Worlds is a very Korean affair with 36 of 91 players on home turf

The game is on at the 2023 League of Legends (LoL) World Championship. The seeded round robin Swiss Stage began Thursday at KBS Arena. More than a third of the competitors left in this year's Worlds are Korean — 36 of the remaining 91 players

Five members of Korea's T1 pose during a media day ahead of the Swiss Stage opener at LoL Park in central Seoul on Tuesday. [RIOT GAMES]

The game is on at the 2023 League of Legends (LoL) World Championship. The seeded round robin Swiss Stage began on Thursday at KBS Arena in western Seoul.

Korea is already dominating the bracket, with the most players across the 16 teams left. More than a third of the competitors left in this year's Worlds are Korean — 36 of the remaining 91 registered players — but not all of them are playing for a Korean team.

Korea has four squads in this year's competition, alongside four Chinese-owned teams, three from the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region and three North American teams who directly qualified for the Swiss Stage following their regional championship finishes during the regular season.

Two teams — Vietnam’s GAM Esports and Swiss-owned Team BDS — joined the 14 over the weekend, having qualified from the Play-In Stage, essentially a preliminary, that ended Sunday. Twelve of those 16 have at least one Korean player on their roster.

There's the four Korean-owned teams: T1, Gen.G, KT Rolster and Dplus KIA. All of their players are Korean.

And then there's China’s JD Gaming, LNG Esports and Weibo Gaming; EMEA’s Fnatic and MAD Lions and North America’s NRG, Cloud9 and Team Liquid who have at least one player from Korea.

Chinese-owned JD Gaming's Park ″Ruler″ Jae-hyuk, who was part of the Korean gold medal winning team at the Hangzhou Asisan Games in September, gives an interview while members of Korea's Gen.G watch at LoL Park in central Seoul on Monday. [RIOT GAMES]

Following Korea, China is the second-most represented country, with 18 players across the four Chinese teams. Unlike Korea, no players from China are competing with a team from a country that isn’t their own.

It’s the third time in Worlds history that the tournament has come to Korea, which co-hosted with Singapore and Taipei in 2014 and became the sole host in 2018. This year, the winner walks away with a guaranteed $445,000 — 20 percent of the $2,225,000 purse.

Teams were paired with squads from different regions for their opening matches on Thursday but it’s almost inevitable that teams from the same region will end up on opposite sides of the screen.

Indeed, friends have already become foes. In their first Swiss Stage match on Thursday, fan favorite Korea’s T1 faced North America’s Team Liquid (TL), where Park "Summit" Woo-tae and Hong "Pyosik" Chang-hyeon made up two of the five-person squad.

It’s a friendship that’s already been tested, as Pyosik, then with DRX, defeated T1 in the final round of last year’s Worlds.

But there didn’t seem to be any bad blood between former teammates TL’s Pyosik and T1’s Ryu "Keria" Min-seok, who both played for Korean team DRX and were seen chumming it up earlier in the week in posts to Instagram and X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

All members of Korea’s gold-medal winning team at the Hangzhou Asian Games in September are at Worlds. Along with Keria, Team Korea's Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok and Choi “Zeus” Woo-je are members of T1, while Jeong "Chovy" Ji-hoon plays for Gen.G.

Fellow Asian Games teammates Seo “Kanavi” Jin-hyeok and Park “Ruler” Jae-hyeok are on contracts with China’s JD Gaming.

In the Swiss Stage, it’s three strikes and you’re out. Teams are pitted against others based on their win-loss records, and the two unlucky squads to take three straight losses will be the next ones cut. Four more teams will be eliminated before the next phase, the knockout round in Busan.

All of the Play-In losers have already secured their consolation bags, with 17th- and 18th-place each taking home $38,937.50, the 19th- and 20th-place taking $33,375 and the bottom two each with $22,250.

BY MARY YANG [mary.yang@joongang.co.kr]