Jordan "n0thing" Gilbert is a professional Counter-Strike player and rifler for Cloud9.

With his team coming in hot after winning the Americas Minor Championship 2017 - Kraków, C9 are set to compete in the Esports Championship Series Season 3 Finals. Ahead of his games on the weekend, n0thing took the time to speak to theScore esports and other media about his team's preparation for the upcoming qualifiers, dealing with criticism and using Rank S for training.

What follows is a transcription of selected questions from ECS' round-table press conference, where questions were asked by journalists from several outlets, including theScore esports.

The team has received a lot of criticism lately because of your group stage exits at EPL finals, DreamHack Summer and DreamHack Austin. How much of an issue is fan pressure on the minds of the team, especially Stewie2k as IGL?

I think for sure when you're a newer player to the scene, it's kind of like your first day in high school, you want to look good, you want to make sure you're one of the popular kids. But in the end it's all about doing our best and not looking back, and always looking forward.

So, in this case, I think everyone is kind of learning to roll with the punches. But at the same time, yeah, when you see people make threads about us going out at 10 group stages, that stings, not because it's pointed out, but because it's the truth. So I think we wanna come with that fire and get back to the top spot in the world this summer.

How does the team deal with mental blocks in situations like those? Specifically on your T-sides on CT-sided maps.

Lately, the funny thing is our T-sides may seem bipolar, but it's really our CT-sides that I think are truly hit-or-miss. I think our T-sides are just an ebb and flow of the attitude, and it's really easy for us to fix on T-side.

Our CT-sides are the ones that if we're not on point they really drop off sometimes. We get those 0-5, 0-6 starts, and we can't let that happen if we want to get where we want to be.

I think it's just playing it a round at a time, and not getting in each other's heads, you know, leave that to the fans and try and keep lifting each other up.

Cloud9 has a really busy schedule. How does the team plan on battling fatigue?

Five of us are hitting the gym, we're trying to get shroudy [shroud] in there. Really it's just giving each other space, go watch your TV show, go do what you need to do, but when it comes to match day, just hopefully everyone can stay mentally tough and come in there to play.

It is tough playing away from home for so long, but we're basically trying to look forward to keeping our eye on the prize, being a top five to 10 team in the world before summer break, and then looking forward to that break.

Do you have anything to say to people doubting your odds of making it to the Major?

We always have something to prove, and I'll say to those fans: just tune in and watch and make us more ad revenue.

What is your opinion on the efficacy of Rank S or FPL for training?

I think in terms of already established pros, I'd say the main thing you could use it for would be probably going outside of your role a little bit. So maybe Skadoodle goes to Rank S one day and rifles, he's done it a couple of times, but for myself I like to play different bombsites and different spots and get different looks on maps that I don't usually get on my team practice.

I think the people who gain the most from the scene should be the semi-pros and we should be focused on them because I think if we give them a good foundation, and get their communication to a pro level and their decision making to a pro level... because one of the problems we see in Rank S and FPL is that there's a gap between the pros and the semi-pros and there's a lot of frustration.

I'm hoping that a lot of these pros can see this as an opportunity not to be frustrated but to help educate players on a game-by-game basis on how to communicate better, how to think more round-to-round, create more simple thought processes so our talent pool expands.

What about leadership, or the IGL role and developing that in NA? is that something that's feasible in FPL or Rank S?

Well, it can definitely give you some experience in terms of having the slight pressure on the fly. So, critical thinking. But overall leadership I don't think is something you're going to get from playing the game.

With shroud talking about retirement, and you'll have to pardon the expression here, has that put a cloud over the team?

No. I would say that first of all, I don't know if you saw this but I'd also sort of call him [shroud] a drama queen because I think part of what he did there was play with the technicality, because he in private was obviously saying 'well any of us could speak about retirement, technically.' Stewie can speak about retirement, it was just kind of him just saying that.

I do think in the back of his mind he thinks about streaming and the longevity just like JasonR made his statement and left OpTic. I think for us, we're professionals and as long as [shroud] shows up with intensity we're going to play with him. If that drops off we'll re-evaluate and I think that goes for anybody on the team.

This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

Dennis "Tarmanydyn" Gonzales is a news editor for theScore esports who enjoys whiskey, D&D and first-picking Oracle a P90 my Souvenir Negev Discipline Priest Pharah a silenced Cavity 9mm. You can follow him on Twitter.

Preston Dozsa is a news editor for theScore esports. You can follow him on Twitter.