What Is And Where To Watch League Of Legends MSI

Greetings from the Sunshine State! Which is apparently what Florida is called even at nighttime. I'll be out here covering the League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational for the next few days so it's probably a good idea to explain a) what the Mid-Season Invitational is and b) when the various bits of it are happening in case you want to follow along.

The MSI sees the top teams from each of the major competitive regions in League of Legends [official site], plus a wildcard team, duke it out in the gap between the professional scene's Spring and Summer splits. It's kind of a mini version of Worlds (the game's major tournament) where there should be a whole bunch of world-class play and the winners will make off with $100,000.

Who's playing?

SK Telecom T1 (LCK - which is the Korean scene)
Edward Gaming (LPL - China's pro league)
Fnatic (European LCS)
Team SoloMid (NA LCS)
AHQ (LMS - Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau)
Beşiktaş (they're through from the wildcard tournament)

SKT and Edward Gaming are favourites for the top spots (I'm leaning towards an SKT win) but I'm keen to see how Fnatic hold up in the contest and also whether Beşiktaş, the wildcard team, can cause any upsets.

What's the haps?

There's a best-of-1 round robin group stage which is, like, 15 games before tiebreakers and gets spread over two days. That then gives way to a best-of-5 single elimination bracket stage featuring the remaining four teams.

The first match is Fnatic v Team SoloMid on Thursday at 4.30pm ET which is 9.30pm GMT. Given the number of matches being crammed in you'd be up til about 4 or 5am trying to watch in the UK so might be better to wait for the rebroadcast if you have to be functional that next morning. [Or you could leave it on in one window and the results of the UK election in the other. --Voting Ed].

I'm going to pop the Twitch stream here if you did want to catch it: