A pick’em is a prediction contest where you forecast match or tournament outcomes instead of placing a monetary bet on them. In esports, the most well-known version is Riot Games’ official League of Legends pick’ems, run around major events like the World Championship and Mid-Season Invitational, where fans predict series winners, group standings, and other tournament outcomes in exchange for in-game rewards rather than cash. The same basic concept — predict outcomes, get scored against reality — shows up across most major esports titles in some form, whether run officially by a publisher or league, or informally by community sites and creators.
How League of Legends pick’ems typically work
Riot’s pick’em format for League of Legends has generally centered on predicting match winners and series results across a tournament’s stages — group stage, knockout bracket, and sometimes special categories like which team will finish with the best record. Correct predictions earn points or in-game currency that can be spent on cosmetic rewards tied to the event. The exact structure, scoring, and rewards have varied between tournaments and years, so the specifics for any given event are best confirmed directly through Riot’s official pick’em page for that tournament rather than assumed from a prior year’s format.
Pick’ems vs. fantasy vs. sportsbook betting
These three formats get used interchangeably in casual conversation but work differently:
- Pick’ems ask you to predict outcomes (who wins) for points or rewards, usually run by the publisher or league itself.
- Fantasy has you draft a roster of real players or teams and score points based on their actual statistical performance across a period.
- Sportsbook betting involves wagering real money against odds set by a licensed operator, with a payout determined by those odds.
Pick’ems are generally free to enter and reward-based rather than cash-based, which is a meaningful distinction if you’re trying to understand what kind of product you’re actually looking at.
What makes a good pick’em strategy
The analytical process is the same one that applies to any esports prediction, whether it’s for a pick’em, fantasy contest, or betting market:
- Weight recent form heavier than season-long record. A team’s last few series tell you more about current level than results from months earlier.
- Account for roster and coaching changes. A midseason substitution can shift a team’s ceiling and floor significantly.
- Study draft and map pool tendencies. In League of Legends specifically, champion priority and ban patterns reveal a lot about how a team plans to win.
- Don’t overweight reputation. Historically dominant teams and regions can and do lose to lower-seeded opponents — pick’em brackets are full of upsets every single tournament.
- Track your own accuracy over time. If you’re doing pick’ems regularly, keeping a simple log of your predictions versus outcomes is the only real way to know if your process is improving.
A word on accuracy expectations
Even well-informed predictions are wrong regularly — esports is volatile by nature, with format changes, patch shifts and roster moves creating more variance than most traditional sports. No pick’em strategy or prediction framework produces certainty, and any source claiming a “guaranteed” pick’em strategy is overselling what’s actually possible.