Bugi is an Unstoppable Machine
Right now, Lee “Bugi” Seong-yeop has been the best performing player of the whole league, and it’s not even close. With a 1st-place finish, 4 MVPs and multiple Player of the Week awards, the 24-year-old Korean jungler is looking to roll over the summer split without anyone on his path capable of stopping him. The Bugi we are seeing now is looking like a completely new one compared to the one we saw during the 2021 season play for Furious Gaming.
It doesn’t matter if he is playing Wukong, Xin Zhao, or Vi, Bugi is fully capable of carrying the entire weight of his team without breaking a sweat. Sure, Estral’s lanes are quite solid and they don’t require much help from Bugi, but that’s the whole point. We’ve seen many junglers fall into conformity if their lanes are in a winning position, but not Bugi. If he has any window to invade or look for a skirmish, he will do it, and he will be successful at it.
It’s impossible to ignore Bugi’s form heading into the playoffs. Throughout his last 3 games, Bugi has maintained a whopping 21 KDA, while playing 3 different champions. To top it all off, 2 out of those 3 games he played against top-4 teams. Only time will tell which team is going to be the one stopping Bugi, but it’s already been 7 weeks of competition and not a single squad has come even close to doing so.
This time he’ll be going up against Dimitry, a jungler that showed a lot of promise throughout the spring split, but has shown a bit of his weaker side during the regular season. While the Dominican jungler has a lot of potential, he really struggled against Bugi in both encounters. I wouldn’t be surprised if Aze ends up throwing more than a couple of bans towards Bugi in order to put Dimitry in a comfortable position.
5Kid and Straight are Back in Form
After an incredibly shaky start of the summer split, the Aze bot lane has managed to pick up their slack and now are looking like the strongest bot duo in the league. First, it was 5Kid that had some COVID-related issues during the first couple of weeks, but now that he is fully healed up, there is no other ADC that comes close to his level. In the case of Straight, he had a very unfortunate streak as he faced both COVID-related issues and some other health issues. Now that they have both overcome their health issues, they are looking to claim the title a 2nd time.
Sure, every single player in the Aze lineup is playing much better now heading into the playoffs(Lonely might be an exception), but what Straight brings to the table has no comparison. It’s incredible that a player that has only been playing support for less than a year is putting up such clutch performances. With picks like Rakan and Alistar, the 22-year-old Ecuadorian support has proven to be one of the best supports we’ve had in Latin America.
Last split, the 5Kid-Straight duo only had a single bot lane capable of challenging them. It was former Estral’s bot lane Bvoy & Mia that could put up a good fight against them. Now that they are gone, 5Kid and Straight are by far the most threatening bot lane in the league.
They’ll be going up against Estral’s newest acquisition Kindless, who is not a bad player at all, but his passive playstyle will give a lot of room for Straight to roam around the map.
Estral vs Aze Game Information
- Date: Saturday, August 6
- Time: 4:00pm ET
- Estral vs Aze Live Stream: LLA – Twitch
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Estral vs Aze Predictions
These two teams have been the most interesting ones to watch this summer regular season. Estral had a dominating start of the split and they never slowed down, in fact, it was quite the opposite as they’ve been constantly improving week to week.
On the other hand we have Aze, a team that had a disappointing start but has been ramping up incredibly fast, heading into the playoffs winning 5 out of their 6 last games.
While it would be incredibly exciting to see Aze picking up the victory, I really doubt they have any chance against Estral, at least not in the first round of the playoffs. The lol Odds project that Estral shouldn’t have much trouble winning over Aze as they are many steps ahead of the competition.
With that being said, I do think that Aze is going to make some sort of miracle run through the losers bracket where they will end up meeting Estral in the finals once again. Make sure to check out the rest of our Esports Picks as we’ll be covering the entirety of the LLA playoffs.
