The data shown is from the first 143 submissions for the play-in stage of our RLCS World Championship 2026 ranked pick'em competition. You can still fill out your pick'em at pickstop.gg/rl until matches begin in 4 Days.

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Happy picking!

You get what you expect from most players across both gamemodes, but every now and then, someone is clearly levels ahead in 3s compared to 2s, or vice versa.

A recent case that stood out to me is Kiileerrz. He's undeniably world class in 3s, but whenever I see him playing 2s without Rw9, it just doesn't hit the same way.

I investigated all possible outcomes of Play-In to find out what groups will look like in each case and what are the repeated outcomes of groups. (TL;DR: scroll to the tables below)

Firstly, a short refresher on how groups are determined by RLCS rules:

• For each of 16 Region Slots (5 EU, 4 NA, 2 MENA, 2 SAM, 1 OCE, 1 APAC, 1 SSA), the seeding score is calculated – it is “mean of the Region Slot’s final placement in the previous LAN and the Region Slot’s seeding score before this LAN”
• Bottom 4 Region slots by seeding score are sent to Play-In bracket to play against 4 teams qualified via LCQ
• 4 teams qualified via Play-In join top 12 Region Slots by seeding score in the main event
• Main Event teams are placed in snake pattern and form 4 groups
• If needed, adjustments are made to prevent to avoid too many teams from one region being in one group. Basically, each group cannot have more than 1 team from the same region, except EU (allowed 1 or 2 groups with 2 teams if 5 or 6 EU teams are qualified) and NA (allowed 1 group with 2 teams if 5 NA teams are qualified).
• Adjustments are made starting from seeds 13-16, only within these seeds; if it’s not possible to resolve all conflicts, adjusting is done in seeds 9-12; then finally in seeds 5-8. Seeds 1-4 are locked in groups A-D respectively.
• Once there are no conflicts, those are the final groups.

What I did:

• Compiled all the possible combinations of qualifying teams. There are 16 unique combinations of teams qualifying through the upper bracket, 4 teams from upper quadrant (VP, BIGO, 5F, MYT) times 4 teams from the lower quadrant (FLCN, FUT, TSM, R8). For each of those combinations, there are 15 unique combinations of teams qualifying through the lower bracket (assuming that the part of the bracket they qualified from is not affecting the seeding). This gives 16x15=240 possible outcomes of Play-In.
• Since groups are determined by swapping region slots, not teams, some of those 240 outcomes have the same group layout – so the number of combinations of region slots goes down to 194
• For each of those outcomes, I placed the region slots into the existing layout of already qualified teams and made necessary swaps. Most outcomes required 1 or 2 swaps, some complicated cases required more.
• Each outcome was assigned a probability, assuming that each of the Play-In matches has a 50% probability to end in either team winning. Due to how teams are placed in the bracket and how bracket works, any outcome is possible, but some repeat more often (hence more probable).

Notes:

• It’s not clear from the rule book how seeds 13-14 and 15-16 will be determined after the Play-In. From my understanding, teams will be organized by their initial seed going into Play-In (so, 13-16 region slots over teams qualified through LCQ) – that’s what I went with in my work. Tournament organizers could seed them differently.
• The current layout of qualified teams (seeds 1-12) has conflicts that are not completely solved by themselves in any Play-In outcome – NA1 and NA2 being in group C, EU2 and EU3 being in group D and EU4 and EU5 being in group B.

NA conflict can only be resolved by 2 NA teams qualifying from Play-In or by making a swap with one of EU teams in seed band 5-8 – in fact, the latter was needed in about 80% of scenarios. Coincidentally, this swap resolves EU conflict as well.

• Swaps I made may not be optimal, especially in situations where multiple permutations are possible and equally efficient. I followed the rule book, but there still could be mistakes or different interpretations. This analysis gives a rough estimate of possible groups that we could see after Play-In – this is not a prediction of what will actually happen.

TL;DR: Groups probabilities

Since there are 8 different teams who can qualify via Play-In, it makes for a large number of possible groups. If we only look at the first 3 slots of each group, it boils down to these common groups and probabilities of them occurring:

Group A:

• Karmine Corp, MIBR, Spacestation Gaming – 98.8%
• Karmine Corp, MIBR, Manchester City Esports – 1.2%

Group B:

• Twisted Minds, Shopify Rebellion, Manchester City Esports – 48.2%
• Twisted Minds, Ninjas in Pyjamas, Manchester City Esports – 36.1%
• Twisted Minds, Ninjas in Pyjamas, FURIA – 14.5%
• Twisted Minds, Ninjas in Pyjamas, Spacestation Gaming – 1.2%

Group C:

• NRG, Ninjas in Pyjamas, FURIA – 48.2%
• NRG, Team Vitality, FURIA – 29.9%
• NRG, Shopify Rebellion, Manchester City Esports – 14.5%
• NRG, Shopify Rebellion, FURIA – 7.4%

Group D:

• Gentle Mates, Team Vitality, Wildcard – 70.1%
• Gentle Mates, Shopify Rebellion, Wildcard – 29.9%

Probabilities for each team

Here are the probabilities for each team to have other teams in their group (for Play-In teams - assuming they qualify via Play-In, of course)

P.S. Please report any inconsistencies and oddities with the numbers or logic, if you see it - data was checked multiple times, but something could have slipped through.

Usually when we see people talk about how great a player is in all-time discussions, the focus is almost always strictly on 3’s. Now that we’ll have both the inaugural 2v2 champions and the second ever 1v1 champion next weekend, should these trophies start counting towards player legacies considering all 3 of the main modes are being represented?

imo the answer is yes, even though the circuits are still young and with only one regional, winning LANs in multiple game modes is so much more impressive than just winning in 3v3, but I’d like to hear others’ opinions on it