The League of Legends World Championship (Worlds 2020) concluded its group stage. Now, the highly exhilarating knockout stage will commence on Thursday, with the finals scheduled for October 31st. The finals will take place in the Pudong Soccer Stadium, Shanghai and the tournament is organised by TJ Esports, a joint venture between Riot Games and Tencent.
TJ Sports announced a live-audience plan for Worlds final, with 6,312 free tickets and a strict verification and safety process to fulfil COVID-19 restrictions and avoid ticket scalping. The online registrations opened on October 12th and hit 1 million registrations within four hours. 2 million people registered within 12 hours and by the time online registrations closed on 14th October, there were over 3 million registrations for 6,312 tickets.
The selection possibility is only 0.19%, which means selecting one “winner” from approximately 520 people. The selection process would be supervised by Shanghai Jingan Notary Office and the final results will be announced on the League of Legends official website. The winners will need to present their Chinese ID cards or Passports (in case they are not Chinese nationals) on 31st October at Pudong Soccer Stadium. There will be a strict temperature check and facial recognition on the gates to avoid any unwarranted personnel.
TJ sports repeatedly emphasized that the ticket can not be transferred or resold to others, to avoid tickets being resold by scalpers. However, scalpers still posted their bulk ticket information on Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao, with a single ticket for a maximum price of ¥30K RMB ($4.5K), and ¥7.5K ($1.1K) for 100% winning the selection process, according to a report by Chinese business outlet The Paper. The claim over the 100% chance to win sounds dubious, especially when one needs to bypass a facial-recognition station and the scrutiny of Riot Games, TJ Sports, and Shanghai Jingan Notary Office.
Aside from the free tickets, there is no information on tickets that can be purchased as of now. The Pudong Soccer Stadium can hold a maximum audience of 33,000 people. However, in touch with the social distancing norms, it’s unlikely that all of the 33,000 seats will be filled.