Balls secures a Pentakill in unexpected win against Fnatic

The first Pentakill of Worlds 2015 belongs to Cloud9's top laner An "Balls" Le!

The accolade was earned in a nail-biting game which saw North America's third seed beat Europe's first seed Fnatic to take the top spot in Group B. Cloud9 is now 3-0, with Fnatic, Taiwan's ahq, and China's Invictus Gaming all tied in 2nd place with a 1-2 score.

"I didn't expect to get the Penta", Balls tells us. "I just saw 'Quadrakill' and then one person walking out and then I saw the Penta and I was like 'holy crap!' It was the best Penta, too, because we were able to end the game off of that. It was amazing!"

Fnatic was looking pretty strong up until that point, managing to drop Cloud9's top inhibitor. Not long after that, a team fight broke out at Fnatic's mid tower, which resulted in Balls getting a five-man dunk with Darius and streaming into their base to take the win. This is easily the most convincing Darius play we've seen so far this tournament, despite how often the champion has been picked throughout Worlds so far.

Why is this? "Darius is the most banned champion in Solo Queue right now. I think people are still learning to play [him]. He's a risky champion since he doesn't have a lot of mobility, so it's really hard to pull out a champion and play well with him when you can die easy to any gank if you don't play smart," Balls explains. "Also, blind picking a top lane champion is really risky because there's a lot of champions that people play that can maybe disrupt you, or counterpick you."

Says the guy who first picks Darius and takes the first Pentakill of the tournament. But if he's banned so much in Solo Queue, why are we seeing him so much at Worlds? And why is Mordekaiser being banned in almost every game instead? "I think people can deal with Darius better than Morde. Morde can impact the swing of the game, while Darius can get kited in team fights and you can build to play against him. People think you can't build to play against Morde, probably."

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Seung-hoon "Huni" Heo then proceeded to lock in Yasuo, who's not traditionally considered an appropriate counter for Darius. "I wasn't expecting the Yasuo pick," Balls told us. "I think [Huni] picked Yasuo into Darius for the team fight, just because they had Gragas and Orianna, who both synergise well with Yasuo. Orianna can ult and Yasuo can ult off that. I think they were looking past laning phase."

That Orianna pick on Fabian "Febiven" Diepstraten also allowed Nicolaj "Incarnati0n" Jensen to lock in one of his strongest champions, Azir. Even though Febiven is also renowned for his Azir play. Balls seemed perplexed. "I don't really know why they gave us Azir. Maybe because they had a counterpick against it, which was Orianna. I thought Febiven played pretty well into Azir, too. So I think that was their plan, Ori against Azir looking to get a good ultimate off and looking to win the game off that. But I guess it just didn't work out for them. It didn't phase [Incarnati0n] at all. He was just like, 'I got this.'"

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But Cloud9 aren't about to get complacent. They still see Fnatic as their strongest competitor in the Group, as Balls proceeded to explain. "I still think it's Fnatic over [Invictus Gaming] and ahq, but IG and ahq… I don't know how strong they are compared to each other. Their matches, it looks like they're pretty close. Anything can happen. It's really hard to tell. Whoever's playing the best that day. But definitely Fnatic over those two."

For now, however, all bets are off. All of the teams now have three days to practice solidly before they meet again on Summoner's Rift. Balls thinks that this will act as a big reset button, meaning absolutely anything could happen in Week 2. "Next week everything's going to restart and they might not be the weak teams they were before. It's going to be interesting."

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You can watch Cloud 9's rematch against Fnatic, along with their next games against ahq and Invictus Gaming, on Sunday 11th October, starting at the earlier time of 10am CEST / 1 AM PDT.