56 is the number of games Faker has won all-time at Worlds. The maximum number of games anyone can win in any single Worlds is 15. You would need almost four perfect Worlds runs to eclipse him. He has more wins than the other seven remaining mid laners combined and more wins than the rest of his team combined. No one remaining is even remotely close to catching him now. And now is the knockout stage. You need nine more wins to be crowned champion.

Of the remaining teams, three feature rosters that are entirely new to the Worlds stage. One has a single member with experience. And four are veterans, including three-time champion SKT (though only two members have experience) and one-time champions IG (who returns everybody) and FNC (who returns no one from their 2011 roster). Every single matchup features a veteran against a newcomer. Every single matchup features a team that has played in a do-or-die set and a team that has only ever watched it from home. This is a Quarterfinals about parity, where everyone feels like they have a shot to win it all. 

I am reminded of the documentary Free Solo in which climber Alex Honnold scales mountains with no safety equipment. They give names or numbers to specific juts or edges or turns on mountains — for El Capitan, there was Pitch 6 and Pitch 23 and Pitch 27 among others. He practiced first with ropes and other people before making the free solo with just a small pouch of chalk and his memory of where to place his fingers — down to the inch — on specific parts of the cliff. 

At Worlds, about half of these players have been here before. They know which rock will pry loose and send them tumbling down. They know which foothold is too narrow, and they know which crevice they are strong enough to take hold of. Some know it for the whole mountain. Some know it for half, and some only know that the first rock they grabbed was not right.

The other half are seeing this mountain for the first time. In theory, they know it is possible for someone to climb it all the way to the top. They have studied the pitches. They know where people are likely to stumble and why, but they will place their hands and feet onto that face this weekend, and then they will rise or they will be thrown to the wind. There are no harnesses to catch them if they should drop. There are no ropes to bring them back up. 

If a loss in sports is a metaphor for death, then most of what we have ahead of us now is death. Worlds itself is death for 23 teams and triumph for one. If the Group Stage was the warm up — the hike to the foot of the cliff — then what lies in front of us is a new beginning. And with that, new endings. Here’s a look at what some of the players see when they look up at the rest of this mountain.

“I’VE THOUGHT ABOUT QUITTING countless times,” says Splyce ADC Kobbe. In 2016, he qualified for Worlds in his rookie season with a stacked roster that includes two current G2 players in Wunder and Mikyx. Even though they were routed that year, it felt like an inevitability that they would continue to rise, which is the promise of youth. It is what we sometimes call potential.

He continues, “We started by winning everything — every Game 5 in a Best-of-5, but 2017 and 2018 and even 2019, I’ve taken so many losses at this point. In the beginning it was so devastating — even the reverse sweep against MSF where we were up 2-0. It completely devastated me every time we lost a Bo5. I thought about quitting and everything. But then at some point it just turned — I just realized I’ve put so much time into this that I’m never going to quit until I reach what I want. It’s not that I don’t [still] get sad when I lose, but at this point I’ve lost so many times that I know how to deal with it.”

It is possible that you have never heard of Kobbe if you have not watched the LEC. He has never been bad enough to be on the receiving end of flame from fans, but he hasn’t quite made the leap to being a superstar. Even after being named 1st team All-Pro in the LEC Spring Split this year, he suggests he’s not quite the Worlds-caliber type of player that Perkz and Rekkles are. His team, Splyce, is also not a household name, though people seem to enjoy spamming “snek” whenever they play, which has maybe unfortunately reinforced the idea of the team being a joke. 

And they have heard all the jokes: Imagine if Splyce made Worlds. Imagine if they made it out of Groups. Imagine if they beat FPX. Imagine if they scared SKT. Or beat them? How far are you willing to go down this hole with them? Kobbe knows they are the massive underdog here, and he knows Splyce will continue to be trash talked until they can pull off a major win. There aren’t any expectations for them coming into this Quarterfinal, but that also means there’s no pressure. 

This isn’t like 2016 when he crumbled on the Worlds stage in his first appearance. It’s not 2017 when his team fell apart around him and he didn’t know what to do about it. It’s not 2018 where they were a couple wins away from qualifying for Worlds. Here and now they are among the top eight teams in the world. In front of them is the winningest team of all time, and not even for a second has Kobbe thought about quitting. 

WHEN SKT WAS ELIMINATED from MSI this year, I don’t think even they were that surprised by the result. Ever since they were denied their 3rd straight Championship in 2017, the aura of invincibility was lifted. It is like experiencing the death of someone you know for the first time in your life. You don’t get it — not really — until, suddenly, you do.

“kkOma gives us a lot of advice,” says SKT top laner Khan, who was infamously swept out of the Quarterfinals in 2017 despite being favored to win it all. “[He says] it’s a long race, so every match is important, but even if you lose one now, there are others to come.”

This is the type of quote you’d only really get from a three-time winner because the implication is a single loss won’t end your tournament. This is not true for everybody. A single loss has denied Doublelift four years in a row now. Every single team this year but one will arrive at a moment where a single loss will serve as the dividing line between continuing or going home. At its core, though, kkOma of course means you cannot dwell too long on mistakes, which is perhaps something Khan could have used in 2017. But for the teams that are eliminated, that dwelling is all they will have.  

The stakes for SKT this year are simple. Win and reclaim glory not just for the winningest team of all time, but for a Korean region that has been unexpectedly embarrassed on the international stage for the better part of two years now. For the individual players, though, it is a little more complicated. Outside of Faker, none of the others have much, if any, international experience. 

Khan struggled for years across various levels of play before rising to international stardom seemingly overnight with Longzhu. He went from being essentially a nobody to being called the best top laner in the world, and then almost as quickly as he rose, he fell. Even this year, his play continues to be questioned. On SKT, it is not about whether you are a good top laner or not. It is about whether you are good enough to represent the SKT brand, and it is about whether you are good enough to play alongside Faker. Whether this is fair to him or not, it is part of the job description. 

He says, “It’s true that SKT has always made it to the Worlds Finals, but there’s no extra pressure.” This is a thing that is easy to say. It is, maybe, even easy to feel before you start playing. If that first loss comes, though — or worse, the second — I imagine the pressure will make itself known.

AFTER WINNING MSI this year, Caps carried the MVP trophy with him everywhere he went. He was scheduled for maybe half a dozen interviews in the immediate aftermath, and each time he took it with him. I wasn’t sure if it was because he’d felt an attachment to it like a proud father to a newborn baby, or — maybe also like a father to a newborn baby — he just didn’t know where to put it down.

G2 is one of the most perplexing champions in the history of League of Legends. At times they look as if they are just as likely to win in 15 minutes as they are to lose in Ranked Flex Queue. Sometimes you see both versions of this G2 in the same game. Sometimes it happens in the same play. Yet what keeps them from being infuriating is that they always manage to win when it matters.

So far, though, G2 has played fairly mellow compared to what we saw in the LEC. Part of that I’m sure is because the level of competition is higher. G2 mid laner Caps adds, “We wanted to show as little as possible, so we kind of drafted the same way all of Worlds so far…  If we were to face [for example] Griffin in a Bo5, I would be a lot more confident just because we’d have a week to prepare for them and actually have proper drafts.” 

He acknowledged their difficulties with Damwon in scrims, but there was no hesitation or any inkling that he was actually worried about losing. This iteration of G2 has been invincible so far this year, and until they actually falter, they’re just going to keep building up their immortality. The confidence you gain from winning an international event can’t be understated — in their mind, they are their own greatest enemy. It is a large boon to not just think but know that if you play your best, no one can beat you.

G2 is a team with so much energy and talent that sometimes they don’t know where to place it or what to apply it to. It is not until they are tested — like in the matches against FNC this summer — that they respond in force. They have an extremely difficult road ahead of them if they wish to replicate the success they found in Taipei, and to Caps, at least, success means only one thing.

He says, “In 2017, when we were a very weak team, we made it to Quarters. In theory you could see it as a success. But for me, it was a failure. Last year, we made it to Finals — a lot of people hyped that up for being the first time in a long time that Europe made it to the Finals, but I see it as there’s only one winner in the tournament. Everyone else is a loser. And I want to be on the winning side.”

“I HAD A SNEAK PEAK at [the Quarterfinals] venue and it’s so big,” says Damwon top laner Nuguri. “Maybe I’ll be mesmerized or even terrified because it’s so big.”

Even among the newcomers to this stage, Damwon is the newest. Having just qualified for the LCK this year, they are a brand new team almost across the board. They’ve made rumblings among fans for dominating Solo Queue on the EUW server, and at one point have had as many as four of their players in the Top 10. To me, this is the team that best represents the mostly bygone era of five people forming a team online and going pro (just some bros hanging out and going pro!). For every kid in Solo Queue who has dreamed, even once, of what it would be like to stand on the Worlds stage, here is Damwon making it a reality.

Last year at Worlds, Damwon was already making waves among the rumor mill for dominating the Semifinalist teams in scrims even though they were still a challenger team. These rumors are still going strong — Caps himself told me that G2 has struggled against Damwon so far in scrims, and Nuguri suggested the same. Scrim results are, of course, just that, but this isn’t the same as last year when the LCK representatives were struggling everywhere.

Nuguri says, “Playing games at Worlds is really different because it’s our first time playing competitive games against foreign teams and we have a bigger venue… I believe we are the challengers because G2 won MSI earlier this year.” 

They’ve been challengers all year, and they’ve trudged through their list of firsts. The first LCK match. The first playoff match. Their first wins and first losses. Being eliminated from Worlds is different from anything else — there is a reason countless pros have built their careers around trying to get back to this stage. Many have had their entire legacy defined by it. And for Damwon, that legacy begins now against the best team Europe has ever produced.

AFTER DESTROYING the 2019 MSI Group Stage with a 9-0 record, many of us were ready to declare this the era of Invictus Gaming. We could have had the coronation right there and plopped the crown atop Rookie’s head, and at the time, they’d have deserved it. But something happened after they lost that 10th game to SKT. Ning walked back to the hotel by himself, which was a thing he wasn’t supposed to do, which is the image that comes to mind when I think about IG’s sudden decline.

They would go on to lose to Team Liquid in the Semifinals, and then they would stumble through the entire LPL Summer Split before rebounding just in time for the LPL Regional Qualifier. Even in this Group Stage they finished 2nd. This is not the IG we saw last year, and I think that is something even IG themselves are trying to understand. 

On that, IG mid laner Rookie says, “I think all of our players have very strong personalities and at the same time are very elite at their positions. IG is a team that doesn’t have an upper limit, but at the same time, that also applies to our lower limit. When we’re doing well, we can win the World Championship. When we’re not doing so well, then bowing out in the Group Stage is also possible. It just comes down to the temperament of the players.” 

Rookie has come to be the front-facing leader of IG, and though he wasn’t particularly strong as a player over the summer, he’s had a good tournament so far. It’s clear he’s still integral to this team’s success. I don’t know if sympathy is the exact emotion I feel for IG’s decline because no matter what happens, you can’t take 2018 away from them, but watching a champion fall from the top is, at the very least, somber. 

Part of the mythos that is built when you become champion is invincibility. You cease to become what you are in the now and are instead forever tied to that championship moment. Part of Rookie’s image for us is always going to be him kissing the Summoner’s Cup, and part of us will always expect them to play that well again. But IG in February of this year or IG in July of this year were not the same team, and honestly they never will be again — that is just, very literally, how time works. An IG that has won it all cannot ever again be the same IG that never did.

“As long as I’m a professional, I’ll always be chasing after a World Championship title,” says Rookie. This bit, at least, has not changed. “Last year, the memory and feeling of winning the title was ecstatic like a drug. You can’t forget about it.”

They don’t need to prove anything to fans so much as they need to prove it to themselves, which is to say they need to keep focus on the reason they’re playing to begin with. IG is not the team they were last year, but any time you load onto the Rift, you are trying to win. You don’t need a reason for that. IG doesn’t need to summon their championship form from last year — all they can do is summon their best form right now.

I WAS IN ST. LOUIS for the LCS Spring Finals during the LCK Spring Final this year between Griffin and SKT. Like many people, I set an alarm to wake up in the middle of the night to watch what was being hyped as one of the best regular season Finals matchups in League of Legends history even though I had an early call time. Some millions of fans around the world were just as excited. I even jumped into a voice chat with a bunch of friends as we all groggily watched the hype unfurl. SKT decimated Griffin, and then it happened again in the Summer.

Griffin has now lost three consecutive LCK Finals and four Best-of-5s overall, which is a fact that will be repeated ad infinitum this weekend as they take on the reigning champions. When you see a stat like this, I think the impulse is to assume Griffin must be choking on the biggest stages, and given a chance to be eliminated so far, Griffin has been eliminated every single time in their short tenure together. I don’t think “choking” is a science or anything — it’s not like there’s actually a choking gene — but I do think it’s a history that accumulates, and once it does, how do you not think about it? 

You might not think about it when you are in the middle of a fight or CSing or buying items, but what happens when you make a mistake and die? In those 30 seconds or 60 seconds, are you able to block everything out of your head but the game? To me, it’s one thing to say you won’t think about something and another entirely to actually do it. You’d be rich if you figured out how to reliably teach people to block specific thoughts from entering their heads.

When I ask GRF jungler Tarzan if he has given much thought to the win moment — who does he imagine being the first to lift the trophy — he says, “It doesn’t matter who lifts it first, but you know, we’ve never done it before so I think we’ll all be super happy. But I don’t think anyone will be able to lift it alone because it’s heavy.”

I don’t imagine he meant heavy in a metaphorical sense here, but it made me laugh to hear that. A loss is a failure that is shared by the entire team, as is a win. The trophy will inch further and further away from them with each loss, and the idea of hoisting it may eventually grow heavy on their hearts, but for now at their first Worlds, they truly don’t know how much it weighs or whether they can lift it at all. And there is, as they say, only one way to find out.

“AFTER WE BEAT BOTH CG AND SKT, most of us realized that the chance of us actually making it is really high,” says FNC jungler Broxah. “But at the same time, [the last game] was against RNG. It was against Uzi. We’ve been in that situation so many times — even twice this year against G2 — where we were just one game away. And then we messed up that one game all those times in the past.”

After making Finals last year with a roster that was considered by many to be, at the time, the best that EU had ever produced, MVP and mid laner Caps surprised everyone by leaving. Fnatic replaced him with a relatively unknown talent in Nemesis and then tripped all over themselves out of the gate in the Spring Split. They looked nothing like the Worlds Finalist until they went on a huge winning streak to salvage the split, but it was clear there was still a world of class between them and G2, Caps’ new team. 

Eventually, though, FNC did bounce back — in the Summer Split they proved to be the only team that could go head-to-head with G2 and pushed them to Game 5 in both of their playoff sets. And then they managed to rise from one of the hardest groups in Worlds history by defeating an RNG squad that ended their year in 2017 and their MSI run in 2018. I’m not going to say they’re back because that feels unfair to the journey they went through this year — it is a different team entirely, and Broxah says Nemesis and Caps are also very different players.

But the sense that they’re a world class team? That, definitely, is back. The goal, too, remains unchanged. Fnatic is the second most storied organization in League of Legends after SKT, and for this Worlds to be in Europe, I think there is an inkling among EU faithful that the most appropriate and deserving winner is Fnatic — at least in terms of who has best represented them over the years. It will be years more before Worlds returns to EU soil again, and these chances to win are never guaranteed. For it to be within grasp this year is, perhaps, a once in a lifetime opportunity. To be able to lift the trophy in front of your most diehard fans is a dream they’ll have been salivating over for the last decade.

And as we approach Finals, the sting from last year’s defeat will feel fresher and fresher for Fnatic. Broxah recalls it and says, “The biggest thing I learned from Worlds last year is that as long as I remain confident in myself, I will be able to perform at a high level. Even if someone starts questioning me, I just need to make sure I don’t doubt myself. At Worlds last year, I was probably the most confident I’ve ever been, and that really showed once we entered the Rift and the Lee Sin was locked in — I had some really big highlight picks. I just reminded myself that last year I was considered one of the best junglers in the world — maybe even the MVP — and if just one year ago I played at that level, then there’s no way I can’t bring that back.”

Fnatic is a team that has lost at every single stage of this event. They, better than anyone else in the world, know exactly what it feels like to be eliminated from Worlds. I don’t know if that translates to an edge for them necessarily, but it does mean they won’t be short on emotions to dredge up as fuel. When you lose any game, let alone on the Worlds stage, you think about how you’d do things differently if you were given just one more chance. Fnatic is a team with one more chance — again — and again they get to try all those different things they’d imagined.

“YES, I CAN FIND my [wife from the stage after games] because she has a very, very loud voice. Sometimes my ears even hurt when she screams, ‘Nice,’” laughs FPX mid laner Doinb.

Doinb is, I think, a little confused when I ask him a couple questions about his marriage, but it’s extremely uncommon for pros to be married, and in NA especially I think being married in your early 20s is extremely uncommon. He says, “When Ambition got married, he won a World Championship, so I wanted to try that — to get the marriage buff. Actually, I was planning on retiring before this year. That’s why I made the decision to marry, but then I saw an opportunity to win not only the LPL but maybe Worlds as well.”

That Doinb also happens to be one of the best players from the LPL only adds to my curiosity. He’s been regarded by some as the best player to never make Worlds before this year, and because of his unorthodox champion pool (things like Sion and Nautilus mid) and roam-heavy style, he’s drawn a lot of attention.

FPX is a team that has built an entire playstyle around what Doinb brings to the table, and now with RNG’s early dismissal from the tournament and IG’s inconsistent form, I think the LPL is looking at and praying for FPX to be their shining light this year. FPX is not a brand with a deep history like we’ve usually seen from LPL teams in the past, but nothing deepens your history faster than winning Worlds.

They’re not going to overcome years of heartbreak like IG did (or RNG or EDG could do), but at least in Doinb they have a centerpiece that has endured six years of change. They don’t have the pedigree of Fnatic or SKT, nor do they have the widespread international appeal. But in Doinb and his wife, there is much you can relate to aspire to. And they didn’t win MSI like G2, but even they feel extra pressure on this stage. 

Doinb says, “I think this has to do with my personality because when I win, it’s too easy for me to get emotional. Especially at last year’s Rift Rivals, and this year’s Rift Rivals too… because… I guess you could say it like this, because both these competitions [I was] representing the LPL. The importance of this was to not be an embarrassment. So when I won, I was really emotional because I had so much pressure.” 

One of the reasons his wife cheers so loud, I think, is to help relieve that pressure. It is a show of support that says, “I am here with you.” Which is why any of us cheer for our teams. And the players answer back with their play — this is not some isolated relationship between fan and player. For esports to run, you cannot have one without the other, which is what makes Doinb’s wife leading the cheering section for FPX so special. The two of them represent, literally, the marriage between a player and their fans. Your cheers are not just some cries thrown into the abyss — they converge together with the others and like that give sound to a player’s dreams.