The National League Division Series (NLDS) is a pair of best-of-five game series played annually by Major League Baseball teams to determine the opponents in the National League Championship Series (NLCS) . The NLDS determines which two teams from the National League will advance to the NLCS. The teams that play in the two series are the three division winners (East, Central, West) and the wild card winner. The NLDS was first introduced in 1981 as a one-off tournament because of a midseason strike, with the first-place teams before the strike taking on the teams in first place after the strike. From 1994 to 2011, the wild card was given to the team in the National League with the best overall record that was not a division champion. Beginning with the 2012 season, a second wild card team was added, and the two wild card teams play a single-game playoff to determine which team would play in the NLDS. The NLDS is a best-of-five series where the divisional winner with the best winning percentage in the regular season hosts the winner of the Wild Card Series between the top two wild card teams in one matchup, and the divisional winner with the second-best winning percentage hosts the winner of the other Wild Card Series between the lowest-seeded divisional winner and the lowest-seeded wild card team.