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To celebrate the kick off of Riot Game’s Sentinels of Light event, Twitch Rivals partnered with the developer to hold a special tournament that included all of Riot’s titles including Valorant, Teamfight Tactics, League of Legends, and Legends of Runeterra. The two day $100,000 event saw players from all of the games come together with Team Soju coming out on top. Here are the lessons we learned from the big event.

Strategy outweigh Mechanics at Twitch Rivals: Sentinels of Light

Despite an event like this one with two strategy games and two mechanic intensive games present, many captains decided to go all in on one genre or the other. This was present in Cloud 9’s Michael “k3Soju” Zhang’s team which had five TFT players on it. An example of the opposite side of the spectrum was Cloud 9’s vtuber Vienna’s team of primarily League of Legends players. But at the end of the day, it was Soju who took home first place and the $20,000 prize.

Second place was also captained by a strategy game player, Evil Geniuses’ Sean “Swimstrim” Huguenard . Swimstrim took the Legends of Runeterra portion of the event. Even in third place was Team Emiru, who had multiple TFT players including Team Liquid’s Alex “Kurumx” Tompkins and David “DxnTFT” Nguyen.

At the bottom of the standings was Team Kristoferyee who had zero strategy game players on the team.

TFT Players can play other games

Teamfight Tactics players often get a bad reputation since they share the same client as League of Legends and have the same ranked system. With League of Legends players often smirking at TFT players Challenger ranking. Soju proved that theory wrong in this edition of Twitch Rivals.

With certain teams bringing in stacked League of Legends rosters, Soju’s was an afterthought. But the team of five TFT players made two upsets on their way to a finals appearance in the League of Legends bracket. Many people don’t know that some TFT players were Challenger level League of Legends players before making the jump. Soju used to play on Challenger series teams in League of Legends and Kurumx used to be a Challenger ranked Fizz player too.

But it’s not just League of Legends, in the other strategy game in the event – Legends of Runetera – TFT players excelled once again. Kurumx in particular had a nice performance, reportedly going 6-0 in his games. Although Swimstrim still won the LoR section, the Kurumx’s team finished second and Soju’s team finished third.

TFT Players can also lose at their game

Although TFT players can play other games at high levels, sometimes they cant even play theirs at one. Due to the heavy RNG nature a game like TFT has, sometimes even the best players can lose to worse players. Sometimes they lose to players who don’t even play TFT. TFT is a game that relies on big sample sizes to show skill, so in an event format that only allows for three games, wacky things can happen.

Soju’s full TFT team may have won the TFT portion but it wasn’t without a huge scare. Going into the final game, they were in second place. This was due in part of TSM’s  Ki Yoon “Kiyoon” Yoo who placed dead last in his Game 2 lobby that didn’t have as single player above Platinum 4. Soju also had a poor performance in his second game as well.

But team TFT brought in back in their Game 3 lobbies as Soju and Kiyoon both won their lobbies to squeak out the overall win in TFT.