LCS Summer 2021 - Power Ranking

With the summer season of LCS starting in just a week, we wanted to run out some predictions on how we expect this split to go, and give a relative power ranking to each team.

To do this, we ran predictions for every single one of the 135 matches slated over the next 9 weeks, and aggregated them into our expectation of each team's record. There are some caveats, of course, but we know you're just going to scroll down to the final results anyway so here they are:

|            team name |  wins | losses |   win% |
|----------------------|-------|--------|--------|
|          Team Liquid | 19.72 |   7.28 | 73.02% |
|               Cloud9 |  18.6 |    8.4 | 68.89% |
|         Team SoloMid | 16.78 |  10.22 | 62.16% |
|          100 Thieves | 14.98 |  12.02 | 55.46% |
|        Evil Geniuses | 12.85 |  14.15 | 47.61% |
|             FlyQuest | 11.15 |  15.85 | 41.28% |
| Counter Logic Gaming | 11.02 |  15.98 | 40.82% |
|            Immortals |  10.9 |   16.1 | 40.37% |
|             Dignitas | 10.82 |  16.18 | 40.07% |
|     Golden Guardians |  8.19 |  18.81 | 30.32% |

We expect Team Liquid to be the strongest team this summer, with Cloud9 not too far behind, projected to lag by only one win. Golden Guardians are the weakest of the bunch, but we still don't expect them to get absolutely crushed; winning 30% of your matches isn't nothing, after all. We expect some stratification among the top 5 teams, but FlyQuest, Counter Logic Gaming, Immortals, and Dignitas are all incredibly close to each other in our power ranking, so spots 6-9 could easily swap around quite a bit.

So about those caveats... first, the wins/losses are the expected value of those numbers. Obviously a team can't win 19.72 matches, as they either win or don't win each match, but on average we expect Team Liquid to win 19.72 matches. Second, these are not necessarily our final predictions on these games, these are simply predictions using all of the information we have so far. Going into week 9 of the split, for example, we'll incorporate all of the results of the first 8 weeks into our model, to get the most up-to-date analysis possible. Finally, life happens. Rosters may change, players may get sick, or other unforeseen situations can occur, all of which will obviously change our expectation of each match.

In addition, these power rankings reflect our view of the relative strengths of each team and our expectation for the season, but they don't actually mean much in the context of betting. Until we see the odds offered on each individual match, there's no way to know whether any particular match is actually worth betting on from an EV perspective.

We've already posted our first round of bet suggestions, for the 15 week 1 matches! You can find them on our Facebook or Twitter. In addition, we store all of our bet suggestions on this site here, so you can easily find any of our past suggestions and catch up on any you've missed. We'll update all three of these locations whenever there's new action, so make sure you follow us and are subscribed to keep up with all of our developments and predictions and stay ahead of the game!