Cloud9 completed their 3-0 sweep earlier today with their second one-sided affair at the tournament, beating mousesports 16-5 on Train to advance to the ELEAGUE Major group stage.

"It wasn't up until this moment that we made the Major," says RUSH in regards to Valve's new format

At the end of day three in Atlanta, we asked William "⁠RUSH⁠" Wierzba a few questions about C9's run so far and their plans for the next four days, and got his thoughts on the inclusion of the qualifier into the Major.

Your whole run throughout the first stage here was quite dominant, what do you think that came down to?

Individually speaking, everyone is on top of their game, we are all peaking right now as individual players because we are all confident in the roster we have. We've only improved since we made roster in August. The bootcamp helped as well, we had a bootcamp and we played for about six-seven days at the house together, and that, combined with the individual confidence, just makes us a great team right now.

What will you do for the next couple of days, as you now have four days off to prepare for the group stage?

Obviously we don't know who we're going to play yet in the next stage, the group stage, I think we're just going to focus on expanding our strats, making them better, looking at our games and what went wrong — even though the games we had, we didn't have that many mistakes. I think we're just going to grind out, maybe not tomorrow, we might take a day off, and then after that we're back to the grind, practice probably against teams that are here or other teams that are in NA, because there's plenty of practice available right now.

Are you going to approach the next stage any differently to what you did here?

No, we'll just take it day by day. I'm not sure when we find out who we play, whenever we do we will do our homework diligently on them, work on that, and then just scrim, honestly. Playing together is the most important, especially in a LAN environment where you're all next to each other and that just grows us as a team overall.

As you said, day by day, but what do you think is going to be the goal for the main part of the Major?

For me, it would be top eight, but I'm sure everyone on my team wants no less than like top four, because right now I think we're in peak form. But for me a personal goal would be Legends status, that would make everyone happy, especially Tyler because it's about time (laughs).

Valve have kind of included the qualifier into the Major, what are your thoughts on that? Do you feel like you've already made progress at the Major or do you still consider this phase a qualifier?

Even though there are stickers in the game and it's considered the Major, I feel like we didn't make the Major until right now, because that's how it's always been. 24 teams is a lot, it's not very prestigious to make it into a 24-team tournament. Making it into the top 16, even then it's not that prestigious, but still, that's making the Major to me. So it wasn't up until this moment that we made it.

In terms of other things, I know this has been around, but the roster lock thing is kind of crap, in my opinion, the fact that steel and boltz can't play with their respective teams. You want to have all the top competition in one place and when one of the top teams can't have their player with them and they won't practice with who they're playing with here, that puts their whole game off. And Liquid's now making 2-1 with their coach, they'd probably be 3-0 with steel here. No offence to zews, obviously, he's doing his best, but it's just a really sh*tty situation for both teams that they can't play with their respective players.