iG and TES Deliver LPL's First Wins at League of Legends Worlds After a Winless Start
After a 0-for-4 start at the League of Legends world championship, China's teams finally won — TES over AL, then iG over TSW of the Pacific league — and the relief on Weibo says as much about the LPL's anxieties as the wins do.
When the 2026 League of Legends world championship opened its Swiss stage this week, every one of the Chinese league's four representatives lost. A 0-for-4 start for the LPL — long the game's strongest region — was bleak enough that the second round forced two Chinese teams to play each other, just to put someone in the win column.
TES took that all-Chinese match against AL in the early hours of Sunday Beijing time, and with it the league's first game of the tournament. "Before this, four teams had all lost in the first round, and the region's record line read an unmistakable 0-4," the video outlet Pear Video noted in its match report.
A few hours later came the win that mattered more. iG beat TSW, the top seed of the Pacific league, 1-0 — the LPL's first victory this tournament against an outside opponent, what Chinese fans call an "external battle" (外战). The match teetered until a late teamfight in which TheShy, the veteran top-laner who returned mid-season to rejoin iG, landed the decisive blow with his K'Sante, killing the enemy Qiyana. "They had countless chances in hand and couldn't convert a single one," a widely shared match summary put it.
Speaking afterwards, TheShy was candid about the season behind him: "Honestly, I hadn't been playing much. I hoped we could make Worlds, but I never felt certain. I'm just happy we got here — and I feel I'm playing better than I expected."
The wins arrived against a grim backdrop. HLE, another Chinese seed, lost to Korea's GEN the same morning, out-drafted and down nearly 3,000 gold by the fifteen-minute mark, and now sits at 1-1 with a possible elimination-weighted match against a top seed looming in the next draw. BLG is 0-2 after a collapse against MKOI, and AL, China's first seed, is 0-2 with its tournament life hanging on what comes next. The TES-AL game had its own Zhihu post-mortem within hours, as Chinese esports debates always do.
The stumble has hit a nerve because it follows a troubled run-up — one team's coach never made it out of China at all, caught in a visa dispute before the event. Two wins have steadied the record, barely: under the Swiss format every remaining game now carries elimination weight, and whether the LPL's record survives the next round of draws is the argument Chinese fans have already started to have.