Top 20 LoL streaks in esports history: 20-11 (Part 1 of 2)
With more than three years of League of Legends history in the books and now spanning all the significant esports regions, there have been lots of impressive runs of wins by the great and the good teams of their eras. In this two part series I'll count down the 20 most impressive streaks in LoL history. A small clarification I should add is that in general I've only looked streaks based purely on consecutive wins and such, other impressive feats like always placing top four have not been taken into consideration for this list.
Top 20 LoL streaks in esports history
Part 1: 20-11
20. ahq e-Sports Club's 16 game win streak online to open the 2013 GPL Summer season
TPA's dominance over SEA has not been unbroken. After their team began to fall apart, both in terms of results and players, other teams rose up. Those included sister team TPS, who had received the gift of former TPA Support Mistake, and also ahq e-Sports Club. Beginning the Summer season of GPL, ahq managed to put together a 16 game consecutive online win streak against the best competition SEA had to offer. Aside from the sheer quantity of wins, what made this impressive was that much of it came while the majority of the TPA World Championship line-up was still intact or largely intact.
19. Taipei Assassins's 21 game win streak online in the 2013 GPL Spring season
Before TPA's best era came to a close, they took their late 2012 form into early 2013 and put together a truly monstrous run of dominance in GPL Spring. Obviously people will wonder just how competitive the region could have been and will say that some of these wins might have been like facing Challenger level opposition in NA, but to simply win 21 games in a row is pretty unreal. I don't usually count online wins as of being of much significance, but simply not to ever make a fatal enough mistake to lose a game in that many is a special feat of accomplishment.
18. Curse's 8:0 start to the 2013 LCS NA Spring split
It's worth remembering that Curse were one of the teams who had to qualify for the first LCS split along with all the amateur and second tier sides. While TSM, Dignitas and CLG had earned automatic LCS spots due to placing top three at the S2 Regional, Curse had to go through the nerve-wracking offline qualifier in early 2013, knowing if they failed to make it in then some of their careers were likely over. Upon making it into the league, they were expected to be one of the big four, with the three aforementioned teams, but people would have looked to TSM or CLG to be leading the pack.
It came as a great surprise when Curse were able to start the first ever split off with eight straight wins. One knock on this streak is that of all the LCS streaks listed, this one is against by far the worst competition. Curse had a schedule which saw them facing GGU and coL twice each during this time period, when those were two of the worst teams in the league, as well as having a game against MRN. They did beat Dignitas and CLG once, which is noteworthy, but the quality of the run was not up to the standard of some of most of the better streaks on this list.
To begin the first ever LCS split with such a run was impressive though, as teams adapted to the new format and Curse were the first to fully find their feet and get a running start.
17. Alliance's 8 game win streak in the 2014 LCS EU Spring split
The Alliance which began the Spring split this year was supposed to be a potential contender, loaded with names who had all at some point in time been considered one of the best at their position. When the team took an immediate nosedive and hovered around the bottom of the league, most wrote them off and said their flaws would ensure they could never be the great team their potential had seemingly hinted at. Instead, Alliance gradually began to find their way as the split went on.
That process of getting it together culminated in a stellar eight win streak towards the end of the split. During this time, Alliance were able to beat ROCCAT and Gambit twice, both teams towards the top of the leaderboard, as well as the SK line-up which ended up placing first at the end of the regular portion of the split. This run alone turned around the narrative of the latter part of Froggen's career, as he went from an often criticised player to the league MVP.
16. fnatic's 8 game win streak in the 2013 LCS EU Spring split
From the fourth game of week 4 of the 2013 LCS Spring split to the first game of week 8, fnatic were unbeatable. They had come into the split with some questions surrounding them, having had to remove rising star ADC Rekkles from their line-up due to age restrictions from Riot. With YellOwStaR still integrating himself into the team, one might have expected them to take a while to adjust. Indeed, they were not quite the force they had been before when the split begin, but four weeks in they really got it rolling.
Over this run, fnatic were able to beat six of the seven teams in the league, including SK twice and Gambit once.
15. Gambit's 8 game win streak in the 2013 LCS EU Spring split
fnatic weren't the only ones to tear up the first European split of LCS. Before their run, it was Gambit who racked up eight straight. From the beginning of week 2 to the last game of week 4, Gambit were the kings of Europe and it seemed as though little had changed from their Moscow Five days of old, always on top of the EU competition. Just like fnatic, they were able to beat six of the seven teams in the league.
An interesting piece of trivia, is that the Gambit run was ended with a loss to fnatic and fnatic's run from there on out would eventually be ended by a loss to Gambit. At the time, those two teams stood above all the others in the league.
14. fnatic's 7 game IEM Season VI Global Challenge New York undefeated run
After fnatic had surprisingly won the Season 1 Championship, they'd then finished third at IEM VI Cologne two months later. For the elite NA teams who had considered themselves the best going into the S1 finals, it seemed as if fnatic had been good for one event but then come back down to Earth. In Cologne they lost to TSM in the semi-final and it was CLG vs. TSM, an All-NA affair, in the final. Just under two months after that, though, fnatic proved they were one of the world's very best teams.
At October's IEM VI New York, on American soil, Shushei and xPeke's guys went an undefeat 7:0 to win the tournament title. Even more compelling, was that their run included wins over TSM, CLG and Dignitas, three of the four best NA teams at the time, in the group stage. In the playoffs they defeated Sypher and SK without losses, demonstrating their dominance over Europe's best as well. In this moment, they could realistically have laid claim to being the best team in the world.
13. fnatic's 7 game win streak to open the 2014 LCS EU Spring split
LCS Spring for 2014 saw the first split in which fnatic could use Rekkles, the youngster having been sat out the previous two splits due to not yet being 17 years of age. Despite being able to add such an obvious talent, the split began with question marks over xPeke and company. They had won the previous two splits without Rekkles and then, Puszu, their stand-in from part way through the Summer split of 2013, had then been a part of their run to top four at the Season 3 World Championship.
After the S3WC, they had added Rekkles and gotten wrecked by Gambit in the final of IEM Cologne and beaten 2:0 by Cloud 9 in the Battle of the Atlantic exhibition series. Fans were openly pondering if the team should not have kept Puszu and risked letting Rekkles go to another team.
Those doubts were fairly quickly dispatched with as the Spring split began, with fnatic beating all seven of the other LCS teams in a row. Even more crucially, their bot lane looked to be at another level from any of the others in Europe at that time.
12. Dignitas' 10 game win streak in the 2013 LCS NA Spring split
Aside from Curse, the other team to light up the Spring split during the regular portion was Dignitas. scarra's men not only won 10 in a row, two more than Curse had managed, but they also beat more high quality opposition. Their run included wins over TSM, Crs and CLG. They also beat Vulcun, who would finish fifth in the regular portion of the split, twice. This was a period where the meta seemed to perfectly fit Dignitas and would see scarra manage to be sent to All-Stars as the representative of NA in the Mid lane.
Dignitas held their form until near the end of the split, only to see key champion nerfs send then spiralling down and out of the season in 5th-6th. Despite that, their win streak was the longest recorded in NA for that split.
11. Taipei Assassins's 26 game win streak in the 2012 GPL Season 1
If the SEA records other mentioned here were impressive, then this one really is spectacular. Starting out almost three months before they won the S2 World Championship, TPA strung together an incredible 26 games in a row in GPL. From the second game of round 9 through to the second game of the offline Grand Final, TPA could not be beaten. Every single team in the region fell to them multiple times as they went on their murderous rampage through the online competition and then into the offline final.
In part two of this series, which will be released tomorrow, we'll look at the top 10 LoL streaks in esports history. Teams like SK Telecom T1, Team SoloMid, World Elite and Cloud 9 all enter the list in that part.
Photo credit: Riot Games, fnatic, Garena
