The LEC Upper Semifinals Are in Madrid on Saturday and the Season Does Not End Until Nice on the Twentieth
Europe's summer playoffs are split across three cities in three weeks, and the top three finishers go to Worlds.
The LEC summer playoffs open on Saturday with the upper bracket semifinals in Madrid, and the upper final follows on Sunday in the same building.
After that the tournament moves. The lower bracket rounds are in Berlin on the eleventh and twelfth, then in Nice on the eighteenth and nineteenth, and the final is in Nice on the twentieth. Three cities, three weekends, one bracket.
Splitting a playoff across venues is a touring model rather than a tournament model, and it exists because the LEC has an arena problem: Berlin's studio is small, a real arena is expensive, and filling one for a semifinal is a different proposition from filling one for a final. Moving the event lets each city host the round it can sell.
The top three finishers qualify for the World Championship. Karmine Corp went into the playoffs at nine and zero in the summer split, Team Vitality at seven and two, and G2 Esports at six and three. G2 won the spring split by beating Karmine Corp in the final, which is the result the rest of the bracket has been arranged around ever since.
The summer split itself ran from the twenty-fourth of July to the twentieth of September under the same single round-robin of best-of-threes the spring used, with the top six advancing. That is a short regular season by any standard, and it puts almost all of the weight on three weekends in September.
Nobody in the LEC has won a World Championship. The region has reached one final since 2019.