LCK 2026 season awards: how the regular-season votes came out

A year ago one club supplied all five players of the best line-up of the South Korean league. This year the same line-up takes its players from three. The LCK, the professional League of Legends league of South Korea, published its 2026 regular-season awards on August 27 on the LoL Esports site of Riot Games, the game's publisher: a Regular Round MVP, a Rookie of the Year, a Head Coach of the Year and three All-LCK Teams, the league's selections of the best player in each of the five positions.

Sheep Esports, which reported the results the same day, summed up the change in one observation. For the first time in five years, at least three clubs have a player on the All-LCK First Team.

LCK awards announcement on LoL Esports, August 27, 2026; club counts computed from its All-LCK lists.

Four categories, announced before the playoffs

The league describes the awards as going to those who performed best in the regular season, the long phase that ranks the teams before the knockout rounds. The votes therefore know nothing of the playoffs.

The announcement gives each winner with a points total. Chovy, the mid laner of Gen.G, is Regular Round MVP, the most valuable player of the regular season, with 148 points. Smash, of Dplus KIA, is Rookie of the Year, the award for the best newcomer, with 176 points. Kim Dae-ho, the Dplus KIA head coach known as cvMax, is Head Coach of the Year with 141 points.

The page does not describe the panel or the scale behind those totals. It links, for each category, to a document with the full voting results, and in its own text it gives only the winner of each individual award. It also carries a fifth distinction, for the player named Player of the Match most often during the season. According to Sheep Esports that one went to Chovy as well.

A last individual trophy is still open. The league says its Finals MVP will be revealed after the final on Sunday, September 13.

Three clubs on the First Team, four on the lists

An All-LCK Team has one player per position: top lane, jungle, mid lane, bot lane and support. The league names three of them, ranked from first to third, which makes 15 places in all.

The First Team has two players of Hanwha Life Esports, two of T1 and one of Gen.G. Sheep Esports describes the spread as more balanced: no club has four or five of the places, and it is the first season in five years in which at least three clubs have a player on the First Team.

The contrast with 2025 is direct. When the league announced last season's awards on September 4, 2025, Gen.G placed all five of its players on the first line-up, Sheep Esports reported at the time. That Gen.G had lost one match in thirty in the regular season, a record of 29 wins and one defeat. The club also had the MVP, already Chovy, and the Coach of the Year.

The same report lists the two other line-ups of 2025, and four of their players have moved since. Keria was on the Second Team a year ago and is on the First Team now. Zeus goes from the Third Team to the First, and Delight from the Third to the Second. Gumayusi is on the Third Team for the second year running.

Read across the three line-ups, the 2026 lists stay inside a small circle. Hanwha Life Esports has five of the 15 places, one in each position. Gen.G and Dplus KIA have four each, and T1 has two. No player of any other club appears.

Those four clubs are also the first four of the regular season. The standings on the LoL Esports site place Gen.G first, Hanwha Life Esports second, T1 third and Dplus KIA fourth.

Sheep Esports links the closeness of the standings to the closeness of the ballots. It describes the MVP vote as one of the most contested of recent years, because the clubs of the nominees finished much nearer to each other than in earlier seasons.

Chovy keeps the MVP

The winner did not change. Chovy has won every Regular Season MVP since his first, in the 2024 Spring Split, Sheep Esports notes. With the Player of the Match distinction and his place on the First Team, he completes what the outlet calls a triple crown.

The podium of the MVP vote is known only in part. Sheep Esports reports that Kanavi, the jungler of Hanwha Life Esports, finished in the first three. It is his first season in the LCK after a transfer from the LPL, the Chinese league, and it ends with a place on the First Team.

A rookie race inside one club

The Rookie of the Year vote was decided inside one team. Smash and Career, who form the bot lane of Dplus KIA, the pair of players who share the lower side of the map, took the first two places, Sheep Esports reports. Smash received the majority of the first-place ballots, and Career finished second. The outlet's phrase for it is a friendly civil war.

The league's announcement gives Smash 176 points. Career does not leave without a mention: he is the support of the All-LCK Third Team.

Three players appear on an All-LCK line-up for the first time, according to Sheep Esports: Career, his teammate Siwoo, the top laner of the Third Team, and Lucid, the Dplus KIA jungler, who is on the Second Team. Together with ShowMaker, the mid laner of the Third Team, they give the fourth-placed club as many All-LCK places as the first-placed one.

The coach of the fourth-placed team

The Head Coach of the Year vote is the one that breaks with habit. cvMax wins the award for the first time, and he does it from fourth place.

Last year the award followed the standings. The 2025 Coach of the Year was Kim Jeong-soo, at the head of the Gen.G that lost once in thirty matches, Sheep Esports reported in September 2025.

The 2026 result goes with the rest of Dplus KIA's list: the Rookie of the Year, the runner-up of the same vote, three players named to an All-LCK Team for the first time. The league's page gives the coach 141 points.

How the LCK's lists compare with the LEC's

The European league runs a similar set of awards, and it has published its method in more detail. In the rules Riot Games set out for the LEC on February 23, the Season MVP and the All Pro line-ups are chosen by professional players, team staff, journalists, broadcast partners and broadcast talent. Each voter names three candidates for MVP and three players per position. The votes produce three All Pro line-ups, as in South Korea.

Two differences show in the calendars. The LEC holds its regular-season votes twice, in its Spring and Summer splits, where the LCK announced one set of awards for its whole regular season. And the LEC gives its Rookie of the Year at the very end of its Summer Split, on criteria that cover the whole year, while the LCK names its rookie with the other regular-season awards.

Both leagues keep one trophy apart from the ballots of the season: a Finals MVP, named after the last match.

From the awards to the final on September 13

The awards came out between the regular season and the last matches of the year. Sheep Esports reported on August 19 that a finish in the first two places of the regular season sends a club directly to the second round of the playoffs, and that Gen.G had secured one of them by that date.

The season ends at the KSPO Dome, in Seoul's Olympic Park. The final is set for Sunday, September 13, at 2 pm Korean time, and the match that decides its second participant is played in the same arena the day before, The Esports Advocate reported on August 20. The same report says the final will be shown live on MBC, a South Korean terrestrial television channel, for the third year in a row: Riot Games extended the broadcaster's agreement by two years, to cover the finals of 2026 and 2027, without disclosing financial terms. The 2025 final, which Gen.G won 3-1 against Hanwha Life Esports, was played on September 28 at the Inspire Arena in Incheon.

The Finals MVP will complete the list of the season's individual awards that evening.

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