Caps Hall of Legends: Riot revisits the 10 plays that defined the King of the West

Rasmus “Caps” Winther has spent almost a decade giving European League of Legends fans reasons to believe that the gap between the West and the world’s strongest regions can still be crossed. Now, with the G2 Esports mid laner officially becoming the third player inducted into Riot Games’ Hall of Legends — and the first Western professional ever to receive the honor — LoL Esports is revisiting ten of the plays that best explain how the teenager who joined Fnatic in 2017 eventually became the “King of the West.”

The new The BEST Plays from NEWEST Hall of Legends Inductee video puts LEC caster Aaron “Medic” Chamberlain in charge of breaking down ten defining moments from Caps’ European career. Rather than functioning as a simple montage of kills, the selection focuses on the qualities that have repeatedly separated Caps from other elite mid laners: creativity, mechanical execution, willingness to take risks and an unusual ability to identify plays that many competitors would never attempt in the first place.

Those characteristics have survived enormous changes around him. Caps entered Europe’s highest competitive level with Fnatic, reached the World Championship final in 2018, moved directly to rival G2 Esports, won the 2019 Mid-Season Invitational, reached a second consecutive Worlds final and then remained at the center of G2 through multiple roster generations and competitive eras. Riot’s Hall of Legends announcement now places that career alongside those of Faker and Uzi, transforming what European fans have argued for years into official recognition: Caps is no longer simply one of the greatest players the West has produced. He is formally part of League of Legends’ competitive pantheon.

Caps becomes the first Western player in the Hall of Legends

Riot Games officially announced Caps as its 2026 Hall of Legends inductee on August 16, making him the third player selected since the program began. Faker inaugurated the Hall of Legends in 2024, Uzi followed in 2025 and Caps now becomes its first representative from the Western professional ecosystem. Riot describes him as a player whose career reshaped what Western teams believed was possible internationally, highlighting his playmaking, leadership and ability to remain composed during the highest-pressure moments of competition.

The selection is especially significant because Riot does not simply choose inductees internally through a marketing decision. According to the company’s official explanation, approximately 20 eligible players with at least five years of Tier 1 competition are nominated by regional Riot staff before an independent panel of around 50 esports veterans votes on the candidates. International standing, regional and international championships, role-specific statistics and the player’s overall contribution to competitive League of Legends are among the factors considered.

Caps therefore enters a deliberately small group. Riot is inducting only one professional each year, which makes being selected third — while still actively competing — an unusually strong statement about how the company and its voting panel evaluate his influence on League esports. The honor is not simply based on European trophies; it reflects a career in which Caps became the central figure behind many of the West’s most credible attempts to challenge Korea and China.

The teenage Fnatic prodigy quickly proved that playing safely was never going to define him

Caps arrived in Fnatic’s starting lineup in 2017 as an exceptionally young and mechanically gifted mid laner, and his earliest professional games already established the identity that Medic’s retrospective emphasizes. Even when the optimal competitive decision appeared to be patience, Caps regularly looked for another possibility: a solo kill, an unexpected flank, an unconventional champion or an aggressive mechanical sequence capable of changing the state of a game immediately.

That willingness to experiment would occasionally create the less flattering “Craps” half of the community’s famous “Claps or Craps” nickname, but it also made Caps unusually difficult to prepare for. G2’s own current biography describes him as capable of playing assassins, mages and marksmen while dazzling through his mechanical ability, and Riot’s Hall of Legends announcement makes essentially the same point from a different angle: opponents have never been able to feel completely prepared for what he might attempt.

By 2018, the experiment had become championship-caliber. Fnatic won both the Spring and Summer EU LCS titles and then produced Europe’s deepest World Championship run in years, reaching the 2018 final before losing to Invictus Gaming. Caps was no longer merely an exciting prospect. At 18, he had already become one of the central figures in a Western team challenging for the Summoner’s Cup.

The creativity behind Caps’ plays has always mattered as much as the mechanics

Calling Caps mechanically gifted is accurate, but it is also incomplete. Plenty of professional League players can execute difficult combos, react quickly and position precisely during fights. What makes so many of Caps’ highlights memorable is that the mechanical execution frequently begins with a decision that another player might never make.

One of the clearest historical examples is his willingness to use unconventional champions or bring picks into situations where opponents are not expecting them. His champion pool has repeatedly included assassins, control mages, marksmen and situational counterpicks, and he even moved from mid lane to bot lane for G2 during the first half of 2020 before returning to mid for Summer. That flexibility was not a short experiment during an irrelevant period: Caps and G2 continued winning domestically while reorganizing their roster around those role changes.

Medic’s focus on creativity in the new top-ten retrospective is therefore essential. Caps’ best plays are often memorable because the audience can recognize the risk involved before the result is known. The spacing may be extremely narrow, the target may appear impossible to reach or the engagement may initially look unfavorable, but Caps repeatedly backs himself to identify the one sequence that transforms the situation.

2018 turned Caps from Europe’s next superstar into a Worlds finalist

The 2018 season remains one of the foundational chapters of Caps’ Hall of Legends case. Fnatic dominated Europe, winning both EU LCS splits, and then advanced all the way to the World Championship final. Although Invictus Gaming ultimately won the title 3–0, Fnatic’s run changed expectations around what the modern European scene could accomplish internationally.

Caps’ willingness to ignore conventional assumptions was already visible during that period. His champion choices and aggressive interpretation of mid lane created situations where opponents could not simply prepare for a standard control-mage matchup. By the end of the year, he had gone from playing his first full seasons of top-level European League to competing on the biggest stage in the game.

Yet the most consequential decision came after the Worlds final rather than during it. Caps left Fnatic and joined their greatest domestic rival, G2 Esports, in November 2018, forcing Luka “Perkz” Perković — himself one of Europe’s defining mid laners — to move to the bot lane to make room. G2 describes the transfer as the moment Caps left its biggest rival to join a roster prepared to build around him. It was one of the most dramatic European roster moves ever made, and within months it produced the strongest international result of Caps’ career.

The 2019 Akali pentakill against T1 captured everything that made peak G2 dangerous

Any retrospective of Caps’ greatest moments inevitably returns to MSI 2019, and one play in particular has become inseparable from the mythology surrounding that G2 roster. In Game 2 of the semifinal against SK Telecom T1, with G2 trailing the series 1–0, Caps took over on Akali and finished the match with a pentakill inside T1’s base.

The significance went well beyond adding five kills to a highlight reel. G2 were playing against Faker and one of Korea’s most historically intimidating organizations in a best-of-five that would determine whether Europe reached the MSI final. Red Bull’s retrospective of the moment describes how Caps chose Akali specifically because her mobility gave him the confidence to survive and re-enter chaotic engagements. When G2 pushed into T1’s base, Caps moved through the fight, eliminated multiple members and then helped chase down the final target to complete the pentakill rather than simply ending the Nexus immediately.

G2 eventually won the semifinal 3–2 before defeating Team Liquid 3–0 in the final, becoming MSI champions. Caps also collected the tournament’s individual MVP honor, and the victory remains the defining modern international championship for European League of Legends.

The pentakill embodies exactly what Medic emphasizes when discussing Caps: mechanical skill matters, but fearlessness transforms that skill into something memorable. Many players can execute Akali combos. Far fewer are comfortable doing it against T1, in an international semifinal, while their team is already trailing the series.

His Irelia against Team Liquid became another symbol of Europe’s greatest international run

Caps produced another of his most recognizable mechanical sequences during the 2019 MSI final against Team Liquid, when his Irelia survived and outplayed a two-versus-one situation. LoL Esports itself highlighted the sequence immediately after G2 became MSI champions, using the play as an example of the mid laner’s performance during the tournament.

The surrounding context makes the moment particularly important to his career. G2 were not merely winning occasional international series in 2019. Their roster was threatening to complete one of League esports’ most prestigious possible seasons after winning Europe, MSI and another domestic championship before eventually reaching the Worlds final. Caps was the only Western player to appear in back-to-back World Championship finals, first with Fnatic in 2018 and then G2 in 2019.

That is also why the 2019 highlights continue to occupy such a large place in discussions about Caps’ legacy. They happened during the moment when European confidence was at its highest. G2 could defeat T1 in best-of-five competition, dominate Team Liquid in an all-Western MSI final and enter Worlds genuinely considered capable of winning the entire tournament.

Caps became the face of that possibility.

Two consecutive Worlds finals created the foundation of the “hope of the West” identity

The phrase “hope of the West” can sound overly dramatic until Caps’ international record is placed in context. Western teams have spent most of League of Legends history chasing Korean and Chinese organizations at the largest tournaments. Reaching one Worlds final is therefore exceptional. Caps reached two consecutive finals with two different European organizations.

Fnatic’s 2018 run ended against Invictus Gaming. G2’s 2019 attempt ended against FunPlus Phoenix. Caps never lifted the Summoner’s Cup during either campaign, but the failures do not erase what reaching those matches represented. For two consecutive years, a Western mid laner stood one best-of-five away from becoming a World Champion.

That repeated proximity is central to why Caps occupies a different historical position from almost every other successful European player. His legacy is not built entirely on domestic dominance, nor entirely on one international upset. It combines longevity at home with repeated evidence that his teams could reach the final stages of global tournaments.

Even Faker’s congratulatory message following the Hall of Legends announcement referenced the unfinished part of that story, expressing hope that Caps continues working hard and eventually wins Worlds. The comment resonated because the missing World Championship is simultaneously the largest gap in Caps’ trophy cabinet and one of the reasons his continued career remains interesting.

Caps remained the center of G2 long after the legendary 2019 roster disappeared

The easiest career for a highlight video to celebrate is one with a short, obvious peak. Caps presents the opposite problem. His defining plays stretch from Fnatic in 2017 through several completely different generations of G2, which is why the new video can trace almost a decade of European competition rather than concentrating entirely on 2018 and 2019.

Perkz eventually left. Jankos eventually left. Wunder and Mikyx moved on. G2 rebuilt repeatedly, but Caps remained the organization’s competitive center. His current G2 biography still identifies him as the mid laner around whom the team’s World Championship ambitions revolve, and he remains under contract as the organization continues competing in 2026.

That longevity matters because League of Legends changes aggressively. Champions are reworked, items disappear, map systems change, macro concepts evolve and entire generations of professional players arrive with different mechanical standards. A player who was world-class in 2018 cannot simply repeat the same habits indefinitely and expect to remain relevant.

Caps has instead changed alongside the game. The specific champions and systems surrounding his highlights vary enormously, but the underlying approach remains recognizable: push the mechanical limits of a situation, search for unconventional solutions and accept a degree of risk that more conservative players might reject.

Seventeen European titles show why the highlights are supported by sustained results

Spectacular plays alone do not earn a Hall of Legends induction. Caps’ highlight reel is supported by one of the most extensive domestic trophy collections in Western League of Legends history. Current reporting around his induction credits him with 17 European championships across the EU LCS and LEC era, a record accumulated between Fnatic and G2.

The number requires some context because Europe’s competitive formats have changed substantially over the course of his career, and recent seasons have offered more individual titles than the old two-split system. It is therefore not useful to compare the raw number directly against players from every historical format without considering those structural differences. What the total does demonstrate is remarkable consistency: whenever Europe reorganized itself, Caps kept reaching finals and winning championships.

That distinction strengthens the Hall of Legends argument. His career contains both an exceptional international peak and sustained regional dominance. Players often achieve one without the other. Some become domestic legends without ever threatening the best teams internationally, while others produce one extraordinary global tournament before gradually disappearing from title contention.

Caps has remained relevant across both dimensions for almost a decade.

The Hall of Legends recognition is about influence as much as trophies

Riot’s selection criteria explicitly extend beyond championship totals. The Hall of Legends panel considers international standing, individual statistics, regional and international achievements and a player’s overall contribution to competitive League of Legends. Caps’ career illustrates why that final category matters.

For an entire generation of European players and fans, his teams represented proof that the West did not have to enter international tournaments merely hoping to survive. Fnatic could reach a Worlds final. G2 could eliminate T1. Europe could win MSI. A Western roster could enter Worlds as a legitimate championship contender rather than as an entertaining outsider.

Riot’s global head of LoL Esports, Chris Greeley, specifically identified Caps’ “X factor” in the company’s induction announcement, pointing toward his playmaking, leadership and composure under pressure while describing his influence on generations of Western competitors.

That makes the new top-ten video particularly appropriate. Statistics can establish that Caps won championships, but highlights explain why people remember him. They show the decisions that created the reputation: the unnecessary-looking sidestep that makes a skillshot miss, the apparently suicidal engage that becomes the winning fight, the champion pick that looks ridiculous until it works, or the mechanical sequence that turns an unfavorable situation into a kill.

Medic’s breakdown shows why Caps has never been defined by one signature champion

One of the interesting aspects of looking back across Caps’ career is how difficult it is to identify a single champion that completely represents him. His history contains memorable performances on Akali, Irelia, Sylas, Ryze, Syndra, LeBlanc, Tristana, Vayne and numerous other picks, while his temporary move to bot lane expanded that range even further. G2’s own profile specifically emphasizes his ability to move between assassins, mages and marksmen rather than associating him with one narrow archetype.

That versatility matters when analyzing the top ten moments because the skill being celebrated is rarely simply mastery of one champion. Caps’ defining characteristic is the way he interprets situations. The tools change, but the willingness to test the limits does not.

The Akali pentakill against T1 is one expression of it. The Irelia outplay against Team Liquid is another. His unusual marksman selections represent another. Later G2 rosters provide entirely different examples built around newer champions and changing metas.

This also explains why fans frequently disagree over which champion should ultimately represent Caps most strongly in Hall of Legends cosmetics. His career is simply too broad to reduce comfortably to one pick, and the debate itself reflects how many different versions of Caps have existed across the years.

Hall of Legends will celebrate his career in-game beginning September 10

Caps’ induction extends beyond the competitive tribute videos. Riot has confirmed that the Hall of Legends in-game event begins September 10, featuring an event pass structured around his career alongside special Caps-themed cosmetic content. The company has also said additional Hall of Legends information will become available through its dedicated website beginning August 24.

As with previous Hall of Legends inductees, part of the revenue from the associated pass and collections is distributed to the inducted player and their organization. The celebration therefore combines historical recognition, in-game cosmetics and direct financial participation for the professional whose career is being commemorated.

Riot is also preparing a longer Hall of Legends: Caps film for September 10. The initial trailer describes the story through hope and resilience, while the new top-ten plays video approaches the same career from a more mechanical perspective. Together, the pieces are building toward a larger retrospective rather than treating the induction as a single announcement.

Caps is in the Hall of Legends, but his career is still unfinished

Perhaps the strangest element of the celebration is that Caps is not being inducted after retirement. He remains an active G2 Esports player in 2026, meaning every retrospective necessarily ends with an unfinished sentence. His greatest play may already be somewhere in Medic’s top ten, or it may not have happened yet.

That makes his induction different from the traditional idea of a sporting hall of fame. Riot deliberately allows active competitors to be considered, and its official rules state that both active and retired professionals can enter the selection process.

For Caps, the unfinished objective is obvious. He has conquered Europe repeatedly, won MSI, reached two Worlds finals and now joined Faker and Uzi in League of Legends’ Hall of Legends. The World Championship remains missing.

Whether he ever completes that final chapter cannot be assumed. The strength of Korean and Chinese competition, the volatility of international League and the difficulty of assembling another Western roster capable of reproducing G2’s 2019 level make it an enormous challenge. But the fact that the possibility can still be discussed seriously in 2026 is itself part of why Caps has received this recognition.

The King of the West finally has his place among League’s legends

The BEST Plays from NEWEST Hall of Legends Inductee does not need to prove that Caps has won enough trophies. The record already exists. What the video adds is the explanation for why an entire generation of European League fans became emotionally invested in watching him attempt things that often seemed impossible.

From the teenager joining Fnatic in 2017 to the G2 veteran still competing in 2026, the same traits continue appearing: creativity, mechanics, aggression and a willingness to trust his own read of the game even when the safer option is obvious. Some of those decisions failed spectacularly, which is part of the Caps experience. Enough succeeded to change European League of Legends history.

He reached the Worlds final with Fnatic in 2018, then did it again with G2 in 2019. He helped deliver Europe’s 2019 MSI championship, produced a pentakill against Faker’s T1 during the semifinal and became the first Western player to reach consecutive Worlds finals. Years later, after roster changes, role swaps and countless meta shifts, he remains G2’s mid laner and now owns a record 17 European titles.

Riot has now made the verdict official. Faker. Uzi. Caps.

The player who began his career carrying the nickname “Baby Faker” now shares the Hall of Legends with Faker himself. The teenager who represented Europe’s next great prospect became the player Riot describes as reshaping what the West believed was possible.

And because Caps is still playing, the top ten moments Medic has selected do not necessarily represent the final version of the list.

The King of the West has taken his throne.

He still has games left to play.