The regular season for the LTA North Split 1 has just concluded and we now have our four teams that will be jetting off to Brazil to represent the North in the Split 1 playoffs. 100 Thieves, Cloud9, FlyQuest, and Team Liquid all made it through the double elimination bracket stage to qualify for the playoffs. Let's take a look back at the entirety of the LTA North Split 1, highlighting the biggest winners from the event, and also the biggest losers. 

100 Thieves and Cloud9 rise up 

At the beginning of the split when the draw was announced, it was heavily accepted that FlyQuest and Team Liquid will be able to breeze through their respective brackets and qualify early for the Brazil playoffs. This wasn't to be the case, however, with both 100 Thieves and Cloud9 upsetting the tournament favorites in the second round, clinching the number one and two seeds for themselves.

Starting with 100 Thieves, they along with Team Liquid put on one of the best best-of-threes North America has seen in a while. Quid in particular had a monstrous series against one of the best teams in the league, so much so that his performances earned him the player of the week award. UmTi did not have a great series, however, setting the LTA/LCS death record and was one of the worst performing players throughout the series.

100 Thieves looked far more coordinated in their teamfighting, which allowed them to get wins against the weaker teams, but never enough to topple the bigger teams like Team Liquid and FlyQuest. 100 Thieves would then face Cloud9 in the first-place decider, in which the former stomped C9 convincingly to head into Brazil as the number one seed.

Cloud9 had a beheamouth of their own to deal with being their next opponent. FlyQuest looked in fine form coming into this series, showing no signs of a slump following their successful Worlds 2024 run. In game one FlyQuest continued to show why they were the 2024 LCS Summer Split champions, dictating the pace of the game and not giving Cloud9 an inch of room to breathe.

In games two and three, however, Cloud9 went up to a level many didn't think they could reach this early into their rosters iteration. C9 was able to consistently outfight FlyQuest, which was the latters biggest trait in 2024 was their ability to out-teamfight the best teams in the world. C9 has looked much better as a team in 2025 with the squad being more cohesive, their drafts making more sense, and their overall teamfighting feels like every player is on the same page. C9 are in with a real chance of making international events this year after many predicted a third place finish at best.

LTA Format hurts weaker teams

The losers in this list, while not having a winning record, are impacted by the LTA format in the eyes of the North American LoL community. Teams like LYON, for example, had to have their support play on significantly higher ping, while another team like DSG only played two best-of-threes before their season was put on pause for a couple of months. Despite the LTA format being known since the start of the year, it was a delayed negative reaction once Disguised and LYON were sent home after losing two best-of-threes.

This LTA format definitely favors the stronger teams, who will at the end of the playoffs had played a decent amount of stage games. As for the weaker teams, their time on stage is extremely short. To compare with the LCK Cup for example. Teams that were eliminated in the group stage still played double the amount of stage games as DSG did, despite not making it out of the group stage. It's definitely a format that fans are not happy with as Riot continues to use formats that been deployed in the VCT.