The world of electronic sports was in for a surprise earlier this month; fans of the League of Legends Championship (LCS) everywhere received quite a shock from the result of this year’s LCS World finale. On Saturday, Nov. 4, 2017, the reigning world champions, team SK Telecom T1 (SKT), were beaten in a best of five match to team Samsung Galaxy (SSG). SSG not only beat SKT, but they won 3-0. After only three games, SSG came up on top and became the new world champions, dethroning SKT after being the champions for the last two years in a row.

SSG played amazingly for all three games. The first game, they had full control over everything, from the beginning to the end they had SKT in control. However, the second game started out a bit slower; SKT put SSG behind a bit and got a good lead, but SSG managed to start fights that SKT were unprepared for. SSG took advantage of SKT’s mistakes, bringing them their second win of the finals. In the last game, SKT started fighting back. They gained a huge lead over SSG and the game looked in favor of SKT, but in the very last moments they lost it. In a game where getting gold from kills and objectives gives you everything, SKT had 9 kills over SSG and a ten thousand gold lead (most games have each player ending with around 10k-15k gold). SSG managed to close that gap, winning key fights. SSG won in the end by killing SKT’s best player.

SKT is the only team to have won the championship three times, and are known very well for winning all times with their key player, Faker. Faker has been considered the best player in the world by most if not all players who know who he is. This year, Ruler, a player for SSG, was considered to be the MVP of the team. During the finals, he was playing perfectly, winning fights for the team, and he even defeated Faker in the last fight of the third game, leading directly into the win for SSG. Ruler was a rookie last year, as it was his first year going into the LCS. After only one year, he managed to be the MVP of the finals.

Last year, team SKT faced against SSG for the finals and ended up beating them 3-2. For SSG to come back from the unfortunate defeat, to beat the number one player in the world in the finals with a score of 3-0 was unpredictable. The analyst desk had three of the analysts state some of their predictions for the finals match. All but one analyst predicted that the games would end up being 3-2 in favor of SKT. The single analyst believed that it would be SSG coming out on top.

“You know, everytime we’re in this spot, where there is SKT T1 in the grand final, we tell you a familiar story, and by you I mean the viewers, of a team who started very vulnerable in the group stages [this] Korean team, they had to adapt, but by the time they hit the knockout stage, they started steamrolling the competition and were very quickly frontrunners for the Summoner’s Cup and I think we have that ‘sleeping giant’ in the final, but to me, for once, it’s not SK Telecom T1. I actually think that Samsung Galaxy with their obliteration of Longzhu Gaming and then backing it up by denying late game teamfights from Team WE are gonna be good enough, even with Faker playing amazing, even with the clutch nature of SKT. I think Samsung is gonna take it,” says Riot Games’ official analyst, Christopher “Papasmithy” Smith, before the finals began.

After the loss, Faker was clearly demoralized, having his head down on his keyboard and almost didn’t get up to give a handshake to the members of SSG. Faker has won every single world championship he has played in and this was his first time ever not winning the finals. Each year the crowd and stadium has grown for the finals. This years finals took place at Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing with a crowd of 80,000 people, the largest crowd to date, and Faker lost in front of the biggest crowd he has seen yet. His first win was in 2013, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, in front of a crowd of 21,000 people and that was the same location for their last win, so it was four times higher than it ever had been in the past.