Ten teams are drawn into two groups with five teams in each group based on their seeding. Teams of the same region cannot be placed in the same group (excepted seed #3 of Europe is Gambit Gaming).
Double round robin, all matches are best-of-one.
If teams have the same win–loss record and head-to-head record, a tiebreaker match is played for second place.
Top two teams of each group will advance to Playoff stage. Bottom three teams are eliminated.
The 2013 World Championship final was watched over Twitch by over 32 million people, with a peak of 8.5 million concurrent views, a large increase from the 2012 finals of 8.2 million viewers, with 1.1 millions peak concurrent ones. The numbers shattered the previous records for any eSports event. These numbers were much higher than those of other competitor eSports events for Dota 2 and Starcraft 2, the former of which only reached one million concurrent viewers.[4]
Riot's 8.5 million concurrent viewers is on a par with the "more than 8 million" people that watched Felix Baumgartner's jump from the edge of space. Exact figures for streaming events are difficult to ascertain, but All Things D reports that Baumgartner's jump was "web video's biggest event ever."
League of Legends is by far the biggest entity in the pro-gaming sector, regularly outstripping the stream viewer numbers of its major competitors, including Valve's Dota 2 and Blizzard's StarCraft II. In context, Valve's flagship Dota 2 tournament — The International 3 — took place two months before the League of Legends Season 3 World Championship finals and reached one million concurrent viewers.
References
^Although TW/HK/MO All-stars team in All-star Event also represented for Southeast Asia region (both regions are organized by Garena), but Playoff spot was decided for team of TW/HK/MO Regional Winner without competition in GPL because of the championship of Taipei Assassins in last year.
