Eager had a relatively lackluster performance in the Fall Split, finishing as the fifth seed. This put them in the bottom half of the European teams despite being a contender for worlds in 2015. But in Group B, they had an unprecedented performance beating not only the fourth seed, Allegiance, but the first seed in NA (North America) and favourite to win, Luminosity. Because of this, e-Sport journalist Anatoliy Alekseyenok gave Eager the nickname “LANimals.” Since only the top two teams of each Group advance to Super Regionals, Noble and Allegiance are eliminated while Luminosity and Eager move on.

Their games against the eighth seed, Noble eSports (formerly known as the Randozos), went as most expected; crushing victories in all four games. One observation many have made is that Noble did  extremely well in the laning phase, but did terrible in team fights which fits the pattern that Noble has been following all season. What it seems like is that the players are skilled, but there’s no team synergy. But they’re still a newer team, and synergy takes time to develop. Noble e-Sports finished with two points finding zero wins, two splits and four losses. (Teams get 3 points for a win both get 1 for a split, and you get none if you lose.)

One surprise was Eager’s domination of Allegiance, after all they finished ahead of Eager in the Fall Split. Though the team has three well known veterans of the SPL (Brett “MLCst3alth” Felley-mid, Kurt “W3aken” Schray-jungle and team captain and Riley “Incon” Unzelman-support) they also have two new players in the ADC and solo roles. Many fans of Allegiance attribute their shortcomings and inconsistent performances to either the new players, or to W3aken (who is easily tilted and makes overly aggressive calls.) Team Allegiance finished with five points, one win, two splits and three losses.

Despite crushing Noble and Allegiance, Luminosity could only take one game out of four that they played against Eager. Unlike Allegiance, Luminosity’s rookies had good performances in the Fall Split, with an incredibly strong duo lane filled by the veterans of the team (John “BaRRaCCuDDa” Salter-ADC/team captain and Jeff “TheSex” Hindla (real name Rosario Vilardi)- support). But even NA’s first seed couldn’t bring down the LANimals. Luminosity finished with 11 points three wins, two splits and one loss, only losing to Eager.

Though Steven “Zapman” Zapas is the most experienced player on Eager (he formed the team and was in the competitive scene since the beginning and is one of the two best ADCs to play the game, along with BaRRaCCuDDa) the MVP award was given to Jeremy “TheBest” Daily, Eager’s mid laner. His overall K/D/A was 4.29 and he played consistently even in the games where they split. Team Eager finished with 14 points, four wins, two splits and no losses.

TheBest says this about their performance “Looking back on this last split we didn’t get very much practice and overall as a team played pretty poorly. The last few weeks leading up to LAN we tried to scrim as much as we could which included scrimming some challenger cup teams and Latam teams. Going into LAN we were very confident in our picks and bans and strategies teams have probably never seen before. Going into day 3 we obviously had to change our picks and bans slightly now that teams have seen what we wanted to do. We weren’t really worried but we didn’t take either teams lightly and just played the best we could.” (One notable thing is that he said “either team,” presumably leaving Noble out of the statement.)

On October 21st, Group C of LANs begins. Because the previous week was NA, Group C will be European teams. The teams that are playing are second seed NRG eSports, third seed Obey Alliance, sixth seed Cringe Crew, and seventh seed CycloneGG. The teams in this next group are much closer together (in terms of performance in the SPL) than they’ve been in previous Groups, and will likely be the most competitive Group so far.