LPL's Winless Worlds Start Forces an All-Chinese Match in Round Two

Four games, four losses. When the first round of the 2026 League of Legends World Championship's Swiss stage ended early on Thursday morning Beijing time, every Chinese team in the draw had fallen: iG to Korea's GEN, Top Esports to Hanwha Life, Bilibili Gaming in an upset against MKOI, and Anyone's Legend to KC. It was, as one Zhihu question put it, the league's worst-ever start at Worlds — 'is the title of world's second-best region about to be forfeited?' our earlier coverage of the opening losses noted that one team's coach never even made it out of China, after his star player failed two US visa interviews.

Then the round-two draw made things simultaneously better and worse. With all four Chinese teams sitting at 0-1, the bracket paired Top Esports against Anyone's Legend — an all-Chinese match in which one LPL team is guaranteed its first win of the tournament, and one is guaranteed a second loss. The other Chinese pairings sent iG against TSW and BLG against TLAW. The draw, trended under a hashtag about 'civil war' (内战)， landed as gallows humour: the esports commentator Wang Weichen wrote that the good news was the internal matchup, since LPL 'will surely get its first win' — and then, in a follow-up, did the grim arithmetic. Even if every Chinese team won its cross-regional game this round, LPL would have at most three teams at 1-1; meanwhile Korea's League, which put four teams into the 1-0 group, also drew two all-Korean matches, guaranteeing LCK teams at 2-0. 'Some teams will be going home early on internal matches,' he warned.

The frustration is bigger than one bad day. LPL has spent the past two international events watching LCK dominate, and the league's structural troubles run deeper than form — this year even getting a full roster to the tournament required visa diplomacy. On Zhihu, where the opening day sat at the top of the site's hot list, the post-mortems were already asking whether the league's talent pipeline and preparation culture can keep pace; on Baidu, the draw itself charted among the day's top searches.

The round-two matches begin at 1 a.m. Beijing time on October 25, as single-game eliminations in name only: for LPL, the tournament's survival now runs through its own teams. TES versus AL will send one Chinese squad to 1-1 and the other to the brink — and whichever way it goes, the league's first win of Worlds 2026 will come at its own expense.