Leading up to the start of the ELEAGUE CS:GO Premier playoffs, we caught up with last season's MVP, Will "RUSH" Wierzba, and talked about Cloud9 and the role he took on within this squad.

Cloud9, who assembled their current roster less than two months ago, booked a spot in the playoffs of ELEAGUE Premier with a dominant showing in group C, securing convincing wins over Envy and NiP to make it through. Tougher opposition awaits in bracket play, however, with G2 being their quarter-final opponent and Astralis, FaZe and North at the tournament as well.

RUSH admits that there is an unspoken rivalry between Cloud9 and Liquid

To get a feel for how the roster is developing and what we can expect from the American squad in Atlanta this week, we talked to William "⁠RUSH⁠" Wierzba.

At your most recent LAN outing, in the ELEAGUE CS:GO Premier group stage, you dropped only eight rounds in a group with NiP, Virtus.pro and EnVyUs. Were you, in a way, surprised by how smoothly securing a playoff spot went? Even though some of those teams might be in slumps, and aren't considered 'top10', I think it was still a tough group for us. Cloud9 historically has had a lot of trouble beating VP in the past so having them in the group, despite them being in a rough patch, was going to be hard for us. NiP is also a really strong team with the REZ/draken additions, and they just need time. We definitely had expectations to make it out of groups considering it was the easiest of the EL groups, but we were indeed surprised at how one-sided the games were for us, and I'm sure the fans watching were as well. I also thought it was fairly impressive that NV beat NiP and VP in BO3's. Before ELEAGUE, you attended ESL One New York and DreamHack Montreal, finishing 3-4th at both events. What were the takeaways from those two tournaments, was making it out of the groups enough for you to be satisfied early into the team's life cycle? We were definitely a little disappointed at the finish we had a DH Montreal because it's a tier 2 tournament and North was the only top top team (besides Immortals) at the LAN. We got a bad draw and faced the strongest team in the semi-finals (North) but that's no excuse. They played really well and we didn't have much of a chance. Saying we got 3/4th place or 'making it out of groups' sounds good, but when you consider the fact we made it out by only beating complexity and Luminosity, that's not exactly something you can brag about. In terms of ESL NY, I think performance wise we actually did well by beating Na`Vi twice (in a BO1 and BO3). Even though we got utterly de_stroyed by FaZe, they were on point that whole tournament. I think we were more disappointed that we played so awful in front of the home-crowd because ESL NY is one of the only tournaments during the year that has an NA crowd of that size. Overall as the weeks go by I see us improving at a rate I am satisfied with. In New York, FaZe took you out in the semi-final and went on to win the whole tournament in quite convincing fashion, making them "the team to beat" currently. What are your impressions of FaZe, what is the toughest thing about playing them? I think they were/are in a sort of honeymoon phase, especially at NY. They swept everybody and the only team that got close was Liquid on 1 map in the finals. It was pretty insane to experience it first hand, but when you have 4 superstars and a tier 1 caller I guess that's what you get. They will definitely remain top three for the foreseeable future, but I do not think they can maintain demolishing everyone they play. Many players struggle with individual slumps and you had a particularly rough time this year after the ELEAGUE Major. What are your thoughts on breaking out of that trend, at what point did you feel you were getting back in form? Your upswing somewhat coincided with playing under tarik's leadership, starting at ESL One Cologne with OpTic and continuing later on in Cloud9. Did that have a significant impact or were there other factors at play? I attribute playing really well at the end of last year to how well OpTic was playing as a whole. Literally everyone was at the top of their game, game-wise and confidence wise. When everyone is playing well, I think it's pretty hard to not play well. If you think about it logically when the team overall is playing poorly, it's tough for any individual player to go off. I guess you could call the players that do play well under those circumstances star players. I also believe I played well because we had a lot of structure under stanislaw's leadership, and I knew what I was doing on every map to a tee. When we lost him and tried a plethora of different IGLs, I was probably the most uncomfortable I've ever been in CS. Going from a system that is fully fleshed out to complete chaos for 8 months is not something I wish on any team. I feel a lot more at ease and comfortable under Tarik's leadership at the end of OpTic and now in C9. He knows how I and others on the team want to play.

After getting over the slump that plagued his 2017, RUSH is looking more and more like the player that won the ELEAGUE S2 MVP