Cloud9 started off the series in dominant fashion, defeating SK on Mirage 16-3 on the back of a strong Terrorist side before the match went to Cobblestone. There, the Americans began with a 0-7 deficit before coming back into the half, but it wasn't enough to take the series in two maps as the Brazilians tied it up 1-1 comfortably.

It came down to Inferno, which was a comfortable affair for Cloud9, who grabbed a dominant 12 rounds on the CT side and closed it out 16-9 to become only the second North American team to ever reach a grand final at a Major, after Liquid had done so at ESL One Cologne 2016.

valens talks SK semi and the upcoming grand final against FaZe

After the match, ELEAGUE held a short press conference with Cloud9 and Soham "⁠valens⁠" Chowdhury shared that the had made a mistake in the veto, banning Nuke instead of Cobble in the first round, so we then grabbed him for a one-on-one interview to find out more about that, the entire SK series and the upcoming grand final.

You've already touched on the veto and screwing up with vetoing Nuke there, can you go over it all and what was the thought process when you realized 'oh, I shouldn't have done that'?

Yeah, honestly, when I was telling tarik - so, pretty much I handle all the vetoes and when I was telling tarik, I swapped the order of what fnatic and SK should have been. So against fnatic I know they don't really play Nuke, but at the same time they have in the past, so I was like 'alright, we're not going to take a gamble, if we have to veto first, we're going to ban Nuke and we're going to ban Cobble second versus them'.

SK was actually supposed to be the opposite, so we were going to veto Cobble first and then Nuke later in the second stage, because we know they've got a stand-in, they don't play Nuke in general, what's the point. But it was obviously my fault (laughs).

Did you expect to play Overpass, had the veto gone the way you meant it to?

I honestly thought SK would pick Cache or Overpass, Cache because when we scrim them, Cache is a map that's like it seems they're ahead of us. So I thought they could have picked it because of that, but yeah, we were expecting Cache or Overpass.

You guys had such a strong T side on Mirage, did you think it was going to go that smoothly?

I think Mirage T side, the reason it went so smoothly is that we said 'we're not going to respect SK here, we're going to go straight, really fast,' our gameplan was to abuse A first, because we know felps is playing A and he was filling in for boltz. So we just knew that their rotations and their comms probably weren't going to be great, so our gameplan was to abuse A first and then let's just feel it out.

How did you deal with Cobblestone considering it wasn't even supposed to be among the maps you played? You were able to be quite competitive in the first half despite a really bad start...

I think the nice thing is when we approach our strategy and tactics, setups, we group up teams, it's just not just SK vs G2, like what's going to be good against versus those specific teams, we have stuff that are good against those types of teams.

So we just kind of pulled stuff out of our playbook that we know would work well against their playstyle. And obviously we knew where they play like their spots, T side defaults, who goes where, we knew those kinds of things, so it honestly wasn't that tough, it was more just like a 'oh, sh*t, my bad guys'.

Was Inferno a map that you thought you'd play?

We did think Inferno was going to be third, but I was surprised they banned Cache for their second ban, I thought that they should have tried to get it to Cache. And it would have, probably, if they banned Inferno and the last two maps were Cache and Overpass, we would have likely kept Cache.

How did you feel going into that map, as one that's not up there in your map pool but also not in SK's?

I think Inferno is one of those maps that our record isn't great on, but we feel comfortable on it, we constantly iterate on it just because there's so much to learn when we see these different plays people have, running down mid, these weird halls setups that people do, we learn so much from every scrim on Inferno that our playbook is really deep. We just don't get to play it that often, but we're comfortable, yeah, you might see it tomorrow.

We knew that their style was kind of see-sawing back and forth between the map on T side and we were ready, we just didn't want to overrotate and get caught. Tyler did a really good job reagressing lane side for example, getting info whether they're still mid or not. And I think that's the key, that's the key versus them, it's just kind of making sure that if we do give up a lot of map control, we have a way to take it back at some point, so I think that's just the key. Otherwise we'd give them so much, their CT side Inferno is not great, but their T side can be really, really good, so we were super happy with the scoreline.

You guys lost three one-sided series to FaZe throughout the last four months, what's going to be different this time? What is different about this Cloud9 even if the lineup is the same?

The biggest thing is that when we were here for the first couple of weeks in Atlanta, for the group stage, the major qualifier, that stuff, the challengers stage, legends stage, we scrimmed teams that were here, FaZe being one of them.

And we were doing pretty well, so I think that kind of increased our confidence to be like 'guys, this is just another team. It doesn't matter if we lost the last three matches to them, all we need to know is that one, we can compete, two, we can win maps, three, if it comes up again, then we just have to look at it as just any other team, look at them as a category of a team, it's not FaZe, we're not playing against olof or NiKo, it doesn't matter, it's just a team that plays a certain way and that's it.

Talking about being able to practice these teams, which doesn't really happen to you all that often, is that where the confidence comes from?

Absolutely, it's really difficult to get quality practice where teams even if they lose a scrim, let's say we win a scrim 16-5, you're supposed to play it out, right. Well, it really feels like when you're playing against European teams, they're still giving it, they're still trying their playbook out and we get to learn a lot.

In North America, the biggest thing I noticed is just that if we're not playing kind of the top five teams there, the scrims become less useful, some people start tilting on their team. That's just what it feels like, I can't say for sure, but I think that's why it's so much more productive to play against these teams that have a gameplan with their practicing in Europe.