Last weekend marked the finale of the most intense RLCS season to date. For those who do not know, RLCS stands for Rocket League Championship Series and is the largest professional competition for Rocket League.
Rocket League is three-on-three soccer, but what makes Rocket League so unique is that instead of normal soccer, each player controls a rocket-powered car. The double-elimination tournament had a prize pot of $1 million and included four teams from North America, four teams from Europe, and two teams from Oceania.
Shockingly, all four of the North American teams lost in the quarter-final round and were bumped to the losers’ bracket. G2 E-sports went 0-2 over the weekend, losing both five-game series 2-3. Kristian Leppke, senior actuarial science major and long-time G2 E-sports fan, was disappointed with his team’s performance. “I thought [G2] would do well, maybe even win the whole thing. But instead they didn’t win a single series and were the second team eliminated,” remarked Leppke.
Meanwhile, in the winners’ bracket, defending world champions Dignitas continued their dominance of the Rocket League scene, advancing to the finals with no trouble at all. Dignitas defeated We Dem Girls in the winners’ finals to send WDG to face Cloud9 in the losers’ finals.
Earlier, WDG knocked C9 into the losers’ bracket. However, C9 would reign victorious in the rematch. This left C9 to play Dignitas in the grand finals. In the first set, C9 handed Dignitas their first loss of the season, defeating them in a best-of-seven series 4-1. However, since this was Dignitas’ first loss of the tournament, it required a bracket reset and another seven-game series.
Led by an MVP performance from C9’s “Torment,” the North American team was able to secure another victory over Dignitas to become World Champions. C9 fan Brant Vermeer was surprised by the win, saying, “I thought my boys were going to get clapped by Dignitas, but they came out with a massive upset.”
With this win, C9 became the second ever North American world champions and put a cap on an incredible weekend for Rocket League.
