Pyosik heads home early as TL and Team BDS crash out of Swiss Stage

And then there were 14. It’s the end of the road for European squad Team BDS and North American Team Liquid (TL) at the 2023 League of Legends (LoL) World Championship in Korea.

European Team BDS loses 2-0 to Korea's Dplus KIA during a Swiss Stage match at KBS Arena in western Seoul on Monday. [RIOT GAMES]

And then there were 14. It’s the end of the road for European squad Team BDS and North American Team Liquid (TL) at the 2023 League of Legends (LoL) World Championship in Korea.

The two were booted from the bracket in the first cut of the round robin Swiss Stage on Monday.

Team BDS finished without a single Swiss Stage win, losing 2-0 to Korea’s Dplus KIA in their sudden-death, best-of-three match on Monday after going 1-0 against Chinese-owned JD Gaming and Spanish team MAD Lions in best-of-one’s.

TL lost 2-1 to Vietnam’s GAM Esports on Monday after earlier 1-0 defeats to Korea’s T1 and North American team NRG.

Gone from the tournament are a defending champion and an underdog story.

TL had on their lineup Hong “Pyosik” Chang-hyeon, who joined the team after winning last year’s Worlds with former team DRX, of Korea. This year marked the first time the 23-year-old will not see the quarterfinals at Worlds, he said in a post-game interview with Korizon Esports.

Hong ″Pyosik″ Chang-hyeon of Team Liquid cries on stage after being eliminated from the 2023 League of Legends World Championship in western Seoul on Monday. [RIOT GAMES]

“We have been together for a year. We all worked hard together. I had thought at the beginning we could go much further than this,” Pyosik said in the interview. “I was so sad that our journey had ended right there.”

Underdogs Team BDS had booked their spot in the 16-team Swiss Stage after winning their final round of the preliminary Play-In stage in a reverse sweep against Taipei-based PSG Talon, a joint creation between football club Paris Saint-Germain and Talon Esports.

Before that, they qualified to the eight-team Play-Ins from what was essentially a pre-preliminary round, defeating the United States’ Golden Guardians in the best-of-five World Qualifying Series to earn a spot among the rest of the unseeded teams, battling for two spots to join the 14 regular season qualifiers in the round robin Swiss.

But they were unable to overcome Korea’s Dplus KIA, also home to a defending champion, in their final showdown. Dplus KIA’s Kim "Deft" Hyuk-kyu earned his first Worlds title last November after DRX defeated fan favorite T1 in the finals and stays alive this year after the win on Monday, which was also his 27th birthday.

Twelve teams will head back into the arena for the Swiss Stage’s second phase, which begins Thursday, after a two-day break. The undefeated top two teams, Korea’s Gen.G and Chinese-owned JD Gaming, have automatically secured their spots in the eight-team Knockout Stage after three straight Swiss Stage wins. (Try saying that quickly three times.)

With Dplus KIA’s Monday win, all four Korean teams at Worlds are in the top 14. On Friday, Dplus KIA will meet Vietnam’s GAM Esports while Korea’s KT Rolster faces Chinese-owned LNG. On Saturday, longtime favorite T1 meets China’s Bilibili Gaming. A loss would mean getting cut from the competition for Dplus KIA while KT Rolster and T1 each need one win to advance.

Worlds then heads to Busan for the sudden-death knockout round, which will determine the two teams who will face off in the final, back in Seoul on Nov. 19.

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