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Machi Esports defeats PSG Talon in the PCS Summer Split Final

Machi Esports comfortably clinched PSG Talon in the Pacific Championship Series Summer Split Final today. This title means that Machi secured the first seed from the ocean region arriving in League of Legends World Championship by the end of the year.

Whenever these two organizations have met in a playoff game over the years, the series has grown to five full games, meaning the teams have built up a pretty serious rivalry. So for Machi, a team that lost the Spring Split final to PSG, the revenge of winning this much more important title in the summer must be sweet indeed.

Unfortunately for fans and gamers alike, the fun storylines were heavily marred by technical glitches has plagued some of Riot’s Asian servers all night long. As quick and easy as it was for Machi to send PSG into the game, the broadcast consisted of a grueling seven hours of non-game play.

PSG won’t be able to blame their startling loss on the start and finish nature of the series, however, as it was evident from the start that Machi had their number.

The first game saw PSG try to play aggressively, proactively forcing lane exchanges. Despite their dominance in the regular season, however, the team actually has the lowest first blood rate in the league. This change of pace made them look uncomfortable as Machi, a much more comfortable team with a high pace, was able to overpower PSG in these scrappy engagements.

This was the story of all three games. Typically, PSG tries to draw middle lane champions like Corki who love to farm and have good scalability for late game fighting. In this series, they preferred to draw champions like Zoe, who garnered criticism from analysts and PCS fans.

Both sides drafted what were essentially the same team compositions for the second game. Unified, described as the franchise played for PSG, struggled to find any value in team combat due to the enemy’s ability to control space beyond Kalista’s range with Orianna’s abilities.

Machi took the first game so dominantly that it may have been easy to see it as a harbinger of what was yet to come.

Despite losing the draft again in the second game, through some sort of sheer brilliance, PSG found repeated picks on Machi players that led to the safety of Infernal Soul and all three Barons. But the lost draft proved to be a time bomb for PSG, who, when it mattered most, found themselves without the crowd control, the tools of engagement or the stout front that Machi had. With a clean ace, Machi found himself with two games.

The third game was more or less the same. PSG encountered initial objective pressure but failed to translate it into any significant pressure on the map because they were unable to handle the high pace Machi was imposing mid-match.

The pitchers went so far as to say that “Machi just destroyed PSG in the project, enough said”. The player of the series was undoubtedly Machi’s Gemini jungler, who finished with a combined KDA of 14/1/20 in a jaw-dropping demonstration of raw mechanics and smart decision making on Lee Sin.

Both of these teams have already secured a spot at the World Cup by the end of the year. Machi will be seeded directly in the group stage, while PSG will have to work their way through the play-ins if they are to make it to the main stage.

The 2020 World Cup will start in Shanghai on 25 September.

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