Worlds 2026 Swiss Stage Ends: Quarterfinal Field Is Set

The Swiss Stage of the 2026 League of Legends World Championship ended on Saturday, October 31, in Allen, Texas, and the eight teams that will play the knockout rounds are now known. Karmine Corp, LYON and Bilibili Gaming took the last three places in the final round of the stage, according to GosuGamers, and a bracket draw held after the day's matches, according to GameDaily, set the quarterfinals, which begin on Tuesday, November 3, according to Strafe.

The Swiss Stage is the middle part of the event. Sixteen teams play five rounds; three wins send a team to the quarterfinals, and three losses send it home, with no two teams meeting twice, according to a Red Bull guide to the event published on October 13. According to GosuGamers, the first two rounds were single games. According to the ESTNN results tracker, the later series that could send a team through or out were best-of-three, meaning the first side to win two games takes the match, while some third-round matches between teams with one win and one loss were still single games.

Strafe, November 1, 2026 (qualified teams, records and schedule); Red Bull event guide, October 13, 2026 (Swiss rules).

How the stage finished

The last day of play, October 31, was a day of elimination series. Karmine Corp, LYON and Bilibili Gaming won their final-round series against Movistar KOI, LOS and Hanwha Life Esports, according to a Hotspawn recap published on November 1. GosuGamers put the scores at 2-0 for Karmine Corp and 2-1 for LYON. Each of those six teams had arrived at two wins and two losses, so the winners moved on and the losers were out.

GosuGamers described the LYON series in detail. LOS won the first game, LYON took the second after a long game that ended at the 47-minute mark, and LYON won the third at 36 minutes with a kill lead of 16 to 7. The same outlet reported that Karmine Corp's win over Movistar KOI came in two games, the first of them lasting 39 minutes, and that the result left Movistar KOI in ninth to eleventh place.

Five teams had already qualified before the final day. Gen.G and Dplus KIA went 3-0 and were through on October 25, according to the ESTNN results tracker. T1 (with a 2-0 win over Movistar KOI) and Invictus Gaming qualified on October 28, according to Strafe's report published on October 29, and the ESTNN tracker lists the Invictus Gaming win over LYON as 2-1. Top Esports followed on October 29, according to ESTNN, with a 2-1 win over Bilibili Gaming, according to GosuGamers. That left three places for the final round.

The eight teams through

The table below gives each qualifier with its final Swiss record, its region and the date it clinched. The records and regions come from Strafe's bracket report of November 1; the dates come from the match reports named in this article.

The regional split is lopsided. The two Korean and Chinese leagues, the LCK and the LPL, each placed three teams in the top eight. The European league, the LEC, and the North American league, the LCS, each placed one. Strafe's list contains no team from the Asia-Pacific league, the LCP, or from Brazil's CBLOL.

Who went out

Eight teams left the event in the Swiss Stage. The first two were Anyone's Legend, the top seed from the LPL, and Team Secret Whales, the top seed from the LCP. Both finished 0-3 and were the first teams eliminated, on October 26, according to Strafe. Strafe called Anyone's Legend the LPL's top seed, and GosuGamers called Team Secret Whales the LCP's top seed.

CTBC Flying Oyster went out on October 29, according to ESTNN and Strafe, when Karmine Corp beat it 2-0 in an elimination series, according to GosuGamers. It finished in 12th to 14th place, in that outlet's wording, with a record of 1-3 by the results reported.

Two more elimination series were scheduled for October 30, according to Strafe, and Hotspawn recorded the outcomes in a recap published on October 31. LOS beat Team Liquid Alienware 2-1, which sent Team Liquid out. Hanwha Life Esports beat G2 Esports, which sent G2 out and kept Hanwha Life alive for one more day. GosuGamers reported that G2 finished in 12th to 14th place and received US$125,000 in consolation prize money. Counting from the reported results, G2 and Team Liquid both finished 1-3.

The final day then removed the last three. By the same count, Movistar KOI, LOS and Hanwha Life Esports each finished 2-3. GosuGamers reported that both Movistar KOI and LOS finished in ninth to eleventh place and received US$175,000. The LOS exit carried a historic note: GosuGamers reported that the team had become the first CBLOL team to win a best-of-three series at Worlds, when it swept Team Secret Whales in the third round, before losing to LYON on the last day. That outlet also noted that LOS would have been the first CBLOL team in the knockout stage.

Karmine Corp's road from the Play-In

Karmine Corp, the European team, began its event with the Play-In, a four-team bracket played from October 15 to 18 in Los Angeles in which only the winner moves on to the Swiss Stage, according to the Red Bull guide. GosuGamers reported that Karmine Corp won the Play-In, beating MVK Esports for the last Swiss Stage place.

In the Swiss Stage it began by beating Anyone's Legend in its opening match on October 23, a result that GosuGamers called an upset of the LPL's first seed. Two single-game losses followed, to LYON on October 24 and to Bilibili Gaming on October 26, with dates from ESTNN and Strafe and results from Team aAa's listing, which left it at one win and two losses. At that point a third loss would have ended the run.

It won the next two series, both by 2-0. The first was the October 29 elimination series against CTBC Flying Oyster; the second was the October 31 match against Movistar KOI, which sent Karmine Corp through. GosuGamers reported that in the second game against Movistar KOI, Karmine Corp led by about 14,000 gold and 17 kills to 4 at the 25-minute mark.

The finish put Karmine Corp in the knockout stage at 3-2. It is the one LEC team left in the event, since G2 Esports and Movistar KOI were both eliminated, according to the lists above.

The draw and the bracket

The quarterfinal pairings came from a draw held after the last Swiss matches. GameDaily, in a report published late on October 31 US Eastern time, described the method as semi-random: the top two Swiss Stage teams were placed on opposite sides of the bracket, each facing one of the 3-2 teams in the quarterfinals, and the remaining teams were paired at random. The pairings that resulted are in the table below.

Some pairings come with history from the Swiss Stage. Gen.G and LYON have already met: Gen.G won 2-1 on October 25, according to the ESTNN tracker, coming back after losing the first game according to GosuGamers, in the match that sent Gen.G through. Top Esports and Invictus Gaming will play the only all-LPL quarterfinal, as Hotspawn noted.

How the knockouts work

The knockout stage is a single-elimination bracket with no lower bracket, according to Strafe, so one lost series ends a team's run. Every series is a best-of-five, where the first side to win three games takes the match.

The bracket is split into two halves. Top Esports, Invictus Gaming, Gen.G and LYON sit in one half, and Dplus KIA, Bilibili Gaming, Karmine Corp and T1 in the other, according to GameDaily. The semifinals follow Strafe's schedule: the winners of the first two quarterfinals meet on November 7, and the winners of the other two on November 8. In the half that contains Karmine Corp, the winner of its series with T1 will face the winner of Dplus KIA against Bilibili Gaming on November 8.

What comes next

The quarterfinals and semifinals are played at the Credit Union of Texas Event Center in Allen, Texas, according to Strafe. They start at 5 PM Eastern time, which is 11 PM in Central Europe and 7 AM the next morning in Korea, the outlet listed. The Grand Final moves to the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, on November 14, with a start time of 2 PM Eastern.

The stakes are set by the event's prize pool. The Red Bull guide published on October 13 said the pool is once again US$5 million, with the champion receiving 20 per cent, or US$1 million. That is the only prize figure for the title that appears in the sources used here, and the same guide did not give a full placement table. The consolation payments reported by GosuGamers, US$175,000 for ninth to eleventh place and US$125,000 for 12th to 14th, show how the money is spread among the teams that did not reach the quarterfinals.

For Karmine Corp, the next date is Friday, November 6, against T1, a team that finished 3-1 and reached the quarterfinals on October 28 with a 2-0 win over Movistar KOI. Karmine Corp will arrive after a week that went from the edge of elimination to the knockouts. Gen.G, for its part, meets a LYON team that took a game from it on October 25. For the eight teams, the Swiss Stage record no longer counts: from November 3, each series is a fresh best-of-five, and one defeat ends the event.

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