It's coming down to the wire over in China's League of Legends Pro League this week, as teams up and down the table are ferociously fighting for every last victory they can get their hands on in order to secure better -- or any -- postseason seeding.
While it wasn't a week of big movements -- there were only a handful of position changes -- it was a week that saw many teams draw closer together than they've ever been in the rankings, leaving each a mere hair's breadth from a shot at the playoffs and the opportunity to represent the region at the upcoming Rift Rivals.
Nowhere has the flattening of the league's standing become more obvious than in the middle of the pack teams of each conference. Thanks to some unlikely upsets over the course of the week, both conferences now have three teams all within a game of each other. In the East, those teams are Royal Never Give Up (10-7), Suning Gaming (9-9) and JD Gaming (9-9) while the West has Bilibili Gaming (10-7), Team WE (8-8) and FunPlus Phoenix (7-10). While the game score and number of remaining matches makes it obvious that these teams are a bit further apart than they might seem -- FunPlus Phoenix, for example, has little hope of moving in either direction at this point due to only having a single series remaining in the split -- but even if there's no further movement, the current state of affairs highlights just how competitive the middle of the pack is.
The other race that's receiving a bit more attention from observers of the league is that for the leader of the Western Conference. Snake Esports (11-5) picked up a surprising 0-2 defeat at the hands of Bilibili Gaming early on in the week which, when combined with EDward Gaming's surprisingly narrow victory over Team WE, forced it to finally forfeit control of the Western Conference. Its fate now is now entirely in the hands of the conference's third place team, Bilibili Gaming, who will have to overcome EDward Gaming during the final match of the split in order to allow Snake even a chance at ending the season as the conference champions.
"Competitive" is a poor descriptor for the LPL's other conference, however, as Invictus Gaming (16-1) proved it was the strongest team in the league this week by smashing the only roster that still could potentially challenge it: Rogue Warriors (13-4). With an astounding 89 percent win rate and the most points of any team in the league by a longshot, there remains no question in anyone's mind who the strongest team in China is. At long last, Invictus Gaming can finally lay claim to a title that has eluded it for years, provided it can defend it in the upcoming playoffs, where it'll need to prove that its sole loss to Royal Never Give Up was simply a fluke.
--James Bates