The League of Legends Champions Korea (LCK) has announced a major revamp of its format for the 2025 season.
The LCK, Korea’s premier League of Legends tournament, will see its 2025 calendar split into a single LCK season with five rounds and the introduction of a cup competition.
Coming into effect next year, the changes will see the season kick off with the newly formed LCK CUP set to take place from January to February. The LCK CUP will begin with two groups, each picked by the 2024 Summer finalists Gen.G and Hanwha Life Esports, followed by play-ins and playoffs brackets.
The LCK CUP winner will then qualify for March’s new global League of Legends event, whereby the number one seeds from each regional league will meet for a tournament using a fearless draft format.
The fearless draft sees champions played at any point in a best-of-series be unable to be picked through the rest of the series. The LCK CUP will employ the same pick/ban system.
The LCK regular season will begin in April and will not count LCK CUP results towards its placings. The LCK season is split into five rounds, the first two of which will occur across April and May. Each of these first two rounds will use a single round-robin, best-of-three format, eventually creating a league table in the same manner as the 2024 regular seasons.
June will see the top six teams so far enter Mid-Season Invitational (MSI) qualifiers; a semi-double elimination bracket that allows two teams to qualify for the season’s second global event.
The LCK rounds three to five will see teams split into groups named Legend and Rise. Legend will feature the top five teams from rounds one and two and Rise will feature the bottom five. Groups will remain split for the rest of the regular season.
Each round sees groups carry out a best-of-three, single round-robin. Once all rounds are complete, the top four from the Legend group will go to the playoffs while the fifth place will join the top three from the Rise group in a play-in bracket.
Play-ins, played through a best-of-five, double-elimination bracket, will allow two additional teams to qualify for playoffs. Playoffs then also employ a best-of-five, double-elimination bracket to determine the LCK season champions.
The top three teams from playoffs will qualify for the season-ending World Championship, the final global event of the season. Depending on MSI results, a fourth seed may also be granted to the league.
According to posts from official Riot Games channels, the changes were made to ‘maximize the number of matches’, particularly for mid to lower-standing teams, while different format types were added through the season ‘to compensate [for] the potential decrease in interest’ in a single season-long tournament.
