Day 1 of the IEM Oakland League of Legends tournament brought some recently-overlooked teams to the light and proved lopsided regional prowess. The first match of the day saw Europe's Unicorns of Love completely dominate Brazil's INTZ from start to finish. INTZ was outclassed across the board, and UoL made sure to go for the throat once it found a lead; this was a simple thing to find considering Fabian "Exileh" Schubert lived up to his post-season peak from earlier this year, completely blowing away INTZ's Gabriel "Tockers" Claumann in both games. Exileh paved the way for the team to work its historically strong rotational play, and it never gave INTZ an opportunity to mount a comeback.
The second match was equally lopsided, but more interesting to many Western fans due to the relative obscurity of the teams involved. Oceania's Chiefs made their debut on the IEM stage, only to face South Korea's Longzhu, which was also making its IEM debut. The match started off with an exciting back and forth in Game 1 that almost led to a Chiefs victory thanks to their unexpectedly strong coordination and the efforts from jungler Samuel "Spookz" Broadley and mid laner Simon "Swiffer" Papamarkos.
Unfortunately, the deficit that their top laner, Brandon "Swip3rR" Holland, had against Bon-Taek "Expession" Gu proved to be too much to bear; despite their strong teamfighting the Chiefs just proved unable to fight Longzhu 1-vs-1 in the split push the South Koreans initiated. Game 2 would prove nowhere near as competitive: Longzhu stomped Chiefs flat thanks to an amazing performance from Lee "Chaser" Sang-hyum, whose early pressure in the solo lanes gave Expession the opportunity to once again dominate Swip3rR and split push the team to a win.
Sunday is sure to be an exciting day, as Unicorns take on Team SoloMid while Longzhu will challenge Flash Wolves. With Unicorns in some of the best form in its organization's history, the team is sure to give the hometown heroes a good fight, while Longzhu looks to follow in SK Telecom T1's footsteps from Worlds and thrash the longtime thorn in the side of South Korean hegemony.
However the dice fall tomorrow, we'll be crowning a new champion of the $100,000 tournament come the evening. Expect to see some close and exciting matches, a welcome change after today's bloodbaths.