| Prefer us on Google — see Tips.gg in Top Stories & Discover | Add on Google |
Nineteen teams, three cities, a four-team Bo5 Play-In and a 16-team Swiss Stage that feeds an eight-team knockout bracket. Gen.G sits atop the markets, roughly a third to win it all on Polymarket, after finishing first in the LCK regular season at 19-7 and beating Hanwha Life 3-1 in the LCK Grand Final. Nobody is arguing they don’t deserve the favorite’s tag. But Patch 26.20, the final balance patch before Worlds, nerfed Ambessa, Ashe, Cassiopeia, K’Sante, and Yunara and buffed eleven other champions, and several of the teams below were shaped by what happened on stage this summer rather than by their reputations. We looked at five rosters that could outperform their seeds, for reasons ranging from recency bias to a confirmed salary-delay situation nobody wants to actually read about.
Anyone’s Legend
- Won LPL Split 3, beating Bilibili Gaming 3-1 in the Grand Final on September 13, 2026, after being swept 3-0 by BLG in the Upper Bracket Final
- Finished fourth in both Split 1 and Split 2, then lost 0-2 to Karmine Corp at the Esports World Cup
- Signed Chen “Breathe” Chen as top laner on July 22, 2026; Li “Flandre” Xuan-Jun, the 2021 World Champion, left on July 28
- Head coach Kwon “Helper” Yeong-jae, hired in December 2025, left after Split 1; the staff was rebuilt around Bigwei, Despa1r, and Teacherma
- Enters Worlds as the LPL’s first seed in Pool 1, with Tarzan, Shanks, Hope, and Kael still together
AL’s season looked like a mess for five months, then suddenly wasn’t. The Breathe signing gave the top side of the map a fresh start, and the rest of the core (Tarzan, the Split 1 season MVP, Shanks in mid, Hope and Kael in bot) stayed intact through all of it. That group also took T1 deep in the Worlds 2025 quarterfinals, so the ceiling isn’t theoretical. Nobody should credit a single coaching hire for the title run, though: Helper was long gone by Split 3, and the reasons behind the turnaround are less tidy than a one-line narrative.
Patch 26.20 doesn’t hurt them. Hextech Rocketbelt now has ability haste cut from 20 to 10 and an active that deals 135 damage (+15% AP), which rewards committed engages, and Lucian got a small attack damage growth buff after an earlier indirect nerf, while Ashe and Yunara were trimmed. None of those nerfs are dramatic, so treat this as a modest tailwind, not a revolution.
The market is not exactly ignoring AL, but it is cautious: one sportsbook had them around 10.0 to win outright and 5.0 to reach the final, well behind Gen.G at 3.25, despite AL having just beaten BLG for the LPL crown. The thing to watch is whether the Breathe-era lineup stays composed in the early Swiss rounds. As a Pool 1 team, AL will open against a Pool 4 side, which should be one of the softer draws available.
Dplus KIA
- Won Esports World Cup 2026, beating BLG 2-1, Gen.G 2-1, and sweeping Karmine Corp 3-0 in the Final
- Enters Worlds as the LCK’s fourth seed (Pool 4) despite the EWC title
- Confirmed a one-month salary delay on July 16, 2026, tied to an ongoing sale of the organization
- Under LCK rules, players can request contract termination after a full month of delayed pay
- Bot laner Shin “Smash” Geum-jae named EWC MVP with an 8.1 KDA, 69.8% kill participation, and 836 DPM across the Final
There’s a version of this story where DK looks like a franchise in freefall. There’s another version, the actual one, where a roster beat the best teams from China and Korea back to back for a $600,000 title while its organization was reportedly behind on pay. Smash, a former T1 Academy player who briefly filled in for Gumayusi in 2025 and was named LCK Rookie of the Year, carries much of this team’s damage, and Kai’Sa, a pick he used in the BLG series, dodges the patch’s bot lane nerfs entirely.
ShowMaker anchors the mid lane with the composure of someone who has already won Worlds once, and the young group around him (SiWoo, Lucid, Career) plays loosely. The caveat is real: EWC was played on patch 26.13, not 26.20, so the title run tells us about the roster, not about how it handles the Worlds meta. The off-stage situation also remains unresolved in the reports we could find, so organizational distraction is a genuine risk, not just a narrative.
Watch DK’s draft in their opening Bo1s. If Smash gets Kai’Sa or a comparable crit-scaler through, the damage profile that beat Gen.G and BLG in Paris is intact.
LYON
- Won LCS Lock-In and Spring Split in 2026, then finished third at MSI after sweeping G2 3-0 and pushing Hanwha Life to five games
- Entered Worlds as the LCS second seed, skipping Play-In entirely (Pool 3)
- Went 6-1 in LCS Summer regular season, lost 3-1 to Cloud9 in the playoffs, then beat Shopify Rebellion 3-1 and Cloud9 3-1 through the lower bracket
- Rebuilt in the offseason around Inspired, Berserker, and Isles, and carries a six-player roster after Castle joined in spring
- Finished Summer Split runner-up, losing 3-1 to Team Liquid in the Grand Final
North America gets mocked constantly on the international stage, but LYON already owns a 3-0 sweep of G2 and a five-game battle with Hanwha Life from MSI. That’s not a fluke run, that’s a team that knows how to execute under pressure. They also swept Team Liquid 3-0 in the Spring final before Liquid got revenge in Summer. Inspired in the jungle is the engine, a two-time LCS Player of the Year with a proactive style, and Berserker gives them a safety net in bot lane that most second seeds can’t match.
Patch 26.20 buffs junglers such as Kindred and Lillia, which could open more room for a resource-focused jungler, though how much Inspired leans on them is a draft question and not something the patch notes can answer. One open question is the top lane: with Castle added to the roster, check who actually starts before leaning on any top side narrative.
The betting angle is partly psychological. LYON plays every stage of this tournament on home continent soil, with crowds behind them in Los Angeles, Texas, and Brooklyn. That kind of support tends to matter most in close elimination maps. Watch their Swiss Stage draws against Eastern teams who haven’t yet adjusted to their pacing.
Invictus Gaming
- Won the Demacia Cup early in 2026, but finished fifth to sixth in LPL Split 1 and ninth to twelfth in Split 2, missing EWC qualification
- Reintegrated TheShy on June 15, 2026, after he stepped away in December 2025
- Finished third in LPL Split 3 following the roster settled around TheShy, Wei, Rookie, JiaQi, and Meiko
- Beat JD Gaming 3-1 in the Regional Finals lower bracket final on September 19 to claim China’s fourth Worlds spot
- Enters as a Pool 4 team, with Rookie contracted through 2027
This is the roster that makes the least sense to fade on pedigree alone. TheShy and Rookie led this organization to its 2018 world title, and Meiko is also a former World Champion. The problem is that the sample size for this exact lineup is short: the roster only settled by July, after a Split 2 collapse that happened before TheShy walked back into the starting lineup.
Since then, iG has looked like a different team. Wei was series MVP against JDG, closing the lower bracket final with a clutch Vi, and the squad finished third in a Split 3 that included both AL and BLG. That form earned them a Worlds berth the hard way, through the Regional Finals.
The caution is that one strong summer does not erase a ninth-to-twelfth finish in the spring. The thing to watch is whether the veteran core can handle the Swiss Stage’s early pressure, since a Pool 4 team will face a Pool 1 opponent right away.
Karmine Corp
- Went undefeated 9-0 in the LEC Summer regular season, then lost 3-1 to G2 in the Upper Bracket Final and 0-3 to Movistar KOI in the Lower Bracket Final, finishing third
- Reached the EWC 2026 Grand Final, beating AG.AL 2-0 and T1 2-1 before falling 0-3 to Dplus KIA
- Hired Head Coach Bok “Reapered” Han-gyu for the 2025/2026 offseason
- Added Busio and kyeahoo to a core retaining Canna, Yike, and Caliste
- Qualified as the LEC’s third seed by beating GIANTX 3-1 on September 5, which means the Play-In Stage and the club’s first-ever Worlds
KC’s biggest problem isn’t their roster, it’s their seeding. An undefeated regular season and an EWC Grand Final run, including a win over reigning champions T1, still left them as the LEC’s third seed, and the third seeds from the LEC, LCS, CBLOL, and LCP all begin in the Play-In. A disappointing playoff exit to MKOI, which the team itself would not call a success, is the reason they are there. Canna, the clear 2025 LEC MVP, and Yike in the jungle give them one of the stronger veteran cores in the West, and Caliste and Busio form a bot lane that was among the most heavily invested in the region.
The Play-In is a double-elimination Bo5 bracket, and KC open against Cloud9 on October 15, with C9 at around 2.41 at one sportsbook. The winner of the bracket faces one of the four Pool 1 teams (Gen.G, Anyone’s Legend, Team Liquid, or G2) in its first Swiss match, so even surviving carries a difficult next test. The upside is simple: if KC play to the level that beat T1 in Paris, the price on them once they reach Swiss should be more generous than the headline results suggest. Watch their Play-In scorelines; a clean 3-0 or 3-1 run through Los Angeles would say a lot about how well the roster recovered from the Summer playoffs.
Five teams, five different reasons the market might be too cautious. If we had to pick one, Anyone’s Legend looks like the best value on the board, a reigning LPL champion and Pool 1 seed with a relatively long price. Dplus KIA isn’t far behind given what they already did to Gen.G and BLG in Paris, though the patch difference and the off-stage uncertainty keep them from being an easy call. None of this is a guarantee, and a single Bo1 can undo any of these cases.