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Immortals was able to improve its playoff chances by routing an incomplete Counter Logic Gaming roster in Saturday's Week 9 Day 2 North American League Championship Series match in Los Angeles.
A few minutes before the start of Game 1, news broke that CLG's star AD carry, Trevor "Stixxay" Hayes, would miss Saturday's game thanks to an illness, opening the door for emergency sub of Joseph "Joey" Hasleman. That meant that Zaqueri "aphromoo" Black would slide into the ADC role with Joey playing aphromoo's support position.
Immortals (8-9, 21-21 match record) had no reservations about capitalizing on the roster advantage and picked poke-oriented Karma for support Kim "Olleh" Joo-sung. Once Game 1 began, bottom lane predictably skewed into Immortals' favor where it remained the entirety of the match. Immortals forced fights often, hoping to snowball a lead and tilt the series in its favor before the opposing team's bottom lane could become accustomed to each other.
CLG (9-8, 20-21) was not ready to roll over, displaying great team collapses to keep the kill trades mostly even throughout early game. Unfortunately for CLG, the amount of attention the bottom laners required meant jungler Jake "Xmithie" Puchero was not able to devote enough attention to jungle objectives, and Immortals jungler Joshua "Dardoch" Hartnett was able to secure all four drakes and a Baron. Immortals built an insurmountable 10,000-gold advantage through the mid game and cruised to a 36 minute Game 1 win with an 18 to 10 kill advantage.
Immortals once again took advantage of the new-look bottom lane to start Game 2, with Dardoch managing to claim first blood in the area thanks to an opportune gank. That became the statt of an awful game for CLG's ADC and support combo. In Game 2, neither aphromoo nor Joey were able to secure a kill, but they accounted for 12 deaths. Dardoch's first blood kickstarted what was a dominant performance in Game 2, as he amassed an astonishing 13/2/5 KDA (kills/deaths/assists) while leading his team's charge with blistering tempo around the map. The game was never in question, and Immortals closed out the series by winning Game 2 in under 28 minutes, this time with a 21-to-6 kill advantage.
Immortals' playoff hopes will be on the line when it plays Team Dignitas at 3 p.m. ET on Sunday. CLG will hope for its ADC to make a return when it takes on Team EnVyUs at 6 p.m. ET.