JD Gaming vs Rogue Prediction: LPL champion advances to Worlds semi-finals

The League of Legends World CyberSports Championship playoff stage kicks off on Thursday to Friday, October 20-21. JD Gaming and Rogue will face each other in the quarterfinals.

World Championship 2022 is the year's main tournament in the cybersports discipline League of Legends. The 2022 edition of the premier international LAN tournament takes place in the US and Mexico and features 24 teams from around the world. The tournament will run from September 29 to November 05, 2022, with a prize pool of $2,225,000.

China's strongest team confidently made it through the group stage at the end of the summer split. JD Gaming lost only once to Korean giants DAMWON Gaming and had to play a rematch for the first place, where the LPL champion managed to get revenge. If you look at all the Chinese teams in this Worlds 2022, JD Gaming looks the better team, even performing much more confidently than RNG.

But this squad only started to show such a game this year. The JD Gaming team in 2021 failed in every tournament they participated in. After a good year in 2020, the following year, the organization can boast only the LPL Spring Split and which was the 5-6th place, but the Summer Championship was the worst ever - 12th place, and past even the playoff stage and, of course, the World Championship was out of the question.

Before the start of the LPL Spring Split 2022, the team played in the Demacia Cup 2021 pre-season tournament and losing 4 out of 4 games to drop out without even making the playoffs. But the team succeeded in the spring split, finishing in 4th place in the standings. That's a pretty tough result if you look back on 2021.

The main transfer from the Spring squad was the move of Hope from EDward Gaming, the trainee of the World Champions. He also stayed in the team for the Summer Split. After a year's break, the Korean coach Homme, who led JD Gaming to Chinese championship medals in 2020 and a good result (5-6) at the 2020 World Cup, returned to the organization. Otherwise, new young blood came into the team, renewing almost all of last year's squad, including JD Gaming saying goodbye to the captain. This squad needed time for chemistry, which they got and are already showing results.

Team Rogue joined League of Legends in 2019, and this year's World Championship 2022 has already been the organization's most successful in its short history and sadly its last. In October, it was revealed that Rogue and KOI would merge before the 2023 season, making this Worlds the final tournament for the Rogue brand.

Before the 2022 season, Inspired and Hans sama left Rogue, with Malrang and Comp joining the team as reinforcements. In February this year, Rogue became the 4th team in history to finish the LEC split undefeated first half, convincingly beating G2 Esports and Excel Esports. Rogue finished the second half with 5-4 but took first place thanks to their strong start. In the playoffs, they lost in the grand final by a score of 0-3 to the G2 Esports team. In the 2022 summer season, they finished third with an 11-7 record, but thanks to victories over MAD Lions, Fnatic, and G2 Esports, they won their first-ever LEC title and earned a trip to the Worlds 2022 group stage as the first seed.

The European team lit up in the group stage, beating DRX and Top Esports teams once each. On the last game day of the groups, the Rogue team was lucky in some ways, as they lost their matches to the Koreans and Chinese. Only the failure of Top Esports in the match against outsiders GAM Esports allowed the European team not to fight for a place in the playoffs, and play a tiebreak for first place, which was lost to the DRX team.

For Rogue, this Worlds is the third in history, and never before has a European team made the playoffs. This historically cool event will be the end of it all; I can't believe the LEC champion can beat the LPL champion in a BO5 match.

These teams played each other in the group stage of the World Championship 2020, and then Chinese team JD Gaming was twice stronger in the BO1 format. 

We will likely only see three maps, so I suggest betting on JD Gaming to win with a handicap (-2.5) on the maps for 2.20.

The Total frags in the match will be Over 97.5 for 1.83.