I am still screaming with excitement my team made it to quarter finals GO Cloud 9 !!!!! Once again two years in a row North America's last hope. We go up against Samsung Galaxy which will be a slug fest. Both teams have played very well in the world's tournament. So here's to C9 to break the curse from getting knocked out by Korea.
As for TSM they choked at worlds. I don't know what it is with their organization. They CAN make it to world's they just lack improvising on the fly or get locked into playing META picks which majority of teams at world's have fine tuned counter playing against. They need to go more with comfort picking wombo combos. I seen a few instances where they hovered over a few Champs they were extremely good with only to switch off to a META pick.
TSM needs to focus and perform better in international tournaments ether that or Reginald needs to grow his eye brows back.
Responding to an old post I know, but TSM's problem isnt entirely within themselves. The biggest factor is in the region it self. When 2-3 organizations can consistently dominate the region but can never show up at worlds their is a problem in that region entirely.
And the problem is, is that there is not enough competitive play from all the teams. Unless it goes full China clown fiesta , generally its the top 4 teams fighting with each other and the bottom 6 teams fighting to not get relegated and seeing how many games they can take off the top 4.
TSM worked really hard for season 6, and it showed for the summer split. However none of the other teams worked as hard as TSM so the ceiling wasnt raised for the region, so the only that came of that is just TSM reaching a better performance(ceiling) and showing up against all the other teams in that region. When they came to worlds,it was an entirely different and higher ceiling that they just werent prepared for outside of scrims.
Which is another point, TSM is said to "try-hard" during scrims meaning they play to win. So teams know most of their strats and can base their own strats against them rather than TSM finding weaknesses or strengths of the other team. In other words, they reveal too much. At least that was some of the talk from Korean camps, that Monte also mentioned hearing.
Im all for picking good champs or champs good against meta picks, but if you ask pros, coaches, analysts , they will all tell you, if you dont pick the meta champs, "you're bad" or you wont be able to play at a competitive level. Which I find and ironic, and if you pick champs that arent meta but do really well, its either a "new" meta or "cheese" pick, so go figure.
Better international performances requires more international experience which requires more international games which is on Riot's side of the table.
Improving one team wont make us look good at worlds, only through all the teams(the region as a whole)improving together can we produce a good showing at worlds.