Whether fans, teams, and commentators like it or not, the World Championship is everything in League of Legends.

Success or failure will decide the fates of every team that mounts the stage in Wuhan, China, as play-in and group stages commence. With the best teams from each region attending, winning doesn't just mean personal pride, but not letting your team down or region down. For the whole year leading up to the next World Championship, winners will be exalted, losers condemned and mocked. With the new historical rating system, a loss could even mean the shrinking of a region from elite status.

For many teams, because of the history of dominance of South Korean LoL, the goal for success is merely escaping the group stage. That ultimately makes best-of-ones, the least rigorous and competitive of all formats, the single most important format in League of Legends.

With South Korea dominating for the last three years since the four group structure began, only one South Korean team has failed to escape group stage in the first position (KOO Tigers in 2015). Beyond that, a South Korean team has only lost a best-of-five to a non-South Korean team once. That means, outside the luck of the draw, the second team out may have a 33 to 100 percent chance of dropping out in the quarterfinal. As a result, making it out of groups -- just making it to the quarterfinal -- could be the peak of success to which a team aspires. It's a safe minimum goal "making it out of groups" seems feasible, it proves that you can make top 8, and you can stake some claim to the second best region.

Let's say a team can defy the odds and defeat a South Korean team in a best-of-five. None of that even matters if the shocking and sudden best-of-one group stage cannot be circumvented.

For North American and European LCS teams whose champions Team SoloMid and G2 Esports have evolved by taking advantage of the ability to adapt across series, that sounds absurd.

In 2017 Spring Split, it became almost a running joke. Team SoloMid always loses the first game of a series. Even TSM acknowledged it.

"One of the reasons that we lose the first game more often is that the assumptions I go into the first game are risky or I don't respond well to something they do that's unexpected," Team SoloMid Head Coach Parth "Parth" Naidu Anand said in an AMA, "but adaptations are usually straightforward."

G2 Esports players and coaches have expressed similar sentiments. Against the Splyce series, for example, Joey "YoungBuck" Steltenpool mentioned that G2 didn't necessarily have experience playing against the Jarvan IV-Galio combination their opponents used in the first game, but could quickly identify the issue of having a weak jungle matchup for Game 2.

Halfway through 2016, the EU and NA LCS changed from best-of-one to best-of-two and best-of-three in the regular season, respectively. That eliminated best-of-ones from every Riot Games event except the Mid Season Invitational and World Championship group stages. Of course, regular season games are the least important sets of the year in terms of overall impact on whether a team succeeds or fails. In some cases, regular season losses are even borderline encouraged for a team to work on its flaws, as arguably, EU LCS team Misfits would not have made the final this split had it not actively worked its own weaknesses onstage and lost games as a result.

This change also rewarded the ability to adapt, and G2 and Team SoloMid have become exceptional series teams to top their respective leagues. But they do so by identifying weaknesses and altering the approach. They don't come out of the gate swinging because, outside of Worlds and MSI, they haven't had to.