Esports|League of Legends|DRX — The 3-2 Worlds Final at Chase Center

Inside Chase Center on November 5, 2022, DRX and T1 sat on opposite sides of the League of Legends World Championship stage with one best-of-five series left to decide the season. The arena’s own event record scheduled the final for 5 p.m. Pacific time, confirming that this was an in-person match in San Francisco rather than an online round attached to the city by convention. League of Legends places two teams of five on a map called Summoner’s Rift, where each player controls a champion and the shared objective is to destroy the opposing Nexus. At Worlds, each completed game supplies one series win; the first team to three game wins takes the title, regardless of kill totals. Riot Games ran the publisher-sanctioned tournament on the Windows PC version and designated patch 12.18 as the Worlds patch. DRX started Hwang “Kingen” Seong-hoon in the top lane, Hong “Pyosik” Chang-hyeon in the jungle, Kim “Zeka” Geon-woo in mid, Kim “Deft” Hyuk-kyu as bot carry, and Cho “BeryL” Geon-hee at support. T1 answered with Choi “Zeus” Woo-je, Mun “Oner” Hyeon-jun, Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok, Lee “Gumayusi” Min-hyeong, and Ryu “Keria” Min-seok in the same five roles. Neither side substituted during the final, so the 3–2 result belongs to these ten starters rather than to an organization’s season-long roster. T1 won the opening game, DRX equalized, and T1 moved ahead again in game three. DRX then won game four and the deciding fifth game, turning two separate one-game deficits into a championship without the shorthand of a reverse sweep. The final game lasted a little more than forty-two minutes. DRX’s Nexus remained standing after T1’s last attempt to reach it, and DRX closed the game for a 3–2 series victory; top laner Kingen was named Finals MVP. The result completed a route that had begun in the Play-In stage, making DRX the first team to enter Worlds through Play-Ins and finish as champion. It also gave the organization its first League of Legends world title, while T1’s defeat came in the club’s first Worlds final appearance since 2017. Chase Center still occupies 1 Warriors Way in San Francisco’s Mission Bay district. The cover shows the arena’s east exterior in 2019, not the match or its stage, but it identifies the physical building where DRX’s month-long tournament ended. Sources: LoL Esports venue announcement (https://lolesports.com/en-US/news/riot-games-reveals-multi-city-tour-across-north-america-for-2022-league-of-legends-world-championship); Worlds patch record (https://lolesports.com/en-US/news/champions-queue-returns-for-worlds-2022); official Finals VOD (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzsCRtzIhDE); Chase Center event archive (https://chasecenter.com/news/league-of-legends-world-championship-finals-primer-20221105/); San Francisco Chronicle (https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/league-of-legends-world-championship-17563311.php); Agence France-Presse via Voice of America (https://www.voanews.com/a/south-korea-s-drx-crowned-league-of-legends-world-champions-/6822333.html). Photo: Tony Wasserman, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chase_Center_-_East_Side_-_San_Francisco.jpg).