BLG Sweep DK 3-0 to Reach the Worlds Semifinals, Chasing the T1 Rematch That Got Away

At the 2026 League of Legends world championship in Allen, Texas, the Chinese club Bilibili Gaming needed roughly ninety-seven minutes to end DK's tournament, taking Thursday's quarterfinal 3-0 behind a performance so one-sided that BLG's jungler Xun controlled eleven of the dragons spawned across three games. The club's own minute-by-minute recap of game one reads like a war diary: a mid-and-jungle kill on the enemy mid-laner at minute zero, a top-laner fighting off a two-man ambush and killing both attackers at two, an invade for two more at four, a solo kill at five. The log, posted on the club's Weibo account, drew close to 4,500 likes within hours.

What spread faster than the score was the backstage footage. Esports accounts posted the dressing-room video soon after the match: the DK five filing in from the stage in silence, heads down, nobody speaking, the mid-laner ShowMaker slumped back in his chair, mouth pressed tight, staring at nothing. One Weibo user put it: "A world-famous painting — five people, faces full of pain. ShowMaker's era is over." The poignancy had a competitive edge to it. DK had swept through the Swiss stage with wins over T1 and G2 and were widely tipped as BLG's hardest test; DK's coach cvMax said afterwards that after dropping the first two games the team had slipped into what he called a weaker-side mentality, and by game three could not play its own tempo.

For BLG the win is a step on a longer arc, as the discussion thread on Zhihu lays out: this is the club's third career semifinal. In 2023 it lost a five-game heartbreaker to Weibo Gaming in the last four; in 2024 it reached the final and lost 2-3 to T1; last year it was out in the Swiss stage. The semifinal opponent will come from Saturday's T1-KC quarterfinal, and BLG's players have been open about which one they want. In a post-match interview, mid-laner Knight said that whatever happens, "I personally definitely want to play T1 — I want to win a best-of-five against them at Worlds," a reference to the 2024 final his team led and lost.

The fandom is already rehearsing the rematch. Before Saturday's game, fans of KC — the club standing between BLG and T1 — strung a banner outside a T1 merchandise shop reading "Our wolf will kill your washed goat," a jab at T1's veterans that made the rounds on Chinese social media within minutes.

China's league, the LPL, already holds two of the four semifinal slots: the day before, iG beat fellow Chinese club TES 3-1 to reach its first semifinal in seven years, as we covered earlier. Gen.G awaits iG in one semifinal on November 8; BLG plays the T1-KC winner a day later; the final is on November 15. If the Chinese clubs win both, the last match of the esports year will be an all-LPL final.