The Teams
North America- Team SoloMid (NA Champion)
- Counter Logic Gaming (NA 2nd Seed)
- Cloud9 (NA 3rd Seed)
Europe
- G2 Esports (EU Champion)
- H2k-Gaming (EU 2nd Seed)
- Splyce (EU 3rd Seed)
- ROX Tigers (LCK Champion)
- SK Telecom T1 (Korea 2nd Seed)
- Samsung Galaxy (Korea 3rd Seed)
China
- EDward Gaming (LPL Champion)
- Royal Never Give Up (Chinese 2nd Seed)
- I May (Chinese 3rd Seed)
Taiwan
- Flash Wolves (LMS Champion)
- ahq e-Sports Club (LMS 2nd Seed)
- INTZ e-Sports (Brazil)
- Albus NoX Luna (CIS)
The Groups
The groups themselves will be determined by live draw on Sep. 10 at 2 p.m. EST. The process for the draw, which will sort the teams into four groups of four teams, has been explained in great detail by Riot, but it essentially follows a few rules:- A group can’t have more than one team from the same region.
- The groups will pull teams from three different pools. Pool 1 has the top teams from NA, LCK, LPL and LMS, and one team will go into each group. Pool 3 has the third seeds from NA and EU as well as both International Wildcard teams and, again, each team will go into their own group. Pool 2 is everyone else, and each group will feature two of these teams.
- Each team will play the other teams in their group twice in a round-robin format.
- The top two teams from each group will advance to the knockout stage, where they will play in a randomized bracket. Seeding from group stage results will be used, so a group’s top team will play the second-place team from another group in the quarterfinals.