Royal Never Give Up vs EDward Gaming: Two LPL champions in the battle for the Top 4 Worlds 2021

Saturday, October 23, will be the second day of play-offs for LoL’s premier tournament of the year, the World Championship 2021. Royal Never Give Up, and EDward Gaming will compete for the semi-finals.

The World Championship 2021 is the premier tournament in the eSports discipline, League of Legends. The 2021 edition of the premier international LAN tournament takes place in Iceland and features 22 teams from around the world. The tournament takes place from October 05 to November 06, 2021, and has a prize pool of $2,225,000.

Royal Never Give Up is a Chinese eSports organisation mainly known for its success in League of Legends. The team is owned by HUYA Inc., China’s leading gaming live streaming platform.

Ahead of the 2021 season, veteran team Xiaohu announced a move from mid to top, leading to one of the highest-ranked role changes in LoL. The boys from Royal Never Give Up won the LPL 2021 spring season, securing a trip to MSI 2021, where they won their first international title since 2018. Royal Never Give Up later qualified for Worlds 2021 by beating Team WE 3-0 in the LPL 2021 regional final.

At Worlds 2021, Royal Never Give Up started straight from the group stage. Group C was not the top group, but the RNG boys had to fight the Koreans from Hanwha Life Esports in an extra tiebreak match to win it. Judging by the group stage, these Chinese need to wake up immediately and remember their insanely cool game in the spring. Otherwise, Worlds 2021 will be over for them this Saturday.

EDward Gaming is a Chinese eSports organisation mainly known for their success in League of Legends.

The year 2021 saw the team return to the top of the LPL. In the spring of 2021, the boys finished 3rd in the Chinese championship, losing 2-3 to eventual champions Royal Never Give Up. There were no changes to the team between the two splits, and in the summer of 2021, they won the LPL Championship, defeating FunPlus Phoenix 3-1 in the final, winning the first LPL title since the summer split of 2017 and a direct invitation to Worlds 2021.

The group stage started well for the Chinese. They led Group B for a long time before losing two games on the final game day to the 100 Thieves and T1 teams and thereby missing out on 1st place in the group, which foreshadowed the possibility of a Chinese derby already in the first stage of the play-offs.

The bookmakers see this team as favourites to win the semi-finals, but it’s worth knowing that they won’t be able to surprise each other. The Chinese have seen and heard everything about each other throughout the LPL seasons. Therefore, it will be important to push the buttons competently, and in Iceland, both teams have problems with that.

Both teams don’t particularly impress me with their play. At Worlds 2021, teams from the LPL are always expected to do a little better than they consistently show. Looking at the top 8, we see only two Chinese squads that lost in the group stage to all regions. Either they didn’t wake up or something else... In the head-to-head encounter, RNG look more preferable to me. They played sluggishly in the previous stage, but the team of EDward Gaming, in general, allowed themselves some strange performance. Therefore my prediction for this quarterfinal series is RNG’s victory for odds 2.00.

The Chinese will please us with a full-fledged five-map battle, they are LPL representatives, and it will be a blow for them to drop into the top-8. We’ll give a good odds of 2.45 for Total Over 4.5 maps.