League Championship Series

The League Championship Series (LCS) is the official name for the semifinal round of postseason play in Major League Baseball which has been conducted since 1969. In 1981, and since 1995, the two annual series have matched up the winners of the Division Series, and the winners advance to meet in the World Series

The League Championship Series was promulgated in 1969, when both the National League and the American League increased in size from ten teams to twelve with the addition, via expansion, of the Montreal Expos and San Diego Padres to the former and the Kansas City Royals and Seattle Pilots (now the Milwaukee Brewers of the NL) to the latter. Concomitant with this, both leagues formed Eastern and Western Divisions, the first-place teams from which faced off in the LCS.

Originally, the League Championship Series were best-of-five using the 2–3 format in which the team without home field advantage hosted the first two games and the team with it hosted the remaining game(s), making it impossible for the disadvantage team to win the series at home. It also allowed those teams the unusual luxury of starting a series at home, possibly having home field advantage in a three game series, and a guarantee that they play the maximum number of games possible at home (2).

League of Legends

League of Legends (abbreviated LoL or just League) is a multiplayer online battle arena, real-time strategy video game developed and published by Riot Games for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It is a free-to-play game supported by microtransactions and inspired by the mod Defense of the Ancients for Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne.

In League of Legends, players assume the role of an unseen "summoner" that controls a "champion" with unique abilities and battle against a team of other players or computer-controlled champions. The goal is usually to destroy the opposing team's "nexus", a structure which lies at the heart of a base protected by defensive structures. Each League of Legends match is discrete, with all champions starting off fairly weak but increasing in strength by accumulating items and experience over the course of the game.

League of Legends was generally well received at release, and grew in popularity in the years since. By July 2012, League of Legends was the most played PC game in North America and Europe in terms of the number of hours played. As of January 2014, over 67 million people played League of Legends per month, 27 million per day, and over 7.5 million concurrently during peak hours.

League of Legends Championship Series

The League of Legends Championship Series (LCS), formerly known as the Riot Championship Series, is the name of two professional League of Legends eSports leagues run by Riot Games. Twenty teams compete in two separate competitions in North America and Europe, with ten teams per continent. Each annual season of play is divided into two splits, spring and summer, both consisting of nine weeks of round-robin tournament play, which then conclude with play-off tournaments between the top six teams from each region. At the end of the season, the highest placing three teams in each league qualify for the annual League of Legends World Championship.

The LCS represents the highest level of League of Legends play in Europe and North America. The LCS has a promotion and relegation system; the bottom teams in the LCS from each split compete with the top teams from the Challenger Series (CS) to compete for spots in the next split of the LCS. The Challenger Series in each continent is composed of six teams: three teams which failed to advance in the previous promotion tournament, one team from the previous CS split, and the top two teams from ranked ladder play in the respective public League of Legends online game server.