Cloud9’s Jordan "n0thing" Gilbert is one of the most influential players in North American Counter-Strike. His team currently holds a flawless 14-0 record in ESL Pro League Season 4 and they are one the top teams at this weekend's Northern Arena LAN Final.

n0thing sat down with theScore esports on Day 1 of Northern Arena to talk about the acquisition of Timothy "autimatic" Ta and the current state of the team.

You guys are 14-0 in the ESL Pro League right now. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Part of our 14-0 record could be due to other roster changes, but I do think we're playing strong. I mean, I think we have a lot of work to do strategically, but I think we're definitely five individually strong players, and autimatic vibes well with Stew [Jake "Stewie2k" Yip] and the other four of us already vibed pretty well, so I think right now it's just us playing well and giving credits where it's due.

Sometimes I'm too humble with these type of questions, but I think we're playing well and I think at this tournament it's just about us showing up. I don't think LANs are a huge issue for us, but it's all about that start and getting into it. Once you get rolling, you can get comfortable so that's our plan.

Are you kind of surprised that you guys are 14-0 in EPL?

I guess…not particularly. More like, you never know how Liquid is gonna show up, and Immortals are a good team, and we haven't played SK yet. Maybe a lot of people have counted C9 out in the last months because we weren't at the Major, but when you're in the pro scene you have a good feel [of things].

Outside of SK, we haven't felt outranked or outclassed by Liquid, Immortals, CLG or OpTic in a while. You know, they did well with s1mple, Liquid that is, and OpTic did alright in a couple LANs — they played well and got to the Major — but we never felt like we couldn't clean sweep a lot of these teams. So, as surprising as it is, it's also like not so surprising…we've always been able to out-skill a lot of these North American teams.

In one of your videos you talked about autimatic coming into the team and mentioning the history he had with Stewie2k. How does that chemistry help the team?

Well, it helps too because they're both similar in age and they're both really hungry to prove themselves as top players. Not to say the other three of us aren't, but we've just been around longer.

They're in the practice room at our house like playing all day, so it's fun because sometimes when I'm kind of over CS for the night and I've already played like eight hours, I'll see them down there and I'll sit down at my computer after eating and I'll come up with a quick idea almost purely inspired by the fact that they're still down there playing and I'm just like, "Hey guys, what do you think of this or that or whatever." So that's pretty cool and, like I said, them being similar age group and y'know, it's just someone else to bond with, so that's good.

It's interesting how the roster played out with the recent Valve ruling regarding coaches. Andrew "Irukandji" Timmerman’s no longer with the team and you guys replaced Alec "Slemmy" White for autimatic, but Slemmy was your in-game leader. How did autimatic’s arrival affect the leadership roles?

Well, because coaches were a more viable option at the time as a full-time shotcaller, we were on the hunt for doing that. We asked Slemmy, but he wasn't interested — he just actually kind of stepped down altogether. And then we got autimatic, and since then we just kind of wanted to balance out the playstyles.

There wasn't really a strat caller that we could really look at, adreN [Eric "adreN" Hoag] and daps [Damian "daps" Steele] were the only two that have been strat caller players lately and neither of them really were options. So we picked up autimatic, who we had a good relationship with.

Now it's mostly Stew calling, but it's still all of us making strats. I call a couple maps, and then a lot of it is pieced together, but we're kind of just going over strats together. What's cool is that enables us to throw something into the mix on the rounds we need to. It gives us a really good range of unpredictability for other teams because we have a lot of like one-off strats that we might not use more than once every four or five maps, so it's pretty unique.

Would you say you guys are using a more loose style or more of a structured style?

Well, I mean, there's like a basic structure you have to adhere to because it’s just part of the meta, right? So we know where individual fights are bad, where they're good, and so it's kind of reading between the lines.

You want to be structured because that helps you be consistent, but at the same time, if you’re more dynamic and can switch on a dime and your structure is ever-changing, then that makes you harder to play against.

One of the things you talked about in one of your other videos is the idea of emphasizing picks in some of your rounds. But do you think that maybe bringing in those changes is a little bit risky considering the success you've found?

Honestly, it was inspired mostly by watching teams like SK, G2 and Fnatic. If you see what they do, a lot of times FalleN [Gabriel "FalleN" Toledo] does really unique plays with the AWP or coldzera [Marcelo "coldzera" David] picks up the AWP and they make aggressive plays. When they get a kill they regroup really quickly and efficiently, then they take a numbers game and play the advantages and literally just take fair fights. And when you take fair fights while you have the advantage, you could always get the trades.

So it's a pretty simple game plan, but it requires everyone to be on their toes in terms of the CT rotations. I think that style favors us because I want shroud [Mike "shroud" Grzesiek] taking fights, I want Skadoodle [Tyler "Skadoodle" Latham] trying to get picks, I want autimatic lurking smokes with Stew, and I want me to be able to take those fights that I want.

I still believe I have a strong rifle and I believe pretty much everyone on the team does, so if we can get each other in fair duels and be ready to trade the kills, we have a high success rate against any team in the world.

Do you guys feel threatened by any of the teams at Northern Arena?

Well, Echo Fox is really good. Sean and them could be really good if they catch you off-guard with anti-strats. They’re a team where we got to just stay on our toes, because that's the name of their game, coming prepared and coming with intensity.

Are you still playing Pokemon Go?

Um, not as actively as I was. I play a little bit, but you have to be social and go out to areas. Whenever I'm out sometimes I'll whip it out, but where we live in Santa Monica the data is crappy and AT&T doesn't always give me good service, but I think the highest ranking people on our team is probably our managers.

What level are you now then?

I think I'm like 15 only.

15? Okay? That's not bad.

Yeah, it's not bad, I think like by the time I was seven or eight, Tyler and shroud were already like 19 or 20, so that was like a couple of months ago so… I don't even know, I think I have like a 900 CP Electabuzz or something.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.