Worlds 2026 Swiss Stage Opens With All Four LPL Teams Losing

The League of Legends World Championship Swiss Stage opened on Friday, October 23, in Allen, Texas, and every one of the four teams from China's LPL lost its first game, according to Dot Esports. The four teams from Korea's LCK all won, and Europe's LEC took two of its three opening games.

The Swiss Stage is the main-event group phase of Worlds, the annual world championship of League of Legends. Sixteen teams play it, and Friday's round was made of eight best-of-one games, so each result moved a team to 1-0 or to 0-1.

Dot Esports, October 23, 2026, for the results; regions as listed in its October 19 report on the Swiss Stage draw.

How the Swiss Stage works

A Swiss stage is a format in which no team is eliminated by a single loss and teams are paired by their current record. In this one, sixteen teams play until a team collects three wins, which sends it to the quarterfinals, or three losses, which eliminates it. Sports Kyunghyang, a Korean outlet, described the rule the same way before the stage began.

Riot Games, the game's publisher and the organizer of Worlds, sorted the sixteen teams into four seeding pools before Round 1. According to Dot Esports, Pool 1 played Pool 4 and Pool 2 played Pool 3, and teams from the same region could not meet in the first round. After Round 1 the restriction is lifted, but teams cannot face the same opponent twice. Winners are drawn against winners and losers against losers.

The stage runs from October 23 to October 31 at the Credit Union of Texas Event Center in Allen. The quarterfinal draw takes place on October 31, after the last Swiss games, and the knockout stage begins on November 3, as Dot Esports reported on October 19. Friday's games were all best-of-one, meaning a single game decides each match.

The field came from six regions. The LCK sent Gen.G, Hanwha Life Esports, Dplus KIA and T1. The LPL sent Invictus Gaming, Anyone's Legend, Top Esports and Bilibili Gaming. The LEC sent G2 Esports, Karmine Corp and Movistar KOI. North America's LCS sent Team Liquid Alienware and LYON, the LCP circuit sent CTBC Flying Oyster and Team Secret Whales, and Brazil's CBLOL sent LOS.

How the sixteen teams got there

One of the sixteen places was decided in the Play-In stage, a qualifier played before the main event. Karmine Corp advanced through it to take a Swiss berth, as Sports Kyunghyang reported. Dot Esports noted that Cloud9 failed to get through the Play-In, which left Team Liquid Alienware and LYON as the only two North American teams at the main event.

The seeding pools explain the pairings. According to Inven Global, Pool 1 held Gen.G, Team Liquid Alienware, G2 Esports and Anyone's Legend. Dot Esports' draw report lists these four as the first seeds of the LCK, LCS, LEC and LPL. Pool 2 held LOS, Team Secret Whales, Hanwha Life Esports and Bilibili Gaming. Pool 3 held Movistar KOI, LYON, T1 and Top Esports, and Pool 4 held Dplus KIA, Invictus Gaming, CTBC Flying Oyster and Karmine Corp. Pool 1 played Pool 4 in the opening round, and Pool 2 played Pool 3. The result was a day that cut against the seeding. Dplus KIA, Invictus Gaming, CTBC Flying Oyster and Karmine Corp, the four Pool 4 teams, went 3-1 in their games, with only Invictus Gaming losing. Pool 1, by contrast, went 1-3, with only Gen.G winning.

Round 1 results

The LPL's difficult day

The LPL arrived with four teams, among them Anyone's Legend, its top seed, and Bilibili Gaming, its second seed, and none of them won. Two of the losses came against Korean teams and two against European ones.

Gen.G, the LCK's top seed, beat Invictus Gaming. Dot Esports said Chovy on Akali and Canyon on Qiyana dominated the late teamfights for Gen.G. A teamfight is a large battle in which most or all players on the map fight at once.

Hanwha Life Esports then beat Top Esports. Dot Esports noted that Top Esports started Worlds without its main top laner, ZUIAN, with 369 playing in his place. The pairing carried some extra interest in Korea: Sports Kyunghyang had pointed out that Hanwha Life's jungler Seo Jin-hyeok played for Top Esports in 2025, and that Hanwha Life won this year's Mid-Season Invitational, the international tournament held earlier in the season.

The two upsets came from Europe. Movistar KOI beat Bilibili Gaming with Dot Esports crediting its bot lane and an Ezreal played by Supa for winning the lane. The bot lane is the part of the map where two players, a marksman and a support, play together. Karmine Corp beat Anyone's Legend, the LPL's top seed. Dot Esports singled out Karmine Corp's Canna, who was dominant on Jax and finished with a Quadra Kill, which is four opposing players eliminated in quick succession.

The Karmine Corp result had a history behind it. Sports Kyunghyang noted before the stage that Karmine Corp had beaten Anyone's Legend 2-0 in the quarterfinals of the Esports World Cup in July. Anyone's Legend had topped the LPL to become China's first seed at Worlds, while Karmine Corp had needed the Play-In stage to reach the Swiss Stage.

The LCK keeps its footing

The four LCK teams won all four of their games, though the games were not equally comfortable. Dplus KIA opened against G2 Esports, the LEC's first seed, and had to recover. Dot Esports reported that G2 led 7-0 in kills early, and that Dplus KIA came back and won after G2 lost a late skirmish. The two teams had met before: Sports Kyunghyang recalled that G2 won their 2023 Swiss opener, and that Dplus KIA beat G2 at the Esports World Cup in Paris in July.

T1, the defending world champion, beat LOS, the first seed from Brazil's CBLOL. Dot Esports said Faker and T1 won convincingly. T1 won Worlds in 2023, 2024 and 2025, according to Sports Kyunghyang, and T1 is chasing a fourth straight title. The same outlet counted six Worlds titles in total for T1.

Europe, North America and the Pacific

Europe finished with two wins and one loss. Alongside the wins by Movistar KOI and Karmine Corp, G2 Esports lost to Dplus KIA.

North America split its two games. LYON beat Team Secret Whales, with Berserker posting a 13-1-5 line on Ezreal, as Dot Esports reported. That line means 13 kills, 1 death and 5 assists. Team Liquid Alienware, North America's first seed, lost to CTBC Flying Oyster. Dot Esports said CTBC Flying Oyster denied Team Liquid Alienware objectives and scaling, meaning Team Liquid Alienware never reached the stage where its strength would have grown.

The LCP circuit also finished 1-1: CTBC Flying Oyster won and Team Secret Whales lost. Brazil's LOS lost its only game.

The Round 2 draw

The Round 2 draw was made after the last game of the day. All Round 2 games are also best-of-one and were set for Saturday, October 24. Because the regional restriction no longer applies, teams from the same region can meet.

Among the 1-0 teams, Dot Esports listed Dplus KIA against T1, CTBC Flying Oyster against Movistar KOI, Hanwha Life Esports against Gen.G, and LYON against Karmine Corp. That creates two all-Korean games, in which two LCK teams must meet and one will lose.

In seeding terms, the first of those Korean games pairs the LCK's third and fourth seeds, T1 and Dplus KIA, and the second pairs its first and second seeds, Gen.G and Hanwha Life Esports. The European games are between the LCP's second seed and the LEC's second seed, and between the LCS's second seed and the LEC's third.

Among the 0-1 teams, G2 Esports will face LOS, Invictus Gaming will face Team Secret Whales, Top Esports will face Anyone's Legend and Team Liquid Alienware will face Bilibili Gaming. The Top Esports and Anyone's Legend game has a certain result in one respect: two LPL teams that lost on Friday will meet, so one of them will be 0-2 by Saturday night.

A team that falls to 0-2 is one loss from elimination. A team at 2-0 is one win from the quarterfinals. That is why a single best-of-one in the second round matters more than its single-game format suggests.

A 0-2 record in a Swiss stage leaves a team one loss from the exit.

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