SK Telecom T1 advances to League World semis after win over RNGU
SK Telecom T1 showed some great performance going against Royal Never Give Up, taking a 3-1 win in Friday’s quarterfinals series. Even though RNG boasts some of the most talented individual players in the world, ultimately SKT T1’s immaculate macro play won the day.
It wasn’t completely smooth sailing for the defending champions, however, as RNG took the opening game of the series with an extremely disciplined early game. They picked up several kills and turrets to build a 4k gold lead, and it was 27 minutes into the game before SKT T1 found a kill. Even with the early lead, it took RNG more than 46 minutes to secure the Nexus. SKT T1 nearly crawled back into the game, and they might have won if it wasn’t for a number of puzzling mistakes by SKT T1 top laner Hoseong “Duke” Lee
The rest of the series was all SKT T1. They picked up first blood just a few minutes into game two and never looked back. As always, SKT T1’s success started and finished with legendary mid laner Sanghyeok “Faker” Lee, who over the course of this tournament has dispelled any doubt that he is still the best player in the world. Faker was 16/6/17 in SKT T1’s three wins.
SKT T1 are the second team to advance to the semifinals after Samsung Galaxy, another team from Korea, swept North America’s Cloud9 last night. Next match on Saturday will bring Asia’s top seed, ROX Tigers to face China’s EDward Gaming. Europe’s H2K takes on the surprising and entertaining wildcard Albus NoX Luna on Sunday to wrap up the quarterfinals before the tournament heads to New York City for the semifinals next weekend.
