Rogue have moved onto the 2020 LEC Summer Playoffs semifinals after a clean sweep against MAD Lions, who ended Schalke 04’s miracle run last week.
The Rogue roster was on point with their calls and plays, but jungler Kacper “Inspired” Słoma was on an entirely new level. He played three different champions in the series and popped off with all of them. His performance on Evelynn, Hecarim, and Graves and combined scoreline of 15/5/24 secured him the Player of the Series award.
The series began with a dominant performance from the Rogue squad. Each of the five players snowballed all around the map with Inspired making sure that the enemy jungler failed to find advantages. He kept securing early objectives, warding, and reading the enemy jungler like a book. This allowed him to take control over the first game.
With the momentum from the first game win, Rogue maintained the tempo and dismantled MAD Lions. As a result, MAD appeared to have taken a psychological beating, since they started making more and more mistakes as the series went longer. Their defeat could be seen once they started going for misplays across the map due to Rogue’s superior play today. Following Rogue’s dominant performance in all three games, the series ended with a 3-0 after the three fast-paced games in Rogue’s favor.
MAD Lions have dropped out of playoffs following this loss and are sent to the Play-In stage of the World Championship as Europe’s fourth seed. The lackluster play towards to end of the regular season Summer Split shattered their dreams of winning a LEC Championship title.
Recently Rogue set a new record for viewership.. When Fnatic took the stage against Rogue, many people tuned in to watch the old kings of Europe battle against one of the region’s youngest and brightest teams. In fact, their playoff battle drew in a peak viewership count of just over 556,000 people, according to analytical service Esports Charts.
This League of Legends series was a highly-anticipated meeting to see if the LEC’s first-place team could take down a former behemoth to earn their place at the top of the mountain. Unfortunately for Rogue fans, the postseason pressure was too much for the young squad and Fnatic’s superior preparation helped propel them to a stunning 3-0 sweep.
Beforehand, G2 Esports’ dominant 3-1 series win over MAD Lions held the highest peak viewership for the 2020 LEC Summer Split with just over 519,000 people watching at the same time. Again, playoff experience reigned supreme in this series as G2’s veteran lineup took down their opponents with relative ease.