Esports Experts vs AI: Who Predicted Worlds 2025 Most Accurately?

The 2025 World Championship is still one of the hottest topics in the esports community. Esports Charts has already covered the tournament’s overall viewership stats, and in this article, we’re taking a look back at how our predictions turned out. Just before the event kicked off, we asked our friends and colleagues to share who they thought would be the top contender — and what kind of viewership numbers they expected.

The 2025 World Championship featured plenty of storylines, but the biggest question was whether it could break the series’ all-time viewership record and set a new standard for the industry. In the end, the tournament fell short of surpassing last year’s numbers — the Worlds 2024 record still stands.

Worlds 2025 predictions from Esports industry experts

Among all the predictions from our friends and colleagues, Tom Daniels, editor at Esports Insider, came the closest. The only thing he missed was the peak viewership during the Play-In stage, but his estimates for both the Swiss Stage and the Knockout Stage were almost spot-on.

Tom also nailed the prediction that T1 would take the championship — just like our friend Sam Mathews, CEO of Fnatic. The Esports Charts team, on the other hand, put their faith in Gen.G — a team that dominated every event in 2025 but seems to be “cursed” when it comes to Worlds.

Worlds 2025 predictions from AI

Ahead of the tournament, we asked some of the leading AIs — ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and DeepSeek — to share their predictions. Each was given the same set of questions about tournament favorites, top community casters, and the possibility of breaking a new viewership record.

The AIs correctly identified T1 as one of the main contenders for the title, even though none of them picked the team as the outright favorite — most leaned toward Gen.G and Bilibili Gaming instead.

Predicting community casters proved trickier. The AIs only got one right — that Marc “Caedrel” Lamont would land in the top three for peak viewership among streamers. Vietnamese streamer Hoàng Luân, who ultimately claimed second place. The third spot went to Lee “Wolf” Jae-wan, a former professional player for T1, who streamed on CHZZK.

Meanwhile, Ibai “ibai” Llanos and Kim “Phonics1” Min-kyo came in fourth and fifth, just behind the top three. Kamel “Kamet0” Kebir, however, didn’t crack the top ten — even though he remained the most-popular streamer on the French broadcast.

All the AIs predicted that the 2025 World Championship would set a new peak viewership record for esports — but that didn’t happen. Most of them overestimated the expected numbers, with only ChatGPT coming reasonably close to the actual figures.

Many people say that making predictions is a thankless job, but these articles are meant more as entertainment than serious analysis. The esports industry can be dissected across hundreds of metrics, dozens of patterns can be spotted, and viewer and gameplay trends can be tracked — yet it always finds a way to surprise even its most dedicated fans.