Worlds 2025 Format Explained: Everything You Need to Know

Here is everything you need to know about the Worlds 2025 format. With this year marking major changes to the League of Legends esports ecosystem, it’s time to break down exactly how the biggest tournament of the season works and what it means for the fans.

What is Worlds 2025?

The League of Legends World Championship 2025, also known as Worlds, is the biggest and most important tournament of each competitive LoL esports season. Taking place at the end of the year, it features the best teams from the five major regions in the ecosystem, fighting for the glory and a share of the prize pool, which has been increased to $5 million for this year’s edition.

After the tournament took place in Europe last year, Worlds 2025 will be moving over to China across Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu.

What’s New in Worlds 2025 Format?

There are two major changes coming for this year’s world championship. The first is the addition of Fearless Draft, which will be applied throughout the competition. The decision was made following the early success of the format when it was first used at First Stand earlier in the season.

Fearless brought in more interesting picks and forced teams to be more creative when making meta reads, as the focus has shifted away from finding the optimal picks to finding synergizing team compositions that can also take advantage of the players’ champion pools and characteristics. At MSI, Fearless Draft was one of the main drivers behind many Silver Scrapes series (playing out all five games), making the series a lot more exciting for both online and offline viewers.

The other change is the reduction of the Worlds teams from 20 to 17. This was caused by the merger of the minor regions in the Pacific to form one big region, the LCP, as well as the merger of the North American and South American leagues, forming the LTA.

Each of these two regions will field a total of three teams in this tournament, just like the LEC. The LPL and the LCK, after being the top two regions at MSI, were awarded a fourth additional slot, although the two #4 seeds will have to battle it out in the play-in stage to qualify for the Swiss stage, the first official stage of Worlds 2025. According to the official schedule, the Swiss stage will kick off on October 15.

Worlds 2025 Format is split into 3 stages

Stage 1: Play-In Stage

• 2 Teams
• A single best-of-five series between LPL and LCK #4 seeds featuring Fearless Draft.
• Winners will advance to the Swiss stage, losers will be eliminated and go home early.

Stage 2: Swiss Stage

Introduced in 2023 to replace the group stage, the Swiss stage format has the main goal of creating higher-stakes matches and increase the cross-regional competition right from the start.

• 16 Teams
• The teams play up to five rounds. Each round, teams will play against an opponent with the same win-loss record. Matches are best-of-one until elimination or qualification matches (2 losses or 2 wins), which will then shift to best-of-threes.
• The 8 teams to get 3 wins will advance to the Knockout Stage, while the 8 squads with 3 losses will be eliminated.

Stage 3: Knockout Stage

The Knockout Stage is the last phase that will determine the 2025 World Champions. At the end of the Swiss stage, the eight teams will be drawn into the playoff bracket. The two teams that go undefeated (3-0) in the Swiss stage will face two of the three teams that went 3-2 in the Swiss, giving them an advantage as they would face a “weaker team” on paper. The remaining 3-2 team will be drawn with the three teams that went 3-1 to decide the other two matchups.

• 8 Teams
• Single-elimination playoff bracket. All matches will be best-of-five series featuring Fearless Draft.
• Winning team advances, losers are eliminated.

Check out more news about Worlds 2025.