sgares: "We were able to read [nV]"

Following Cloud9's comeback from two six-round deficits, we talked to the team's in-game leader to pick his brain about how the team adapted throughout the match.

The second battle of the day saw Cloud9 rematch EnVyUs after their clash at Gfinity last week, this time in a best-of-one, on de_cache.

Despite being down 0-6 as Terrorists and then 7-13 as Counter-Terrorists, Cloud9 took seven and nine rounds in a row on the separate sides to come back and advance to meet Virtus.pro in the winners' match.

Since you guys met EnVyUs before at Gfinity just last week and you've known that you were going to play them for quite a while, have you had any time to adapt to what they were doing?

Yeah, absolutely. We went into Gfinity kinda not expecting too much. I as a strat caller went in without doing any homework and I just wanted to see how it would go if we did us and didn't focus at all on other teams. And that's what we used it as, we were pretty jetlagged and the groups were released last-minute. There wasn't too much homework you could've done. We used this last week to really study as a team and watch demos together and really just iron out some of the things that went wrong at Gfinity. In addition to brushing over our own stuff, we also looked at some of EnVyUs' stuff and we mixed it together.

sgares managed to adapt to EnVyUs on both sides 

You started off down 0-6, losing the pistol, losing the first couple of gunrounds, but then I found impressive how you adapted to the playstyle of theirs, going agressive from main etc., how did you react to that?

It was really surprising, because the first time we played them and what we saw in the demos was they would just head stack in the A site and save their smokes, basically. It's a good strategic decision especially for players like Happy and NBK, who really like using their smokes late-game. That's what they were doing at Gfinity and that's what caused them to win a lot of the time on Cache, because they were taking control of their nade usage at A and they'd also get picks from doing that boost. Going into this tournament, I expected them to do it more, but once they started pushing A main more, we had to take mid more and then just slowly grind into more B hits. That's what we pretty much did, because of what they were doing.

As CT it was the same thing, you were down 0-5 but then you got all the remaining rounds, what did you do differently from the sixth round on?

I think the sixth round is a round where Ska first got his AWP, that was a game-changer for us, when he was able to get an AWP and control whichever area he was at, quad or B. We did a pretty good job of moving him around, making sure he was never at the same site for a crazy amount of rounds in a row. Once we stopped a lot of their B hits, from then we adjusted more and swung more players into A. No one's gonna keep jamming their had into a wall and keep losing B splits. We were able to read them well later in the match because they lost earlier rounds. 

Next up is going to be Virtus.pro, you met them at Gfinity as well, how do you think you're going to be able to adapt to their playstyle?

The hardest thing about Virtus.pro is their map pool. They've always had an extremely strong map pool, ones that most teams aren't comfortable playing, which is why they're so consistently in the top placings in tournaments. They play those new maps and they stray away from your Dust2 or Inferno. They're really good on those maps, but they generally stray away from them when they play other top teams. The key thing against them is winning the veto and start well.

Cloud9 have a break now while fnatic and CLG are playing, they are scheduled to play Virtus.pro right afterwards.