The first major upset of Worlds 2018 has already happened despite today only being the second day. Supermassive Esports has beaten G2 Esports in a clear victory that is despite being an upset, not all that surprising.
Although G2, Cloud9, and EDG should not lose a single game during the play-in phases of the tournament, G2 really hasn’t look that spectacular throughout the second half of the summer split. The only time during the second half where they actually performed was during the gauntlet when they won through strong early aggression and made their way to worlds. However, today’s showing was much more like the G2 that we saw during summer and not the G2 that we saw in the gauntlet.
First off, G2’s draft left something to be desired. Although the draft was not terrible, blind picking Akali when Tahm Kench is still open is quite disrespectful. Supermassive’s GBM is also notorious for his Zilean which also shuts down Akali pretty hard during the mid and late game. Besides that, the draft was honestly not too bad but the fact that Perkz could never assassinate anybody throughout the game hurt them a lot.
Despite all the issues that the team had this game, their early looked pretty good. Jankos set the pace for the jungle and had good control over the map for the majority of the early game. However, this control did not translate to a big early game lead and G2 got slowly choked out in the mid-game that was in favor of Supermassive. Their draft was completely focused around the mid game but for some reason, it was G2 that tried to make the engages happen.
The First Blood King strikes first at #Worlds2018:
First Blood for @G2Jankos‘ Olaf! pic.twitter.com/iiSYbhwH9g
— lolesports (@lolesports) October 2, 2018
Despite making Worlds, G2 still has a lot of glaring issues that they need to fix if they even want to make it to playoffs. Also, it can’t be understated how well Supermassive played during the game. Although it mainly looked like G2 throwing the game by themselves, Supermassive’s macro game and individual plays were also much better than G2 and they look like they can easily make their way to the group stages.
Later today G2 will face off against Ascension Gaming who have also lost their first game. If G2 loses there is an extremely big chance they won’t even make it to the group stages so it’s really up to them to prove whether or not they have what it takes to play on the international stage.
