MKOI Becomes the Third Team to Waste a 2-0 Swiss Start
MKOI are out of the League of Legends World Championship, and the way they went is now the story. The team opened the Swiss stage with two straight wins, needed one more victory in any of the following rounds to reach the quarterfinals, and lost three times in a row instead. Their exit came in the win-or-go-home round against KC, leaving a 2-3 record and a place in an unwanted piece of history.
The Swiss format, introduced at Worlds in 2023, lets teams advance at three wins and fall at three losses. Going 2-0 means a team is one best-of-three away from the knockout stage. Since the format arrived, only three teams have started 2-0 and finished 2-3, and MKOI are the third.
The first was G2 in 2023. The European side beat DK and WBG to open, then lost to GEN, NRG and BLG in succession. Last year it was DK’s turn: wins over FNC and FLY put the Korean team at 2-0, before losses to LNG, TES and WBG sent them home. The pattern is consistent — early Swiss wins can come against teams that later find their level, and the bracket only gets harder from 2-0.
For KC, the script is the opposite. The team came through the play-in stage, kept surviving the Swiss rounds, and beat MKOI in the deciding match to reach the quarterfinals for the first time in the organisation’s history. A play-in team making the last eight is the kind of run the Swiss format was supposed to make possible.
Six of the eight quarterfinal places are now filled. LCK has three teams — DK, GEN and T1 — while LPL has two in iG and TES, and LEC has one in KC. GEN and DK are the only teams through unbeaten at 3-0. T1, iG and TES each came through a fourth-round best-of-three, and KC took the long road from the play-in.
The last two spots will be decided in the early hours of November 1. LYON face LOS at 4am, and BLG meet HLE at 7am. The second match carries the most weight for the two big regions: if BLG win, the LPL will have three teams in the knockout stage; if HLE win, the LCK will have four.
That is the pressure BLG carry into the series. The Chinese side slipped to 2-2 in the Swiss stage and now face a Korean team in a single best-of-three for a quarterfinal place. The outcome will shape how the bracket looks and how the two regions’ strengths are read going into the knockout rounds.
The Swiss stage has already delivered its usual mix of collapses and surges. MKOI’s 2-0 start now joins G2’s and DK’s as a cautionary tale, while KC’s run from the play-in shows the format rewards teams that improve as the tournament goes on. The final two places will decide which region ends the Swiss stage with the deeper field.