Bilibili Gaming are world champions. The Chinese team beat Gen.G 3-1 in the League of Legends World Championship final at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Saturday, November 14, 2026, lifting the trophy for the first time in the organization’s history.
Mid-laner Zhuo “Knight” Ding was named MVP of the final, and he is now the first Chinese mid-laner to win Worlds. BLG take home $1,000,000, the top 20 percent share of the $5,000,000 base prize pool.
The road through T1
BLG did not look like favorites early. They scraped through the Swiss stage with a 3-2 record, the lowest seed bracket in the knockout draw. Then they caught fire:
- Quarterfinal, November 5: a 3-0 sweep of Dplus KIA
- Semifinal, November 8: a 3-1 win over three-time defending champions T1
- Final, November 14: a 3-1 win over Gen.G
That semifinal was the shock of the tournament. T1, led by Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok, had won Worlds in 2023, 2024 and 2025 and had not lost a best-of-five series to a team from China’s League of Legends Pro League in 13 straight meetings. BLG ended both runs, and for the first time since 2021, T1 missed the final.
Across the three knockout series, BLG won 9 games and lost only 2, a win rate of about 82 percent against the best teams in the field.
Gen.G’s perfect run ends at the last step
Gen.G of South Korea’s League of Legends Champions Korea arrived in New York looking unbeatable. They went 3-0 in the Swiss stage, swept LYON 3-0 in the quarterfinals and swept Invictus Gaming 3-0 in the semifinals. Their only series loss of the whole tournament came in the final. The runner-up prize is $800,000.
Worlds 2026 in numbers
This was the 16th World Championship and the fifth hosted in the United States, with 19 teams spread across three cities from October 15 to November 14:
Los Angeles: the play-in stage at the 300-seat Riot Games Arena.
Allen, Texas: the Swiss stage, quarterfinals and semifinals at the Credit Union of Texas Event Center, which seats 8,100. It was the first international League of Legends event in Texas.
New York City: the final at the 19,000-capacity Barclays Center, making New York the first East Coast city to host a Worlds final.
The tournament anthem, “Know My Name,” came from True Damage, Riot’s virtual band with vocalists Coco Jones, Sofía Reyes, Soyeon and Vic Mensa. Its music video followed Faker’s path to three straight titles, a storyline BLG have now closed.
Western teams in the mix
Two Western teams reached the quarterfinals for the first time since 2021: France’s Karmine Corp, who lost 3-1 to T1, and LYON of the North American League Championship Series, who fell to Gen.G. Both finished joint fifth to eighth and earned $300,000 each.
For more from the gaming world this week, see how IShowSpeed won Streamer of the Year at the 2026 Streamer Awards and what Marvel Rivals Season 11 adds with Nightcrawler, or browse our Gaming section.
BLG’s win means China’s LPL will send the defending champions to Worlds 2027.
Further reading
Image: Andrew nyr, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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