The race for the playoffs in America got that little bit tighter after Cloud 9 annihilated their former team-mates in Flyquest.
Team Solomid and Immortals are tied for first place in the North American LCS with just one week of games left to go. Immortals suffered their fourth loss of the split against Dignitas on Saturday night, while TSM took advantage with wins over Flyquest and Envy. Counter Logic Gaming slipped into third thanks to a surprise defeat at the hands of Phoenix 1. Only two wins separate first from fourth going into the last week of the split, with Cloud 9 still in the running despite a below-par season for them.
Cloud 9 tied Dignitas for fourth place by beating their alumni team, Flyquest. But it was former-C9 support, Lemonnation, who secured first blood and a good start for his team. The early stages of the game were bloody, with Flyquest taking a 7-4 kill lead in under 10 minutes. First tower gold followed soon after and Flyquest were up by over 2000 gold. The kills kept on coming, but with Jensen’s Synda picking up the majority of C9’s, things were starting to look dicy for Flyquest. The game turned in C9’s favour around the 20-minute mark when a scrappy fight broke out in the middle lane, resulting in three kills for two, a mid lane tower, and a thousand gold lead. C9’s superior map play started to tell as their exploded off the back of consecutive tower kills. A Baron followed soon for Cloud 9 and against an 11/1/5 Syndra, Flyquest were never going to stop their nexus from falling.
Jensen was on Leblanc for game two and he started where he left off in game one. An early gank from Contractz’s Rek’Sai got first blood for Jensen - an advantage the Dane milked heavily. This time, the teams were nowhere near the more-than-a-kill-per-minute frag fest of game one, and Cloud 9 dictated the pace from start to finish.Contractz and Jensen combined for five kills in the opening 10 minutes, putting their team up by 3k gold before any towers had fallen. Cloud 9 had 11 kills before Flyquest even got their first. Though the shutdown gold from 7/0/1 Jensen was plentiful it wasn’t nearly enough to close the huge gold deficit. Cloud 9 took down the Baron a couple of minutes after its spawn, and put their opponents out of their misery in under 25 minutes. Not before Jensen picked up his 14th kill, however, making it 25 for the series.
With two games left per team, the final standings are still up in the air. Immortals look to have the easiest fixtures, as they face Echo Fox and Envy in a bid to secure top spot. Crucially, TSM and CLG face one another on the last day of the season in a match which could decide second place, depending on results earlier in the weekend. CLG have the most difficult fixtures on paper, as they face a Dignitas team who have thrived on upsetting teams above them in the table. Suffice to say, the the final week of the LCS will be an exciting one.
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