League of Legends OPL Finals Recap

Last Saturday the League of Legends OPL Grand Final took place and was shown in Hoyts Cinema’s around Australia and New Zealand. It was a pleasure to watch an incredibly well casted and presented Australian esports broadcast. I would like to give my congratulations to the broadcast and production team, you did an incredible job. A second congratulations goes to the Direwolves and their convincing 3-1 performance: best of luck at Worlds Play-In stage. In case you couldn’t catch the intense action of the OPL finals, at the bottom of the article is OPL’s full video.

I made an appearance at the Sydney show, hosted at Hoyts Broadway. Beside busting four sets of thundersticks the whole event was great. All seats in the cinema were full, the crowd was electric and would often chant and cheer vigorously (even if most of the time they chanted “TSM! TSM! TSM!”). Upon finding our seats, we were delighted to find a League of Legends goodie bag which included the following:

A League of Legends drawstring bag.
A League of Legends lanyard.
A stress ball-like red minion.
A code to unlock the champion Xin Zhao and his Dragon Slayer skin.
An OPL Logitech G640 mouse pad.

OPL Finals goodies.

The staff at Hoyts were nice although I feel they had no idea what was going on. I spoke to one of the girls working and I asked her how she felt about the League of Legends OPL finals being hosted here in the cinema. She replied with: “I have no idea what League of Legends is… All I was told is that there is going to be a lot of ‘LoLers’ in tonight”. Hopefully that was the first and last time that I will be referred to as a ‘LoLer’… Jokes aside, the whole event was great.

The matches were fairly quick and full of action. Match one went to the Direwolves very early on and by 10 minutes they already had three kills (four soon to follow) and a 2k gold lead. From the start the Direwolves were in control in every match except their only loss. Phantiks (Direwolves mid-laner) was on another level, he controlled the games from the mid lane and made sure that he engaged properly in every team fight. If you are looking for a mid lane masterclass, I would highly recommend watching the finals and focusing closely on Phantiks.

Phantiks was unstoppable!

The OPL is going to have a very competitive team in the Direwolves representing them at Worlds play-in stage. The Direwolves will make their way to Wuhan, China and face-off against some of the biggest names in League of Legends. I hope to see Riot and the OPL work together again soon and hopefully bring us something for Worlds.