Bjergsen's Birthday

You fail to see that NA/EU are limiting themselves in actual Worlds Experience. Korea does a Best of 3. China plays 2 game matches. All of this results in MORE COMPETITIVE PLAYTIME. These two competitive styles offer DOUBLE or sometimes TRIPLE the games. Also, since they are back to back, they offer adaption to play-styles. Korean goes further to have multiple playoffs through their season.

1 Game Matches (played in EU/NA) lack this adaption and overall prevent NA/EU teams from growing from BEST of 3 and BEST of 5 matches that WORLDS is all about. (Group Stages are the only thing LCS format help in. After that then nothing. You cannot scrim for this, you can practice this very well.)

Another thing, use of individual champions aside (as this is a team game) and some regional metas favor some champions over others. The chinese and korean meta play is ridiculously better than EU/NA. You have EDG that can play Reactive Team Comps or Proactive Team Comps extremely well. GE Tigers are the same. While in the West, you have SK which can play a pretty good Proactive (engage comp) but flounder Reactive (poke, split push, late game comps) same could be said for TSM. Out of all of the Western teams CLG is the only one that has some semblance of diversity in their comps but they do not play each of these styles with the same proficiency as CN/KR.

I hope for the best for NA/EU teams in Worlds, but the fact of the matter is they are only slowly catching up with those asians (as you put it).

SHR was not a number 1 seed from China and not to mention they were one dimensional and did you not see the game before that where they got completely smashed? Yes they can take games off them, Alliance, Cloud 9, and Fnatic took games off Korean teams, but these are in best of 1's and the games are not back to back so they have time to plan the next game, in best of 5's NA/EU wouldn't stand a chance. OMG 3-0'd NJW, no western team would've been able to do that. If you're going by worlds, only NA teams took games of Chinese teams, no EU team took one.

So, when you say western teams are not threatened by Chinese teams you are narrowing it down to NA vs CN. Not all western teams are NA (as definded by regions EU/NA = Western, CN/KR/SEA = Eastern), but I will continue your conversation directing it specifically to NA vs CN:

#Worlds-2013 -Group Stage TSM: 2:0 LOSS to OMG (Did not Qualify for Bracket Stage) C9: Auto placed in Quarterfinals LOSS to Fnatic Vulcan: No Chinese Teams in that group > Did not qualify for Brackets

#AllStars-2014 -Group Stage C9 3-1 OMG 2-2

Granted C9 did awesomely in the Group stage: BEST OF 1 (No Adaption No Extended Experience) In the Semi-Finals- C9 vs OMG - 2:0 OMG. In this example. NA failed to prove they could do better in Best of 3 or higher competition which is once again what worlds is about. Group stages are fun an all but BEST of 1 shows NOTHING.

I was going to use IEM Championship here but, as C9 Qualified for Brackets then lost to Fnatic it does not contribute to the discussion.

#Worlds-2014 -Group Stage TSM: 1:1 in Group B vs SHRC LMQ (Yes they were an NA LCS quality Team) 1:1 in Group C vs OMG C9: Group D did not have a Chinese team.

--Bracket Stage: TSM and C9 both 3:1 loss to SSW/SSB OMG 3:0 NJWS (who C9 went 1:1 with)

In all of these examples, NA (c9 and TSM) only perform "decently" in Group Stage and this is a relatively new occurrence.

As I have mentioned previously, I hope NA/EU teams can become more competitive on the International Stage, but their performance comparatively is lower than HIGH TIER Chinese and Korean teams (with Koreans still above Chinese in most statistics).

As a side note, if you are going to fanboy over TSM and argue that NA > CN. Please be able to provide facts not hearsay or opinion delivered as facts. It is misleading.