I have noted elsewhere that Sherlock Holmes held the opinions of a crowd in low regard. During the knockout stage of the 2026 World Championship he had an unusual opportunity to test that prejudice, because forty-seven of our readers were picking matches alongside him, and a calculating engine was picking them too.
“Eight teams, Watson,” he said on the morning of the first quarterfinal, “and seven series to settle the matter. Best of five, every one. You will find this stage much less amusing than the last. The longer the contest, the less room there is for accident.”
| Match | Model’s pick | Model gave | Crowd’s picks | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IG v TES, quarterfinal, Nov 3 | IG | 51% | 13 IG, 10 TES | IG 3–1 |
| GEN v LYON, quarterfinal, Nov 4 | GEN | 87% | 23 GEN, 1 LYON | GEN 3–0 |
| BLG v DK, quarterfinal, Nov 5 | BLG | 65% | 15 BLG, 13 DK | BLG 3–0 |
| T1 v KC, quarterfinal, Nov 6 | T1 | 70% | 22 T1, 8 KC | T1 3–1 |
| GEN v IG, semifinal, Nov 7 | GEN | 91% | 19 GEN, 8 IG | GEN 3–0 |
| BLG v T1, semifinal, Nov 8 | BLG | 63% | 4 BLG, 19 T1 | BLG 3–1 |
A coin with a memory
The first quarterfinal brought together two of the teams that had most embarrassed the model in the Swiss stage: Invictus Gaming and Top Esports, rated twelfth and eleventh of the sixteen. The machine gave Invictus fifty-one per cent, which is to say it shrugged. Holmes considered this the most honest number it produced all month.
“It does not know,” he said, “and it says so. That is rarer than you would think, in machines and in men.” Invictus won three games to one.
The obvious, confirmed
Gen.G against Lyon was the opposite case. The model gave Gen.G eighty-seven per cent; twenty-three of our twenty-four pickers agreed; Gen.G won three games to none. Holmes did not look up from his chemistry for the result.
Bilibili Gaming against Dplus KIA divided the crowd almost perfectly, fifteen picks to thirteen, while the model leaned to Bilibili at sixty-five per cent. Bilibili won without dropping a game. T1 against Karmine Corp went as both crowd and model expected, three games to one, though Holmes took a quiet interest in the fact that Karmine Corp, who had come through the Play-Ins, had reached a quarterfinal at all.
“Note it, Watson. The team that had to win three series simply to enter the Swiss stage won six series at this tournament before T1 stopped them. That is not luck. Luck does not hold for six rounds.”
The semifinals
By the seventh of November the model had called every knockout match correctly, and Holmes had begun to treat it with the wary respect he reserves for an opponent. Its most confident call of the entire tournament came that day: ninety-one per cent for Gen.G against Invictus. Gen.G won three games to none, and Invictus, who had beaten Hanwha Life and Top Esports and Lyon on the way, went home with more than anyone had given them credit for.
The second semifinal was the one Holmes had been waiting for. The model favoured Bilibili Gaming over T1 at sixty-three per cent. Our crowd took the other side by nineteen picks to four.
“Here is your experiment, Watson. On one side, a machine that has seen every game both teams played this year. On the other, nineteen people who have seen T1 win a great many World Championships. Which will you back?”
I confess I backed T1. Bilibili won three games to one, and their mid laner, Knight, now stands second only to Gen.G’s Canyon by kill-and-assist ratio. In the knockout stage the crowd had been right seventy per cent of the time in the quarterfinals and forty-six per cent in the semifinals. The machine had been right every time.
Odds and ends
Holmes kept, as he always does, a list of small facts that may matter later. After ninety-four games the tournament had seen a hundred and three different champions, a single pentakill (Smash of Dplus KIA, on Kai’Sa) and not one reverse sweep. Nocturne had been banned sixty-seven times, more than any other champion; Lee Sin had been picked in twenty-nine games, more than any other. Neither appeared in the evidence of any crime, but Holmes wrote them down all the same.
The full tables are on our Worlds helper, and the results of every pick are on the pick’em page.
A Sherlock Holmes pastiche; the characters are Arthur Conan Doyle’s. Every result, rating, probability and pick count in it is real, taken from our Worlds helper and pick’em on the date above.