Cloud9 managed to get revenge on fnatic in the ECS opener after they fell to the Swedes at DreamHack Summer, starting the tournament in the UK well.

Stewie2K is happy to take over the calling if that helps other players

After the game, we got a chance to pick the brains of the young in-game leader and star player of Cloud9 Jake "⁠Stewie2K⁠" Yip.

At the Minor was the first time, at least with you in the team, Cloud9 won against Immortals on LAN. You also won a tournament there, even though it wasn't a big one. Tell me about how did those two things feel, combined?

At the Minor, it wasn't a championship trophy type of a tournament for us. We were kinda just testing the waters on some of our plays and it worked out well. But I would say that the plays that we were testing aren't consistent, but we got the win. We weren't aiming for the win technically, like, we all want to win, but we wanted to try out new strats and kinda be more prepared for events like this.

You were trying out new stuff, so you were coming in a bit more relaxed, do you think that was maybe the key of winning against Immortals that time? Was there any mental pressure playing against them at all?

Immortals are kind-of like our kryptonite and we knew we were down 0-7 on them on LAN. We came in, not with hesitation but with a lot of confidence, we just talked about everyone playing confident and let's see what we can do against them. Make reads on your own, have a mind of your own instead of having one person trying to call everything for everybody.

Following that, you went to DreamHack Summer and you didn't have a great tournament, a great performance, what went wrong for you there?

I'd say at DreamHack we played pretty bad because our mind wasn't completely focused on the game, all five of our bags were missing. There is no excuse for losing, they are all great teams, but it's kinda hard to play our game when we are across the world from home and all of our belongings are missing. And we are gone for about a month and a half and we have a lot of clothes, belongings and losing that is pretty bad.

But yeah, fnatic has always been a top tier team, we struggled against them. In the group stage, I felt like we should've won that one too, but we threw a couple of rounds and they had the momentum over us. And for Gambit, they played very well, they are the type of the team we would struggle against because they are all very aggressive, confident also, they are not afraid to take fights. DreamHack wasn't the event that would say how our summer run went.

Also somewhere in the past, the change back from autimatic calling happened. Can you tell me a bit about the change, is there anything you as a team learned from the experience of autimatic calling compared to you?

Well, I think it's evidently proven that any IGL can have their gameplay affected by calling because you are thinking about the whole team, you are thinking about the other team... During Tim's calling, you could tell that his gameplay was affected a bit and he didn't play as well. But when Tim was calling it kinda helped me, it kinda opened my eyes because he has a lot of structure to his calling, it's all set in stone.

As for me, I don't really like things set in stone but I know you have to have the mixture of both in order to be a good team. So having two different minds like that on the team is really good. Tim also mentioned that he doesn't really like calling because it does affect his gameplay. If that relieves him a little bit then I'm willing to step up and take that role.

Do you think it affects you less than it affects him, negatively I mean?

It does affect me a little bit, but as long as it doesn't affect our star players and it helps people perform then I think we should be fine.