GosuGamers sat down with Jake "stewie2k" Yip before their match against OpTic Gaming to discuss his projection for the tournament, individual matches, the current coaching situation in Cloud9 and how Jake is finding in-game leading.
Jake, how are you?
Doing well, loving Sweden right now.
How are you enjoying the expo?
It’s pretty cool, seeing everyone here just kind of sleeping at the LAN and ready to game. It’s pretty cool.
Speaking of sleep how’s the jetlag?
For me, I’ve been sleeping at 9pm, ended up waking up at 5am, waited till breakfast and tried to sleep, so that’s what’s been going on.
Could you go through the expectations for the tournament?
Well, I always have high expectations. I always expect us to do very well but it doesn’t always happen that way. Against Renegades we always had a slow start, the past few LANs we’ve had slow starts. That’s kind of what’s been making us lose; hopefully we can fix that quick and get back on pace.
Could you give us an overview of the match against Renegades? Obviously it didn’t go quite to your expectations, I imagine, but what went wrong?
Well, we felt that we were in control the whole time. On their T side we knew what they were doing but we got caught off guard a few times, which kind of killed our economy. That helped them change some rounds. Us getting four rounds on CT side after winning pistols was pretty bad. On the T side I think we played pretty well, a few miscommunications, that’s what happened when we lost a few rounds. The very last round was kind of unlucky because I watched the POV again and “yam” pushed tunnels right as I left tunnels. They do deserve to win that game, but we played pretty bad.
The upcoming match against OpTic, any overview of that? What are you guys preparing? What’s the situation?
Well, we’re pretty confident against them, but can’t really tell what’s coming, because they’re kind of a hit and miss team sometimes. When they’re on point, they’re on point and they’ve been on the heater lately, so we need to expect the unexpected.
Moving on from DreamHack Winter-pertaining questions to more general ones, you guys are currently out of a coach. What’s the situation there? Are you guys looking for one? Is there someone currently filling in?
Actually we really aren’t looking for a coach because we like how we play as a team right now. We have a really loose play style, but at the same time we have a structured play style as well. We like playing under our own and we like being able to play how we want to play. No one else is dictating how we want to, so right now we aren’t really looking into a coach. We’ve had some offers come and ask if they could join the team or try out, so far we haven’t looked into it too much.
So essentially you’re saying that you don’t feel like a coach would have as much of an impact, for example, as other teams say it would?
Yeah, for us I don’t think it would impact us too much. I guess you could say there’s another set of eyes to analyse our mistakes, but right now I think we’re doing pretty well, it’s just a matter of starting off strong rather than starting strong late. That’s our only problem that I see right now.
From my understanding you are currently the in-game leader. How are you finding the role?
Yep. It can get pretty frustrating sometimes because I’m trying to focus on my team’s screens sometimes and sometimes I get pushed but I won’t be paying attention to my screen. It’s the in-game leader’s job, so I guess you really can complain too much. Right now I think we’re doing pretty well, sometimes it gets frustrating but that’s what happens I guess.
Prior to you leading Jordan was. Does he ever come back to the role?
Well, I’ve been trying to let Jordan focus on his own role because I know he does play better when he doesn’t need to focus on strat calling or anything. In the past when he strat calls, the gameplay is just completely off, so when I took over strat calling it kind of helped him play better. Right now it’s kind of just me, but Jordan and Tim come along when we’re not in game and help us with strats.
In terms of your style of in-game leading, is it dictatorial? It’s a rash way to express it, but is it dictatorial or is it very much that the whole team chips in and you work off that?
Right now it’s pretty dictatorial. I do kind of micromanage the team sometimes, but there are a lot of times when they see an opening and they do it themselves. If they do see an opening then its whatever, we just play off that.
Newest addition to Cloud9 – Timothy, “autimatic”. How are you finding his performance? How is he doing?
He’s been playing pretty well. The first few LANs he’s been playing pretty well, but it seems like over time the whole team got kind of complacent, so right now we’re not doing too well. Hopefully we can get back on track.
You mentioned not doing too well, so at DreamHack: Bucharest and ESL Pro League, you guys showed phenomenal results. After that there was sort of a settling down. What have you guys done ever since? If we look back at Cloud9, you guys didn’t have the best of performances and now its climbing up steadily.
I guess you could say we’re getting pretty burned out because there are so many matches, online matches that we have to play. Coming back from LANs we have to play online matches the day after, no break. We were pretty pumped up to play with our new five; going into these few LANs was kind of a fresh start for us. We played pretty well, over time when we won ESL Brazil, we kind of wanted a little break, but didn’t really get the chance to have a break since we have so many LANs coming up. I guess you could say we were getting pretty burned out. I think we’re starting to realise that we need to start getting back on track and just start playing how we’ve been playing.
In terms of training routines, since the not particularly good results, have you guys swapped it out/changed it/rearranged it to accommodate for improvement?
We’ve talked about it, we talked about having to refresh our strats and make up new stuff, so people can’t just watch a demo and counter us. We haven’t really gotten the chance to because we would go back home for a day. For example, we went to ELEAGUE and then I think we just went back home for a couple of days, then we went to iBUYPOWER and then we went home for one day, went to IEM and then flew home for ten hours and came here to Sweden. We haven’t really got a chance to practice. We’ve talked about some stuff to improve on, but we don’t really feel confident using it in a match without scrimming other teams and trying it first. So we haven’t gotten a good chance to build new stuff yet.
A miscellaneous question for you: What would you say are the top five teams in North America?
That’s kind of hard, because every team is so inconsistent. If we really had to rank it I’d say were first, then OpTic, Liquid and the next two is hard to say.
Speaking of inconsistency in the scene, if you look at 2014 it was NiP, 2015 was Fnatic, then SK/Luminosity in early 2016 were dominant. The scene is unpredictable, what do you think spurred that?
I’d say having new teams come in, for example we have a completely new roster, almost. I guess we have a lot of hunger at the start and then every time we’re winning we get a little complacent. Complacency could be a key. You can’t really tell what happens in Fnatic right now, maybe there’s internal issues that we don’t know about, so that could be a problem. I guess just having the hunger to win is a key point for teams that are winning all these LANs. This year I don’t think there’s a team that won twice in a row at a LAN yet, so it’s hard to say.
Coming back to DreamHack Winter, which team would you say are your fiercest rivals?
I don’t think we really have a rival right now, I guess you could say Dignitas, because I think we played them and knocked them out of groups. OpTic also, since we beat them at ESL Brazil.
Jake, thank you very much for the interview and I wish you the best of luck in the match.
Thank you.
Images courtesy of DreamHack Flickr/Adela Sznajder - 1/2
