Doublelift spills the details on what happened with TSM at Worlds

With the TSM crew now back in the NA region after their disappointing 0-6 performance at the 2020 League of Legends World Championship, Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng has spilled the details on what happened to them at Worlds.

Upon their arrival in Shanghai, the team initially found success in their first week of scrimmages. While DL did not disclose any of their scrim partners, he said that they were able to win a few matches against top teams and, at the very least, split the games between each match.

TSM managed to bring their summer success over for the first week, but with one more week of quarantine left, Doublelift and his fellow teammates struggled to improve during scrims. Due to social distancing, the team encountered a lot of miscommunications and had a hard time synchronizing during the post-match analysis.

“Our team mood took a big downswing,” said Doublelift. “It never really recovered because we started playing badly and playing poorly; losing trust in each other made it worse. For the boot camp after the first week, we had a 10% win rate in scrims.”

With the lack of trust and cooperation, DL saw that their only way of winning scrims was through coin-flip picks. When it came to the Worlds stage, TSM fell apart in both team and individual performances.

“The only way that we would really win a scrim is if a few coin-flips went the right way early-game and the enemy team started running it down due to tilt,” stated DL. “I don’t think we won games cleanly at that point… I could tell that, individually, our team was playing worse.”

With a 0-3 record in the first week of Worlds, Doublelift tried to knock some sense to the team by reverting back to their old playstyle in the LCS Summer Playoffs. Unfortunately, the pressure of going against world-class players forced many of them to play and flex on their match-ups rather than focusing on the entire game.

With how the team fell from grace in their Worlds appearance, DL saw that the entire team lacked experience, maturity, and leadership to drastically change their playstyle and mindset in such a short time.

With that void in leadership, Doublelift sees why TSM’s mid-laner Søren “Bjergsen” Bjerg wanted to shift into the head coach role. He believed that Bjergsen would’ve done a great job at boosting their morale rather than splitting his focus on his mid-lane gameplay.

With Bjergsen now acting as head coach, we may see some vast improvements in TSM’s playstyle and leadership in 2021 LCS season. TSM has yet to announce Bjergsen’s replacement in the mid-lane.