Olivia R. April 2, 2019
Tyler "Tyler1" Steinkamp owes Hammoudi “Yassuo” Abdalrhman $10,000.
The two streamers made a bet earlier this month, seeing who could climb the highest in League of Legends with an unranked account. The only rules set by the Twitch personalities was that Tyler1 couldn't use his favorite champion Draven, while Yassuo was banned from playing Yasuo.
To the surprise of few, Yassuo came out on top, finishing with a Grandmaster rank and 250 LP. Tyler1 ended his month's run at Diamond with just 50 LP. While it appears that Yassuo is clearly the better player of the two, it's less certain who would have won if Tyler1 was able to play with his signature Draven.
Since Draven wasn't an option, Tyler1 played Sivir for the majority of the bet, resulting in a 62 percnt win rate after completing 73 games. Tyler1 was also seen using Vayne, Ezreal, and Kai'Sa. Yassuo ended the bet with a 71 percent win rate after 56 games played. He accomplished this predominantly with Irelia, sometimes playing Neeko, LeBlanc, or Akali.
The $10,000 wasn't the only thing on the line for these two streamers, however. As previously reported, Tyler1 and Yassuo both saw their viewership skyrocket thanks to the prideful bet. Yassuo saw the largest increase in traffic. Before the bet, he had an average concurrent viewership of 4,600. Halfway through March he was at a 37.7K average.
Despite the success of the wager, it didn't come without its drama. Because of the notoriety of the bet, many League of Legends players were aware of the stakes, resulting in purposely thrown matches in an attempt to sway the outcome. Even former pros such as Michael “bigfatlp” Tang appeared to sabatoge some of Tyler1's games, and Tyler1's fans took to chat to verbally abuse bigfatlp for his poor performances.