League of Legends at IPL5: Day 2 recap

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Day 2 of IPL5 has ended and the brackets are beginning to pan out. As the tournament progresses and teams starting to be knocked out, there is less and less room for error for the contenders.  

IPL5 has been a very well run event, on-stream and off-stream. With great games, interviews, ads and cheers for ward kills, IPL5 is showing that they put a lot of time and effort into their tournament. Here is the update from day 2 at this grand event.

North America draws first blood

The loser’s bracket started off today’s events with FeaR vs Meat Playground and Curse.NA vs Team Dynamic. FeaR coming out of the group stages with a 1-2 record seemed to have still a little bit of hope in the losers bracket against Meat Playground who was 0-2. Meat Playground turned on the heat against FeaR right off the bat. Meat took quick leads in both games and snowballed them into easy victories, ejecting FeaR out of the tournament.

Curse had Team Dynamic’s number and showed them they are a force to be reckoned with. They had some struggles against M5 but they shook of their jitters of day 1 and stomped Dynamic. Curse continued to snowball and easily beat TD going 2-0 against them to knock Team Dynamic out of the tournament.

Asia draws second blood

The next two matches of the day were BlackBean vs Azubu Blaze and Singapore Sentinels vs IceLanD, which were both in the losers bracket. Azubu Blaze made sure that no upsets would happen this time, and being fresh from a good night’s sleep, they easily knocked out BlackBean with a 2-0 victory.

IceLanD a brand new team to the international scene, and the only team from Hong Kong at the tournament attempted to show that they are upcoming contenders. SGS took an easy first game and in the second game they had everything going their way when IceLanD began to defend their base like CLG.EU does so well. They held off SgS for a few minutes until one lux snare and ult combo onto lulu from IceLanD caused Singapore Sentinels to fly into their base destroying two inhibitors and soon after ending the game. Singapore Sentinels wins 2-0 over IceLanD.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

Fnatic vs TPA and Curse.eu vs CLG.Prime were arguably the best matches of the tournament so far. Season 1 Champions Fnatic and Season 2 Champions Taipei Assassins at one point were the best in the world and were ready to prove who is the best in the world now. Game 1 was all about xPekee and his Katarina. XPekee keeping his team in the game picking off kills in every lane allowed Rekkles on Vayne to catch up in farm and kills. Fnatic with xPekee and Rekkles leading the charge, dominated every team fight and taught the Season 2 Champions how to play old school style.

Game 2 started with a crazy level 1 teamfight where nRated on Blitzcrank was taken out. From first blood to late game TPA just dominated Fnatic and had complete control. Fnatic believed in Rekkles’ Vayne and he started picking up kills in small skirmishes. With Vayne snowballing Fnatic began winning every teamfight and pressuring TPA on their turrets. Eventually Fnatic pushed right down into TPA’s base taking the inhibitor and catching TPA outside. After a quick ace, Fnatic took out the nexus and knocked TPA into the loser’s bracket.

Prime moves on in dramatic fashion

After two extremely lopsided games between CLG Prime and Curse EU, game three could not have been closer. The largest gold lead of the 40 minute game was about 3k gold. Things were going back and forth until Doublelift pulled out his godlike mechanics on Ezreal and managed a pentakill that ended the game with a victory for CLG Prime.

After the game, Doublelift tweeted, “FUCK THAT GAME GG CURSE.EU MY HANDS ARE SHAKING LIKE CRAZY.” The win pushed CLG Prime into the winner’s bracket semi-finals to face Fnatic tomorrow.

Master Yi gets banned, TSM’s Korean woes continue

Round 2 of the loser bracket began with Meat Playground vs M5 and TSM vs Azubu Blaze. In game one, Alex Ich brought out the dunkMaster Yi and destroyed Meat just like he did against Curse NA yesterday. It was so brutal, in game two Meat Playground did the thing no League of Legends fan over 1000 ELO thought they’d ever see: They banned Master Yi.

It seemed to be working for a while, but M5 took some lessons from CLG.EU and defended from a 10k gold deficit, slowly winning teamfights and evening out the gold. A few pick offs here and there and one final teamfight in Meat Playground’s base decided the win for M5.

Azubu Blaze coming off an easy win from Blackbean were ready for TSM. However, TSM was about to play two of their best games since the North American Season 2 Regionals. Both teams put on a show playing at their best but Azubu Blaze managed to take the wins. TSM tried their best and had a great showing including a wild team fight that never seemed to end in this series but it just wasn’t enough to defeat the Koreans.

TSM now falls to 0-11 against Korean teams lifetime since first lost to Azubu Blaze at MLG Summer Arena 2012.

What to watch for tomorrow

Grudge matches will be going on all day tomorrow. First up will be the battle of the Curses: NA vs EU. This will be the first time the two have battled in competitive play and might settle once and for all who really deserves the team mansion.

The Singapore Sentinels will get a chance at revenge when they go up against Taipei Assassins as it is a rematch of the Garena Premier League championships. TPA won that match 3-1, but all bets are off when these two teams come together.

The Ward Warriors, CLG EU and Team WE, will be battling it out again. In case you didn’t see it, 80 wards were killed in one of the games that “never happened” between these two teams at the Season 2 Championships. Team WE will get a shot at revenge, but just don’t forget to cheer for those ward deaths.