottom lane as opposed to mid. Meteos went bottom quite often and forced summoners from the SKT bot lane. Once Wolf had nothing, he went down again to get first blood for Sneaky. Faker wasn’t happy with not being the center of attention, so he went bottom lane himself and got a kill on Smoothie. C9 was well aware of their lead and made plays all around the map. Smoothie, on Alistar, and Meteos, on Olaf, gave C9 easy tower dives and all-ins that SKT had trouble responding to.

Mid Game: SKT Take the Gold Lead

Even with C9 ahead in kills and overall map control, SKT managed to get ahead in gold and started trading kills. The overall mechanical skill of SKT started to show and they began to mount a strong comeback. At this point, C9 lost the ability to pick people off with CC because SKT started grouping and winning the vision war.

Late Game: Baron and Teamfights for SKT Gives Them The Edge They Need

With their Baron buff, SKT made plays around the map and got a bigger advantage over C9, increasing their gold lead to 6k. Bang’s ultimate gave SKT so much potential to slow down whatever target they wanted so the team could catch up and pick them off.

Even though C9 was constantly running away because they were low on health, they managed to get kills here and there due to their strong CC engage and the fact that SKT had no real tanks. After securing Elder Dragon, SKT pulled off some insane ult combos to ace C9 and beat them once again.

C9 is now 2-2, while SKT improves to 3-1.

What do you think about the action so far today at Worlds? Let us know by commenting below or tweeting us @GAMURScom.