Bilibili Gaming have ended T1's three-year reign as League of Legends world champions, beating the three-time defending title holders 3-1 in the second semi-final of the 2026 World Championship in Allen, Texas, and setting up a grand final against Gen.G that will crown a new champion.
The result, sealed on Sunday evening local time at the Credit Union of Texas Event Center, brought down the curtain on one of the great dynasties in esports. T1 had won the World Championship in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and no team in the history of the tournament had ever won four titles in a row. That pursuit is now over, and for the first time in five years the final will be played without them.
It was also a first of another kind. T1 had never lost a best-of-five knockout series to a team from China's LPL since their first appearance at the World Championship in 2013, a run that had survived more than a decade of meetings between the two regions. Bilibili Gaming, known as BLG, broke it in four games, and in doing so avenged their defeat to T1 in the 2024 final.
The series began with BLG in control. They let T1's jungler Oner take his favoured Nocturne and built their own game around an Orianna and Naafiri combination instead, winning an early skirmish around the Rift Herald, picking Oner off at around 20 minutes and taking Baron from there to close out the opener.
T1 answered in game two, and it was the kind of comeback that has defined this team. Oner's Lee Sin stole a Baron that BLG had started at around 21 minutes, and Lee Sang-hyeok, known to the world as Faker, took over the team fights on Syndra to level the series at one game each.
Game three swung the semi-final back towards the Chinese side. An early catch on T1 top laner Doran's Ambessa gave BLG the opening they needed, and a costly mid-lane death for Faker on Ahri allowed them to take Baron and move into a 2-1 lead, one game away from the final.
The fourth game produced the moment of the series, and it belonged to Faker. With T1 trailing by around 6,000 gold, his Akali wiped all five BLG players in a team fight at around 28 minutes, dragging the deficit back to roughly 1,000 gold and briefly raising the possibility of a fifth and deciding game. BLG held their nerve, regrouped, won the next fight in the mid lane, secured the Mountain Dragon Soul and Baron, and closed out the series.
The numbers underline how close the contest was despite the 3-1 scoreline. BLG finished with 68 kills to T1's 47 across the four games, and T1 actually won the kill count heavily in their one victory, 22-10 in game two, with Faker finishing that game 4-0-13. Across the whole series Faker recorded 14 kills and five deaths, and his game-two performance on Syndra was the high point of T1's night.
Faker was frank afterwards, offering no excuses for the defeat. "Overall, I think the opponent was better prepared than we were," he said. "We couldn't play the game the way we had planned." He added that he was not satisfied with his own year, a measure of the standards the 30-year-old mid laner has set across a career that has carried T1 to six World Championship finals.
BLG will now meet Gen.G in the grand final at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, on Saturday, 14 November. Gen.G reached the final by sweeping Invictus Gaming 3-0 in the first semi-final on 8 November, and the meeting of the LCK and LPL champions guarantees that League of Legends will have a new world champion for the first time since 2022.
For BLG, the final is the chance to complete a run through the entire Korean field. They eliminated Hanwha Life Esports in the Swiss stage, swept Dplus KIA in the quarter-finals and have now beaten T1, meaning a win over Gen.G would see them defeat every LCK representative in the tournament. The 2026 World Championship, played across the United States with 19 teams and a prize pool of five million US dollars, will end with either Zhuo "Knight" Ding of BLG or Jeong "Chovy" Ji-hoon of Gen.G succeeding Faker as the game's world champion.
