The Red Bull Factions are taking place in Milan

Though hardly as well known as the Pax or E3, the Milan Games Week is nevertheless impressive. Taking place in the Italian city Milan – as the name reveals – it is a sizeable games convention with a strong line-up of both events and competitions.

© Milan Games Week via Facebook

This year, the MGW has upped the ante even more – on an area of nearly 16.000 square feet, the esports event is going to celebrate everyone’s favourite pastime: Video games (and esports, of course)! Over the course of three days, from the 5th of October until the 7th and from 9 am until 7 pm, countless stages, panels and presentations are waiting for exciting gaming fans lucky enough to be in or around Milan that weekend.

As part of the MGW, there are several live national and international tournaments that take place during the duration of the event. They include games like Fortnite, Hearthstone, and most notably, League of Legends. There isn’t just one LoL event taking place during the MGW but several.

In addition to the UES or University Esports Series showdown that sees the best European University teams competing, the Red Bull Factions tournament is also going to take place – at least its finals are. The RBF is, unsurprisingly, sponsored by Red Bull.

The Italian League of Legends event has a modest prize pool of only about €5000 and the finals have the best 4 of the original 32 teams competing. After already having gone through two qualifier stages, the final four will be up against each other in Single Elimination Brackets with simple best of three rules.

© Red Bull

The pick and ban phase is relatively simple as well – each team bans two factions, 2 more are banned by the live audience and Runeterra can’t be banned. Each team chooses an unbanned faction, they cannot choose the same as their rivals, and they can’t pick the same one they used in a previous win in the series. Each team picks 3 heroes from the chosen faction and 2 from Runeterra.

This year, the four teams that made it to the finals are Outplayed, MOBA ROG, Team Forge and iDomina eSports. The first match will be between Team Forge and iDomina, the second between MOBA ROG and Outplayed. The winning teams will then face each other in one final showdown to determine the overall winner.

The Italian-based RBF tournament is a great chance for LoL fans to get into a more local competition than the big championships that usually take centre-stage: Here, smaller, local teams are supported and given the chance to shine.

The four top teams have proven themselves to be well capable of playing on international as well as Italian stages, so it’s really no surprise that this year’s Milan Games Week is expecting more visitors than ever before. The events will of course, also be streamed on Twitch, so even if you aren’t in Milan, you’ll easily be able to watch the action of the Red Bull Factions tournament semi-finale and finale.

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