Gambit CIS League of Legends team concluded an undefeated run in the regular season of CIS Challenger Series with two 2:1 victories over Just.MSI Alpha and MMR in the playoffs and thus became the winner of an inaugural Challenger Series season in CIS. Upon completion of the playoffs, our Mid Laner Anton "Fomko" Fomkin shared his thoughts on our games, reliance on Diamondprox as well as the structure of the league.

Semifinal against Just.MSI Alpha:
In the first game of the series prior to a server crash, despite being down in kills – 0:7, we were on an equal footing in terms of gold. We could easily close this game out thanks to Lulu's buffs – all we had to do is get a couple of items on LeX and kill Ahri. But the game was restarted and we had nothing to do with it.
We lost the draft in the second game. We took LeBlanc when they had lots of CC, added a useless Malphite and an AD Carry who is weak against enemy tanks.
In the third game we decided to draft champions who are strong against tanky opposition and added Azir into the mix. They were forced to stack Magic Resistance, therefore LeX was able to kill them easily. In the fourth game we simply outplayed them.

Grand Final:
I do not wish to comment on our match against MMR. When there is no incentive to win competitive games – it's not a tournament, it is an exhibition game [Ed. Note: there was no incentive for winning the final match.].

League format:
The current format is very questionable. It is strange that you have to play an entire split where you fight for a chance to qualify for LCL, and then play the second split there, and afterwards there are six months of nothing, if you fail to advance to Words' qualifiers. I believe that Riot's Russian HQ has to implement additional ways to qualify for LCL or set at least some kind of a prize pool for CIS Challenger Series.

Reliance on Diamondprox:
I frequently see people saying that "if Diamond wasn't there, this and this would happen with Gambit". It is hard to respond to, since we had been playing with other junglers prior to Diamondprox joining us. We had been playing fine, but our style was a bit different. Danil improved our macro game and understanding of what to do in different circumstances.

Going forward:
Depending on which team TORNADO ROX chooses, us or MMR, we will prepare to face them or Team differential at The Promotion Tournament.