Well, I was wrong.
Here's what actually happened. SKT won, 3-0.
It's hard for me to say what exactly Royal Club did wrong, but they clearly lost the laning phase every game. Apparently I underestimated holes in their laning game. I don't know what exactly those holes are, but they lost almost every dragon - but this may just be another symptom and not a cause in itself.
A few things I noticed:
1) Royal Club was still clearly one of the best teamfighting teams in the league, even in the 3-0 showing. They even pulled off one of their unlikely aces that had the potential to turn the game around, but SKT kept their cool and didn't let it happen twice in a row. Royal Club were just leaking gold too much to cash in on their fighting skills. On the other hand, SKT was clearly was prepared for this, often managing to disengage from dives where other teams would've gotten sucked into an ace before they figured out what was happening to them. They only got aced that one time.
2) In between my blog prediction and when the match occurred, I heard several shoutcasters and pro players mention that SKT was playing a bit off at semifinals. That was the only SKT match I watched very closely at all as of then, so I was thrown off.
It was somewhat odd to see SKT win by taking control of everything but teamfights. It's an example of the asymmetric outcomes and strategies that can occur in higher-level play. Winning a game while avoiding teamfights is a bit of a thousand cuts approach, but even then, SKT did win one of the three games in 20 minutes.
All aboard the Korean hype train. I hope Riot starts featuring them as well as China on lolesports.com in Season 4.
(I'm also hoping for jungler and support QoL improvements, as well as a support loosely inspired by The Wind Fish from Link's Awakening... I can dream about that last one, I suppose.)
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