Despite bringing a lot of unexpected choices, such as Caitlyn supporting Keria, T1 still had an easy victory over the youth team Kwangdongs Freecs.
After the first week of the LCK Spring 2023, T1 showed the strength of the championship candidate with 2 convincing victories against Gen.G and KT Rolster. Before entering the big battle with Dplus KIA, T1 will face the young team Kwangdongs Freecs. This is an opportunity for Faker and his teammates to look for an easy victory and test new strategies.
Game 1
In the first game, the pressure that T1 created made KDF completely deadlocked. The timer has not passed 20 minutes, but the 5 outer pillars of KDF had to collapse before the perfect macro ability that T1 created. Simply the difference in qualifications and skills helped T1 easily crush KDF after only 22 minutes of play.
Game 2
The highlight of game 2 was the appearance of Caitlyn in the support position. After T1 picked Varus on the first turn, KDF completely ignored Caitlyn and let him appear on T1’s 3rd turn. With the extremely strong poke ability of the Varus – Caitlyn duo, T1 quickly won the lane, even confidently performing towering situations with the support of Sejuani in Oner’s hand.
Keria put Caitlyn in support for the first time in a match in the LCK
Although not as overwhelming in terms of kills as in game 1, T1’s macro ability still prevented KDF from playing the game and soon lost 1 lane even though the match was only 20 minutes old. This gap is too big for T1 to comfortably eat Baron before destroying the opponent and extending the unbeaten streak.
Sharing about Caitlyn’s card in the support position, head coach Bengi said: “For the combo selection around Caitlyn, we prepared them from Worlds. But because we couldn’t release Caitlyn, we couldn’t. Today, we have Caitlyn released and can use it like in practice. The results are very good.
We have Sett and Caitlyn. We’ve prepared strong champion picks in bot lane and brought ice pressure. The pokes and turrets worked really well today.”
Jungler Oner wasn’t surprised by Keria’s Caitlyn pick either: “Keria’s champion pool is huge. He’s also used to ADC champions so that’s understandable. We all trust him, So there is nothing to be afraid of with the AD carry champions in Keria’s hands.”