Every year, from September to November, Riot Games, the company that created the world-renowned game League of Legends, holds a World Championship tournament for a multitude of reasons, ranging from increasing publicity for the game, to the more important reason, determining the best players of the game in the world.

                League of Legends is a MOBA, or Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. A MOBA is a type of video game where two teams, usually comprised of three to five players per team, battle against each other on a map that usually has three lanes, top, mid, and bottom, and an expansive jungle area. Each team has some form of base that the other team needs to destroy. In League, this is referred to as a Nexus. Each player has a choice of over 120 champions to play as, with a variety of different skins and appearances for each champion. Teams generally consist of a tank champion in top lane, a ranged damage dealer in mid lane, a ranged damage dealer and support champion to keep them alive in bottom lane, and a high-mobility damage dealer in the jungle. Teams must work together and cooperate in order to achieve victory in a match, though that’s not always an easy task. Overall, the game is extremely fun, and fairly easy to pick up, though once you start, it’s fairly hard to put down.

                The current World Championships is organized by four groups; Group A, Group B, Group C, and Group D, each group containing four teams from around the world, with multiple teams from throughout the world. Over the weeks from the beginning of September to the first two weeks in October, each team has been playing games against each other as a form of qualifying rounds, similar to Playoffs in the NFL. There’s currently still all 16 teams from each group in Worlds, though some are doing a lot better than others at the moment.

 I’m personally rooting for Team SoloMid or TSM, a North American team in Group D. TSM currently has 2 wins and 1 loss, and are doing fairly well, minus a few close games. Unlike the other Groups that have a clear leader of the group so far, TSM are tied with Team WE, a Chinese team, and Misfits, a European team. All three teams are currently 2-1, leaving Flash Wolves, the group’s last and currently worst team, at 0-3. I personally hope and believe that TSM are going to advance in the group, though I’m not sure whether or not they’re going to actually win Worlds. Team SoloMid’s top lane player is Kevin “Hauntzer” Yarnell, their Jungler is Dennis “Svenskeren” Johnson, their mid laner is Søren “Bjergsen” Bjerg, their bottom laner is Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng, and their support is Vincent “Biofrost” Wang. They all don’t play one specific champion, but are comfortable with many different champions for their role. They’re all doing statistically very well so far in Worlds, even with one loss.

                Worlds are an extremely fun event to watch, and League of Legends is an equally fun game to play. The game is easy to pick up but hard to master, and really rewarding when you do master it. For more information regarding Worlds, ESPN does cover all information pertaining to Worlds, from current team win rates to individual player’s gold earnings per game. Riftherald is also another good website to use, though they cover more than just Worlds, and keep up on any information relating to League of Legends.