While the League of Legends Champions Korea offseason is a time of many roster changes and player transfers, it is also when many veteran players decide to retire from professional play. Two members of former team ROX Tigers, Lee “Kuro” Seo-haeng and Kang “GorillA” Beom-hyun, announced their retirement this week, while former world champion Lee “Crown” Min-ho announced he was ending his professi...

More fans than ever went online to watch the LoL World Championships this year, according to Riot Games, with over 1 billion hours watched worldwide during the games that took place from Sept. 25 to Oct. 31 in Shanghai. The Play-in Stage, where the representative team from weaker regions such as Oceania, Latin America, Brazil, Japan, Turkey along with fourth seed teams of China and Europe and th...

South Korean curling officials and coaches who abused the national women's team members for years have been slapped with lifetime bans. The Korean Curling Federation (KCF) announced Monday that its former Vice President Kim Kyung-doo, his daughter Kim Min-jung and her husband Jang Ban-seok will no longer be allowed to set foot in the sport. The Kims were once considered the royal family in Sout...

Unlike in many other sports, the standard practice in the esports industry is to keep the information on transfers and salary secret. The new minimum salary for LCK players has risen to 60 million won with the upcoming franchise system, which is higher than the minimum salary of any other pro sports league in Korea. Still, the top players are thought to get much more. One of the reasons is that ...

Two-time Olympic speed skating gold medalist Lee Seung-hoon returned to the ice on Wednesday, hoping to enjoy being on the ice again after serving his one-year suspension over allegations of physically assaulting teammates. Lee skated in the men's 5,000m race at the Korea Skating Union (KSU) President's Cup National Speed Skating Championship at Taeneung International Rink in Seoul. It was his f...

Unintended event during LoL stove league gets out of hand

An annual forum designed to support the growth of sports in developing countries will be held in Seoul this week, a related state-funded agency said Wednesday. The sports ministry will host the "Dream Together Seoul Forum" at SKY31 Conference Hall at Lotte World Tower in Seoul, starting at 2 p.m. Friday. The Korea Sports Promotion Foundation (KSPO) organized the event, which will be held under t...

After a week of online voting, the most popular player in each of the five roles in League of Legends was selected to play in the 2020 LoL All-Star Event on Dec. 18 to 20. Unlike the previous years in which current and retired pros and influencers from all over the world gathered in one city, this year’s event will be held online. All the chosen players from Korean LoL esports league, LoL Champi...

Busan Esports Arena will officially open Wednesday, Busan Metropolitan City and Busan IT Industry Promotion Agency announced Tuesday. The esports arena to open in Busan on the 15th and 16th floors of Samjung Tower is the first arena dedicated to esports to open outside the capital area. This is the first of the three esports arenas supported by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to open...

Heading to next season, Youn and Lee wish to change the perception of LCK announcers in the gaming community, which until now has focused on their looks and dismissed their understanding of the game. “I hope people can see us as people with expertise. I think it’s natural that we get these reactions because we are still beginners. Right now, many reactions are, ‘Ah you’re so pretty, nuna,’ or ‘I...

Meanwhile, eyes are on the off-seasonperiod leading up to 2021 LCK as contracts of big names such as Nuguri and BeryL, who won the World Championships last week, as well as DRX’s star player Chovy is due to expire. By Lim Jang-won ( ljw@heraldcorp.com )

During the introduction of Damwon players before the match, the audience of 6,312 remained dead silent, only cheering for the Chinese team, evoking criticism online. In the end, Damwon managed to silence the Pudong Football Stadium crowd once again with a convincing win. “Make it a library. Shanghai Library,” said Damwon’s Heo “ShowMaker” Su in the game as he closed out the series. Heading into...

South Korea’s Damwon Gaming took down Europe’s G2 Esports in a convincing 3-1 win at the League of Legend World Championship semifinals on Saturday. This is the first time a Korean team has made the finals in three years at the biggest esports event of the year. For the past two years, Chinese teams have played against European teams at the finals, including the 2018 finals in Incheon. Damwon l...

The first game of the semifinals for the League of Legend World Championships will feature Korean top seed Damwon Gaming against European first seed G2 Esports on Saturday at 7 p.m. The match will decide which of the two regions will be knocked out of the tournament and which will head to the finals. Damwon Gaming went undefeated in the second round robin of the LoL Champions Korea Summer, goin...

“I definitely think that I could have performed better, but there were parts where I underperformed, so that’s really regrettable,” said “Ruler,” the star player of Gen.G. Several players of Damwon, which plays G2 on Saturday, have expressed wishes to play against G2 to seek revenge for last year. Damwon swept the other Korean team DRX on Thursday 3-0 to head to the semifinals. On the other sid...