After an extremely long-winded series, Team SoloMid took down Immortals 2-1 for its first win of the 2017 North American League of Legends Championship Series on Sunday in Santa Monica, California.
The series started off hot, with both junglers making plays across the map. It was Immortals' Joshua "Dardoch" Hartnett who ultimately won out on Olaf, lending his team a 2,000-gold lead. IMT pressed this lead, maintaining an advantage and eventually destroying every last one of TSM's turrets.
Unfortunately for Immortals, TSM never said die, repeatedly fending off IMT from its base. One final fight in defense of their base allowed TSM to ace Immortals, and use the massive death timers to swarm the IMT Nexus for the comeback victory on the back of Søren "Bjergsen" Bjerg's 10/1/11 KDA (kills/deaths/assists) Cassiopeia.
Immortals managed to get even in Game 2. This time, the bot lane was the source of their advantage, as they consistently found kills in two-on-two fights. This led to a 6,000-gold advantage for IMT, which would unfortunately be thrown away in the aftermath of a brilliant Baron steal by TSM's Dennis "Svenskeren" Johnsen. Now in the driver's seat, TSM took control of the game, securing two more Barons in the 50-minute game. However, just after taking its last Baron buff, a brilliant four-man stun from Eugene "Pobelter" Park's Syndra allowed IMT to clean up TSM and storm the base to take the game.
TSM finally pulled themselves together for Game 3, which was the cleanest of the series by far. Before 18 minutes, TSM had accrued a four-to-zero tower advantage and were comfortably ahead in gold as a result, despite the close kill score. While this lead would fluctuate slightly as the game went on, TSM would never lose control of it, and they would enter IMT's base to take the Nexus at 38 minutes, more than 10 minutes faster than the previous two games.
