The student news site of Oakton High School

Oakton Outlook

The student news site of Oakton High School

Oakton Outlook

The student news site of Oakton High School

Oakton Outlook

NA LCS Spring Split Comes to a Close

NA LCS Spring Split Comes to a Close

This past weekend the North American League Championship Series, a competitive e-sports group, held it’s spring quarterfinals to determine which two teams would fight for the title of North American champions. After a season spanning from January until late March, four strong teams had emerged: Team SoloMid, Cloud 9, Team Impulse, and Team Liquid. The four teams went head to head, enduring five brutal matches over the past two weekends.

Cloud 9 and Team Liquid played on the 11th, with Cloud 9 having to fight very hard to avoid an upset from TL, who cruised under the radar for most of the season. The first two matches went decisively in TL’s favor, with jungler Christian “IWillDominate” Rivera and ADC Chae “Piglet” Gwang-jin carrying both games without much trouble. However, in match 3 Cloud 9 regained the upper hand, crawling back from the deadly brink of two defeats to win the best-of-5 series, mainly thanks to outstanding play from Cloud 9’s ADC, Zachary ”Sneaky” Scuderi.

Cloud 9’s coach, Charlie Lipsie, passed it off as going all according to plan. “The first game is usually an experimental game,” Lipsie said, “you let the enemy pick who they want, you pick who you want, and you see how that works.” Despite their rocky start, this is almost believable after their seemingly effortless comeback on Saturday.

On Sunday Team SoloMid, the highest ranked team coming out of the normal season, played against Team Impulse, one of the few teams to beat them during this Spring. Despite it being the first season for TSM jungler Lucas “Santorin” Larsen, the games went in their favor, with the first game going to Team Impulse, and the next three going decidedly to TSM in a profound display of skill and shot-calling. After the game TSM midlaner Soren “Bjergsen” Bjerg admitted that they had more or less predicted the outcome. “We usually lose the first game, so it was no surprise to us, but we were confident that we could come back from it.”

This sticks with TSM’s winning strategy of adapting to new situations this season. Even at the IEM tournament last month, when they went against some of the best European and Asian teams, they molded to new situations extremely quickly, eventually coming home with the trophy. Cloud 9, who also attended, was eliminated in the first round.

Despite those grim tidings for Cloud 9, next Saturday is shaping up to be one of the most competitive NA LCS games in its history, with two extremely strong teams coming head to head over a title held by TSM since it’s conception four years ago. Tune in and see it for yourself on Twitch.tv or Youtube.com next Saturday at 3:00 PM.

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NA LCS Spring Split Comes to a Close