KT Rolster mid laner Bdd addressed the media following his team’s heartbreaking 3-2 defeat to T1 in the League of Legends World Championship 2025 Final. The press conference came immediately after Game five, and Bdd opened with gratitude toward KT fans before diving into what went wrong.
“We lost, so the score doesn’t mean anything,” Bdd said. He thanked supporters for cheering regardless of KT’s performance and apologized for another disappointing finish on the world stage.
Bdd admitted the pressure of the Final affected him more than expected. He entered the series wanting to “show everything” rather than obsess over winning, but the thought “we have to win” kept resurfacing. He confessed he “got excited” without realizing it, acknowledging that nerves crept in on the biggest stage.
The explanation then shifted to KT’s Game five draft, which Bdd described as one of their best-prepared options heading into the decider. KT anticipated T1 would lock in a dive and engage composition built around champions like Camille and Galio. Their counter was a long-range, poke-heavy draft with scaling insurance.
KT drafted Smolder for Bdd in mid lane and Ziggs for deokdam in bot. Yorick went to PerfecT in top to create split-push pressure. Nautilus supported with point-and-click crowd control and peel. The game plan was straightforward: secure early dragons using lane priority, then leverage Yorick’s side-lane pressure to buy time for Smolder to scale into a late-game monster.
T1 responded with Galio for Faker, Miss Fortune for Gumayusi, and Camille for Doran. The engage tools were exactly what KT expected.
One gank changed everything
The plan collapsed at the 2:30 mark. T1 jungler Oner pathed top for an early gank on Yorick, catching PerfecT off-guard and putting KT’s side-lane pressure behind before it ever started. That single kill tilted the entire strategy.
With Yorick behind, KT couldn’t safely split-push. They were forced to group more often than their composition demanded, feeding directly into T1’s teamfight-focused engage windows. Meanwhile, Miss Fortune gained a significant advantage over Ziggs in bot lane, amplifying T1’s damage profile for 5v5 fights.
KT’s poke and scaling plan required clean vision control and careful macro execution. Instead, T1’s early aggression into side lanes kept KT reactive. The dragons KT wanted to secure early became contested battlegrounds where T1’s commit-and-dive style thrived.
The match was played under Fearless Draft rules, meaning champions used earlier in the series couldn’t be picked again. This format demands deep champion pools and extensive series-long preparation, raising the stakes for each game’s draft strategy. KT’s Game five plan reflected that preparation, but execution under pressure proved impossible once the early game slipped away.
