League of Legends World Championship is an annual event organised and hosted by the game’s developer Riot Games. In 2012, the 2nd iteration of the League of Legends World championship was held in Los Angeles, California from July 26th to 13th October. The prize pool for the tournament was an enormously big sum of $2 Million. This was the highest pool of prize distributed till then in the Esports industry. Top 12 teams participated in the tournament after getting selected through various regional qualifiers.
Apart from the qualifiers the League of Legends World Championship 2 had a,
- Group stage where teams were divided in groups of 8 and played in a round robin format. Top 2 teams go onto the playoffs and the rest are eliminated.
- Playoffs, where 8 teams played in single elimination matches. The ones coming from the group stage and 4 with direct entry from China, North America, TW/HK/MO, and Europe. All the playoffs are Best of 3
Grand Finale
The grand finale of League of Legends World Championship 2 was held at the University of Southern California. In the Galen Centre. It was a Best of 5 game series. The center was packed to its brim with 10,000 people inside it. Over 8 million viewers saw the tournament and around 1.1 million viewers tuned into the grand finale, making the 2nd edition the most watched esports in the history at that time. The finale was held between the teams Taipie Assassins and Azubu Frost. Taipei Assassins won the Best of 5 and were declared as the champions of the tournament. Watch the same here below.
Controversies of League of Legends World Championship 2
Like any other Esports tournament, this one too was haunted by various controversies. Firstly there was speculation regarding Azubu Forest player Jang Gun Woong cheating when he looked behind his head to look at the viewing screen, something meant for the audience which gives an overview of the game and not for the players. For this the team Azubu Frost was fined $30,000.
Secondly there were some technical problems during the tournament, multiple times. The network connections in the arena went down terminating the live stream on Twitch and eventually forcing the match to be rescheduled on some other day. Which was certainly embarrassing for the organisers.
The League of Legends World Championship 2 faced a lot of hurdles but one can’t certainly argue that it was the biggest tournament at that time in terms of money or the audience or the viewers and regarding the technical aspects and faults. They certainly were taken care of in the upcoming editions.
