Location United States Administrator(s) Riot Games Teams 14 | Dates September 15–October 4 Venue(s) 3 (in 1 host city) | |
Tournament format(s) 10 team round-robin group stage
8 team single-elimination bracket | ||
The Season 3 World Championship was won by SK Telecom T1 K with the roster of Lee "Faker" Sang-hyeok, Jung "Impact" Eon-yeong, Chae "Piglet" Gwang-jin, Lee "Easyhoon" Ji-hoon, Lee "PoohManDu" Jeong-hyeon. It was the third iteration of the annual League of Legends World Championship and the last one not to be formally titled after the year it took place.
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Teams
The following teams qualified to participate in the tournament's group stage:
Group stage
The group stage was played in a best of one double round-robin format, with the top two teams from each of the two groups advancing to the knockout stage.
Viewership and attendance
The 2013 World Championship final was watched over Twitch by over 32 million people, with a peak of 8.5 million concurrent views, a large increase from the 2012 finals of 8.2 million viewers, with 1.1 millions peak concurrent ones. The numbers shattered the previous records for any eSports event. These numbers were much higher than those of other competitor eSports events for Dota 2 and Starcraft 2, the former of which only reached one million concurrent viewers.
Riot's 8.5 million concurrent viewers is on a par with the "more than 8 million" people that watched Felix Baumgartner's jump from the edge of space. Exact figures for streaming events are difficult to ascertain, but All Things D reports that Baumgartner's jump was "web video's biggest event ever."
League of Legends is by far the biggest entity in the pro-gaming sector, regularly outstripping the stream viewer numbers of its major competitors, including Valve's Dota 2 and Blizzard's StarCraft II. In context, Valve's flagship Dota 2 tournament — The International 3 — took place two months before the League of Legends Season 3 World Championship finals and reached one million concurrent viewers.