Cloud9's first match of the tournament was against North, but a 9-6 CT half ended up being insufficient after the half time switch. The Danes locked down the approaches and left Jake "⁠Stewie2K⁠" Yip and co. on just a single Terrorist round, making the final score 16-10.

autimatic feels like Cloud9 are a wild card at this event

The North American side bounced back against BOOT-d[S], securing a 16-2 victory to move on to the Group A decider match tomorrow. In a post-match interview, Timothy "⁠autimatic⁠" Ta revealed that the IGL duties were transferred to Tarik "⁠tarik⁠" Celik and that Soham "⁠valens⁠" Chowdhury was unable to attend this event with them.

Talk me through the process of picking up your two new players. How did you decide on these two, RUSH and tarik?

It started off with learning if stewie wanted to keep in-game leading or not and he said he was willing to do it—so we decided to pick up two really good fraggers. We decided on RUSH and tarik.

And then when we picked up the two players, tarik seemed very motivated to in-game lead so we decided to switch over to him leading. We haven't had a lot of time to practice yet, but I think we will just get better.

Talking about adding two new players, they played together in OpTic, was that something you had in mind when picking positions where they were going to play? I think on Inferno they are paired up towards pit, is that something you used on other maps or what was the philosophy there?

No, they are pretty versatile and they can play almost every role so then they just kind of filled in to what shroud and n0thing were doing for us. I think it works out pretty well, there are some spots that we switched up on CT side, but for the majority of the spots they are just filling in.

So most of the T sides have stayed the same, you just plugged them in?

So normally shroud was normally on the edges of the map so we put RUSH in most of those spots and tarik is more in the center. We put stewie more toward the edges as well because tarik is calling so he wants to be more towards the middle of the map, so we made that switch.

Talking about the first match you had here, that was against North, it seemed like the first half was pretty good, but on the T side is where the struggle came. Can you tell me about that second half?

I just think that we weren't communicating as much as we should've been. I mean, on our CT side, even then we weren't communicating as much as we should've, but we still had a good half.

On the T side it's really crucial that we communicate with each other and keep suggesting stuff, especially when we aren't getting any rounds and we didn't have that. I know that a lot of the guys are tired as well, I'm pretty jet lagged... It sucks to lose the first match of the group stage but we are going to try to make it out still.

After that you played against B.O.O.T.-d[S], that was a pretty straightforward win. Touching on that game, what went right for you, what defined the game for you?

Well, on their T side, they kept doing A executes so we just started stacking four towards A. And we watched the SK match and they were doing the same thing, so we were prepared for it. We kind of had a good read on them going into the match.

There was a lot of talk about the coaching rule here. However, valens isn't here with you, is that something that was decided before you knew about how the rule was going to be like?

Well, we knew that valens couldn't make it to this event, but I think even with the rule change, unless if it was changed for the Majors or the majority of the tournaments, it wouldn't really matter for us. Because if we practice, it's not like he is talking a lot during freeze time, he contributes more after matches or after practice, or before practice. But during the match he doesn't talk too much, he just kind of lets us play. The rule wouldn't have changed anything for us.

That's how we approach our practice because it would suck having him give a lot of input in practice and not have him do the same thing in matches. So we try not to practice that way.

Looking forward in the tournament, you have SK or North for the decider of the group, how do you feel like a team, what do you think you can accomplish now?

I think we are kind of a wild card now, not many teams know what our good maps are, or our bad maps, and I think we are pretty versatile with our playstyle. So I think we have good chances.