iG Beats TES 3-1 to Reach the League of Legends Worlds Semifinals, Seven Years On
Invictus Gaming, China's first world champions, beat Top Esports in an all-Chinese quarterfinal to reach the semifinals for the first time since 2019 — a run analysts gave them a 0.009% chance of making before the tournament began.
Invictus Gaming beat Top Esports 3-1 on Tuesday night in an all-Chinese quarterfinal at the League of Legends World Championship, and the numbers tell the story better than the game did. Before the tournament, analysts gave iG a 4.1% chance of even qualifying for Worlds and about 0.10% of reaching the semifinals; the same prediction curve put their odds of reaching the final at 0.009%. They are now one series away from exactly that.
For a franchise this is more than a good run. iG won the Worlds title in 2018 as the first Chinese team ever to do so, then reached the semifinals again in 2019 — and has spent the seven years since mostly watching from home. Their return to the knockout stage after 2,565 days was already the story of the group stage, picked up overseas as a "miracle team" narrative. Beating TES — the side that had earlier taken down Korean opposition — turns the miracle into a contending run.
The club's victory post was characteristically literary: "Mountains, seas overturning in great waves. The will to fight is not yet spent. The aurora does not go out — see you at the next mountain" (山，倒海翻江卷巨澜。战意未阑。極光不熄，下一座山再见). TheShy, the superstar top-laner whose return is the spine of this run, posted a two-line thank-you to fans that drew nearly 34,000 likes.
What makes the story resonate beyond the bracket is the mood around League of Legends in China. One long-time player put it plainly: the group chats that once debated every match all night now sometimes go silent on results, and he can't pretend that isn't sad — but when friends finally meet up at an internet café, the game they open is still this one. His closing wish was for "iG or BLG" to take the trophy, and the arithmetic allows both: BLG had already swept Korea's HLE to claim the other semifinal berth, meaning an all-LPL final is live.
The match has broken well past the esports press. Zhihu carried two separate questions about the series on its trending board — one asking how to judge the game, another noting that iG had returned to the final four after seven years — and the top video on Bilibili that night was a breakdown of Wei's quarterfinal performance, the jungler voted player of the match.
The semifinals now stand between iG and a final nobody's model thought possible. The 0.009% is still unspent.