It took TSM three long years, but they finally worked their way back to an LCS championship. This past weekend might have been one of the toughest runs they’ve had to make this season, though. The roster had to play six hours of “on-stage” League of Legends over two days.
TSM played through two grueling five-game series against Team Liquid and FlyQuest, with each match going over 30 minutes. During their battle against Liquid, they even had a 50-minute slugfest in their fourth game, which then led into a 42-minute clash for the series win.
In comparison, TSM only played 18 games during the 2020 LCS Summer regular season, which means that TSM played over half a split’s worth of games in the span of two days.
Each match was hard-fought, and as expected, all the players were happy but exhausted by the end of the series. It’s clear that the tough road was completely worth it to hoist the LCS trophy once again.
As a whole, TSM actually played 25 games throughout the playoffs and had three series go to a full five games. FlyQuest, on the other hand, had to play 19 games throughout the playoffs, which is still one more game than they had to play through the regular split.
With another LCS trophy in their case, TSM’s triumphant roster must now take some time to rest up—but not too much with World Championship incoming.
This discrepancy happens due to the best-of-one format in regular split. However, the main issue is that a best-of-three system was never popular with fans in North America and Europe. Viewership was pretty low when this system was implemented, and because of this, Riot Games switched both regions back to a best-of-one environment.
Going forward, Riot Games has a good reasoning to swap formats if the viewership tanks. However, if the viewership actually increases with these changes, then this situation will continue and LCS teams will be playing much more games compared to the regular split. This shouldn’t happen in an ideal situation, but it will unless the format of either the regular split or playoffs is changed. Teams shouldn’t have to play their hearts out only in playoffs, but regular season as well. Currently, the created situation doesn’t favor teams which perform well in the regular season too much since they still have to play a lot of playoff games to secure the top standings.
However, when the format was different and LCS games were not a best-of-one, the viewership was quite low due to the fact that fans weren’t accustomed to it and no one cared about some match-ups at all. In best-of-one series though upsets can happen and that makes it exciting to watch for fans.