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Today the second First Strike NA qualifiers started, hosted by UMGGaming.
The second qualifiers have FOUR groups of 4 and all the matches are played in a best-of-3 format, losing a match will send a team to the lower bracket where they have another chance to redeem themselves in another bo3 match.
Tomorrow the second First Strike EU qualifiers will begin, hosted by challengermode.
The second EU qualifiers has no groups, are all bo1 matches with NO double elimination, meaning losing a single bo1 match means they're OUT of the qualifiers, no second chance, no bo3 matches beside the very last match, all the way up until this match all games have been bo1 (in total 6-7 matches of bo1 depending on seeding).
How in the hell did Riot allow this to happen? Not only are the closed qualifiers (the ones tomorrow) bo1s but ALL of the matches in the open first strike qualifiers (4 in total) were full bo1s from beginning to the end, even the final decider matches to qualify for tomorrows closed qualifier were Bo1. To put it in perspective, in NA at the same stage the matches were Bo3 to qualify to this qualifier and every match from this point forward was also a bo3, all streamed.
How is this remotely fair for the EU region? On top of this nearly NONE of the open qualifier matches were allowed to be streamed, no upcoming community talent were allowed to cast open qualifier matches. There wasn't a SINGLE steam for the open qualifiers, you had to hug websites to get a score of your favorite team.
Every region has had bo3 in the decider open qualifiers, only the first initial matches in the open qualifiers were bo1 for these regions which is expected, but all of the EU matches are bo1s until the very last match of the second closed qualifier (a total of 7 from beginning to the end).
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