LoL Worlds 2020 Play-In – Day 5 Betting Previews and Predictions
The League of Legends World Championship Play-In stage is slowly coming to a close, with only two more days left before the season’s culminating event transitions to the main stage. This Tuesday, September 29, the Play-In stage will enter the elimination round, where we will see four teams duke it out for a spot in the final round of the competition and a shot at one of the two remaining tickets leading to the Main Event.
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The opening game of the Elimination round will see a rematch between Rainbow7 and LGD, followed by an exciting bout featuring Papara SuperMassive and MAD Lions. INTZ and V3 Esports, unfortunately, failed to make it so far and have already packed their bags as the first two teams to be eliminated from 2020 Worlds.
Rainbow7 vs LGD Gaming
LGD Gaming have left a lot to be desired with their performances throughout the Play-In stage and while we did not expect them to come through the group stage unharmed, it’s fair to say that no one anticipated to see LGD Gaming end the first stage of the competition with a 1-3 record.
LGD and Rainbow7 met last Saturday when the Liga Latinoamérica (LLA) representatives humiliated their Chinese counterparts. Their game was very weird, starting off with the draft, where we saw LGD forgot to ban a champion and later drafted a composition that seemingly wanted to do too many things at once. Additionally, LGD left R7 draft a very magic-heavy composition to which they could not respond with a proper itemization for their champions.
This game has shown just how much of an impact a proper draft can have even when one team is individually significantly weaker than the other. Then there is also a case to make LGD might have underestimated R7 and paid the price for it.
Looking ahead this is another case of a match that is hard to predict. We are still a bit hesitant to bet against LGD solely due to their individual quality, but we have to come to terms that LGD are just not playing well. They fail to take advantage of their strengths, seemingly have a hard time playing like a cohesive unit and are overall very disorganized. On the other side, R7 are not individually as strong as LGD but they play with a lot more cohesion and if they manage to outdraft the Chinese squad once more, we would not be too surprised to see R7 cause problems to LGD.
Even though R7 are priced at around 6.00, it’s hard to imagine LGD will underperform in a best-of-five series, since this is a format they’re comfortable playing on top of the fact that Bo5 is a format that rarely produces upsets. Having said that, LGD are not playing well enough for us to predict a clean 3-0 win and at 2.99, it makes a lot more sense to side with R7 to win at least one map and make LGD work for a spot in the qualification round.
Prediction: Rainbow7 +1.5 maps – 2.99 at PInnacle
Papara SuperMassive vs MAD Lions
Papara SuperMassive and MAD Lions were arguably two of the strongest teams heading into the Play-in stage but they failed to live up to the hype and severely underperformed. While SuperMassive had overall a few more convincing showings, the general consensus is that neither team is looking good.
In order to keep this one shorter, we will focus on the biggest problem of MAD Lions which is their jungle. As talked about before, MAD Lions’ jungler Zhiqiang “Shad0w” Zhao is not having the best time at Worlds and has up to now consistently underperformed. This could be a problem when facing SuperMassive’s Lee “KaKAO” Byung-kwon who is fairly consistent, even though he has yet to show anything spectacular.
It will be interesting to see how these two sides match up in a best-of-five (Bo5) series and while this format definitely favors MAD Lions who look like a better team individually, we have to take into consideration just how inconsistent and lost MAD Lions were in all of their games so far this tournament.
We expect MAD Lions to win the series, but we can’t imagine a clean performance. Unless either side improves drastically overnight, there is a real possibility we might see a five-map series.
Prediction: Over 4.5 maps – 2.71 at Pinnacle
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