K-beauty, K-food, K-dramas and K-pop, explained
Korean esports teams centre on the 10 clubs in the LCK (League of Legends Champions Korea), and most of them carry the name of a telecom, an insurer, a bank or a food company. T1 grew out of SK Telecom, Gen.G descends from Samsung’s old teams, and Hanwha Life Esports belongs to an insurer inside the Hanwha Group. Learn who owns a team and you can usually guess how it spends, how it behaves, and which rivalry it’s cau…
The StarCraft Korea national sport story began in 1998, and within about three years the game ruled the country. That happened because three things lined up at once: thousands of new PC bangs (internet cafés), cable TV channels that put matches on air every week, and corporate teams that paid players salaries. The same machinery later produced the LCK, the League of Legends league that Faker and T1 made famous around…
Why Korea is good at League of Legends: its teams won every Worlds title from 2013 to 2017. That run grew out of two decades of groundwork: PC bang culture, a ladder packed with elite players on one fast server, team houses that make practice a full-time job, and the LCK, which Riot Games has run as a franchised league since 2021.