Riot Korea set to host an LCK/LPL online tournament
Recent reports unveiled Riot Korea are planning on hosting an online League of Legends tournament, which will feature teams from League of Legends Champions Korea (LCK) and Pro League (LPL).
The LCK-LPL event is said to take place sometime in the upcoming weeks, ahead of the summer splits in both Asian leagues and will act as a replacement for this year's Mid-Season Invitational, which got cancelled last month due to the growing fear of COVID-19 pandemic.
The ins and outs of the upcoming event are still a mystery, seeing how there have been no news regarding the format, schedule and participants. However, according to Kenzi, who was the first to bring the information about the event to light, all the details about the tournament should become available sometime next week.
"Ahead of the summer season, an online event match will be held involving the LCK team and the LPL team," said Kenzi.
"Riot Games prepared for the event after the spring season."
The first to come up with the idea of an international tournament was Joe Marsh, CEO of T1, who talked about the possibility of hosting a friendly match between LPL and LCK sometime in May. In his Twitter post, he called out T1, Gen.G, DragonX, FunPlus Phoenix, Top Esports and JD Gaming – six of the strongest Asian LoL teams to "hang out online".
The concept quickly gained traction amongst the League fans, who did not hesitate to show their support for the idea, while most teams gave positive answers.
Some fans have already started to speculate the tournament will resemble Rift-Rivals, where LCK and LPL teams will go head-to-head to determine which region has the right to call themselves the strongest Asian LoL region although nothing is confirmed yet. Having said that, if the upcoming tournament will use the same format as the Rift Rivals, there is a question about what will happen with the third slot. In the previous iterations of Rift Rivals, LCK and LPL were joined by League of Legends Master Series (LMS) and Vietnam Championship Series (VCS), which merged into Pacific Championship Series (PCS) at the start of this season and since PCS was not mentioned so far, there is a possibility the upcoming tournament will only feature Chinese and Korean LoL teams.
It's worth noting, however, that Kenzi explicitly specified that Riot Games' idea behind the exhibition tournament will be "different from the competition proposed by Joe Marsh" and that more information is expected to be officially announced next week.
“Due to the cancellation of the MSI, the offseason will be for about two months. We are preparing a temporary competition," said Riot Korea.
"Not many things have been decided yet, but details and schedules will be announced later on. We hope this event will be a great present for the fans who are struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic.”
No matter how Riot Korea decided to approach the competition, it's still nice to see they're doing their best to provide LoL fans with some international competition that was taken away from the community since MSI was postponed, meanwhile, Rift Rivals was outright cancelled.
