Worlds 2022: Top Esports and JD Gaming take wins in the Group Stage

JD Gaming now leads Group B at 2-0.

Day 2 of the Worlds 2022 Group Stage ended with Top Esports battling GAM Esports and DAMWON Gaming taking on JD Gaming. Top Esports and JD Gaming came away from these matches victorious, with the latter team now leading Group B at 2-0. Top Esports and Rogue share the top group C spot with 1-0 each. 

GAM Esports’ game represented the re-entry of the VCS in Worlds 2022, making it all the more painful that the team couldn’t secure a win against Top Esports today. This match began at a crawl, with both teams sizing up the map clinically and without risk – that is, until we saw Top pocket four back-to-back kills against GAM nine minutes into the game in an utter bloodbath.

That ended up setting a dark tone for the rest of the match, as far as it went for GAM. The team practically handed Top an early gold lead, which slowly but surely snowballed into a massive lategame advantage. Both teams got into skirmishes across the match over objectives and dragons but time upon time again, we saw GAM players go down while Top pocketed even more kills and gold. GAM couldn’t come back from taking so many losses, but Top had little trouble clinching a win here. 

Next up was JD Gaming versus DWG. DWG are former world champions here, so the team is still one to look out for as the Group Stage rolls onwards. JDG played just as aggressively as we would’ve expected them to, especially after the team’s win yesterday against Evil Geniuses. DWG scored its first kill just five minutes into the game against Kanavi, but this was otherwise a fairly even match well into the lattegame. 

We saw some fun moments play out here, like Yagao’s big Shuffle:

And Canyon strolling up to the enemy team to steal a whole dragon:

While both teams were on even ground where turrets and gold are concerned, JDG stood out in teamfights by coming out on top almost every time. DWG just couldn’t survive in these skirmishes and that resulted in an ever-widening gap in gold and damage that ended up giving JDG the win. With this loss, the LCK has managed to go completely without wins on Day 2 of the Group Stage – an unfortunate achievement it now shares with the LCS. 

Tomorrow, we’ll see Top Esports take on DRX in the last match of the day. JDG will face off against G2 Esports on October 11.