This week had a little bit of everything, a world championship in its knockout stage, a CS2 event in Beijing, the first pro CoD event on MW4, and an Apex final in Vegas. But the story I keep coming back to happened last Sunday in São Paulo and I don't think it got anywhere near enough attention.
Here's this week in esports.
The Big One: KRÜ Blaze Did It the Hard Way
Game Changers Championship | São Paulo | Final on Nov 1
KRÜ Blaze beat Gentle Mates 3-2 in the grand final of the VALORANT Game Changers Championship and became the first Latin American team to ever win it. And they didn't take the easy road either, they got knocked into the lower bracket, came all the way back through it, and knocked out both Brazilian teams in Brazil to get there. Nobody had ever won this thing from the lower bracket before.
Gentle Mates came into that final without losing a series and had dropped one map the whole tournament. KRÜ still took it to five and won it. Argentina's tok1o was Grand Final MVP with 84 kills across the five maps.
I want to say why this matters plainly. Game Changers is the circuit built for women and marginalized genders in VALORANT, and Riot's own broadcast called this the final standalone Game Changers Championship. So the last one of these ever went to a Latin American team that had to lose first. That's the kind of story that gets a young player in Buenos Aires or Santiago to actually believe the path is real. If you're new to VALORANT and want to know what these players are actually doing out there, I broke down every Valorant agent by role.
The takeaway: $180,000, a trophy, and a first for an entire region.
Results
League of Legends Worlds 2026: Quarterfinals
Nov 3 to 6 | Allen, Texas
- Invictus Gaming 3-1 TOP Esports
- Gen.G 3-0 LYON
- Bilibili Gaming 3-0 Dplus KIA
That last one is the one people are going to be talking about. Dplus KIA went 3-0 in Swiss and came into the quarters unbeaten, and BLG swept them anyway. DK took one dragon out of 15 the whole series. BLG's support ON was series MVP.
The End of the Road for North America
LYON was the last LCS team standing and Gen.G sent them home 3-0. It hurts more because they took Gen.G to three games in Swiss and Inspired has been here before, he had FlyQuest up 2-1 on Gen.G at Worlds in 2024 and couldn't close. Same team, same wall. Worlds is in America this year and NA still won't have a team in the semis.
IEM Beijing 2026
Nov 2 to 8 | Beijing
- NAVI 2-1 PARIVISION, after dropping Mirage in overtime
- BetBoom 2-1 FURIA, closing it out 16-14 in overtime on Nuke
The bigger news happened in groups though. Falcons are out, and NAVI is the team that did it, twice.
ALGS Split 2 Playoffs
Las Vegas | Orleans Arena
Team Liquid won the Apex Legends Global Series Split 2 Playoffs in Vegas, the org's first international ALGS LAN title. Nine games, match point format, and they finished 11 points clear of Team Vision. Sikezz was event MVP and Zer0 called it all. $600,000 for the win.
Call of Duty: The MW4 Era Starts Today
Nov 6 to 8 | Monster Energy Launch Invitational | $100,000
This is the first pro event on Modern Warfare 4 and every CDL team is in it, all 12 franchises plus four Challengers teams split into four groups. FaZe Vegas walks in as the defending champs and they went out in the offseason and got HyDra and Scrap from LA Thieves, which is wild because those two were the Thieves. So now the Thieves are rebuilt and they landed in what people are calling the group of death with Paris Gentle Mates, Cloud9 New York, and OMiT Brooklyn. OpTic Texas opens against Stallions.
It's not a Major and there's no CDL points on it, but it's the first time we get to see who figured out MW4 first. And for a lot of us CoD is the one we actually grew up playing on the couch with the homies, so this is the weekend I'm locked in on.
The takeaway: FaZe has the trophy and the Thieves' best two players. Everybody else is chasing.
On the Radar This Weekend
- T1 vs Karmine Corp, tonight (Friday) at 5 PM ET. Karmine Corp is at their first ever Worlds and they're the last LEC team left. T1 has won the last three. If KC loses, Europe is done.
- Worlds semis, Saturday at 5 PM ET: Gen.G vs Invictus Gaming.
- Worlds semis, Sunday at 5 PM ET: Bilibili Gaming vs the winner of T1 and KC. If it's T1, that's a rematch of the 2024 Worlds final, which BLG lost.
- IEM Beijing: NAVI and BetBoom join MOUZ and The MongolZ in the semis Saturday, and the grand final is overnight Saturday into Sunday at 2:30 AM ET if you're that dedicated.
Culture Pick: Worlds Comes to New York
Fan Fest Nov 12 to 14 | Pier 36, Lower Manhattan
The Worlds final is at Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Nov 14 and it's the first time the final has ever been on the East Coast. Riot is running a Fan Fest at Pier 36 the three days around it with a cosplay showcase, meet and greets, a graffiti wall, and a watch party for the final. Cosplay signups close Nov 8 so if you've been working on a fit, now's the time. Speaking of fits, I already put together a list of the most stylish gamers in esports if you need inspiration.
What's Next
- CoD Launch Invitational: Championship Sunday, Nov 8, live on the Call of Duty League YouTube and Twitch
- Worlds 2026 Grand Final: Nov 14, 2 PM ET, Barclays Center
- Worlds Fan Fest: Nov 12 to 14, Pier 36, NYC
- BLAST R6 Major: Osaka this month, the first big international Siege event in Japan since 2019
Who you got tonight, T1 or KC? Come argue about it in the CXM Discord, I'll be in there for the whole series.
Your call
Did I get this ranking right?
In this story
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