3 years in a row!

if you look at the individual players, I dont think i have seen anyone's strat-calling that's as impressive as hai's.

Cloud 9 and TSM both were pulling out the strategies. C9 with the Zed sneak up bot lane and TSM waiting in the jungle to flank the Baron'd up enemy team. Unfortunately, both of them had slight implementation hickups which cost the play, but both were incredibly sound in theory.

With Season 5's jungle changes, I think strategy will take a bigger role in how the games play out. It'll be interesting to see how games go when the team that thinks of the best strat wins.

There's a lot of things that goes into this. if you watch the worlds carefully, you will notice that American teams really didn't do THAT bad. we made huge improvements in the past year. we are playing on par with the chinese teams. if you look at the individual players, I dont think i have seen anyone's strat-calling that's as impressive as hai's. koreans had a head start in competitive moba games compares to the rest of the world. But we are really not that far behind them.

Taking away one game from particular chinese/korean teams =/ being on par with them. Winning BO3's and BO5's matter. Tho i agree that NA (C9) improved. EU on the other hand didn't improve at all.

I think this is the BIG BIG thing. Riot has basically handicapped NA teams before they even get to Worlds' by forcing fast paced tournaments with no BO5's or BO3's against top teams. The entire big amalgam of one off games spammed round robin style is completely different to how Worlds' was structured.

c9 DESTROYED SSB first game but couldn't carry it on cuz....they have no BO5 experience. They didn't know how to use that adavantage to push SSB harder and instead just tried to copy that strat again because that's what works in LCS since teams don't play against each other consecutively and aren't that well studied.