Rounding up the press day we approached Jordan Gilbert a.k.a "n0thing", one of the most celebrated North American Counter-Strike player. He accepted our interview request, where we spoke about his time as an in-game leader in the team, impacts of the departure of Ryan "fREAKAZOiD" Abadir and the integration of "slemmy" into the roster.
Aleksei: Hi Jordan, how are you doing?
Jordan “n0thing” Gilbert: Doing swell, just got done with some press conference interviews, about to shoot some more content and get ready for the matches tomorrow.
Aleksei: How are you enjoying London?
Jordan “n0thing” Gilbert: Haven’t really enjoyed it much yet, but I enjoy London as a city, there’s a lot of diversity here and it’s really cool. You can walk around and see all the history.
Aleksei: You guys are flying from California, how do you find the travel? Does the jetlag get to you?
Jordan “n0thing” Gilbert: I’ve been getting better over the years at adapting to jetlag personally, not all my teammates take my advice. I try to adjust my breakfast and dinner schedule the day before I fly, just so I’m fasting when I should be sleeping in the next time zone. Luckily we had a straight shot flight for about ten and a half hours, I slept for about seven while, so I felt pretty good. Stayed up late last night, had a few beers with the Fnatic guys and then hit the sheets.
Aleksei: Talking about changes in the team, earlier this year you guys added “slemmy”, how have you personally found his in-game leading?
Jordan “n0thing” Gilbert: I think he’s a very smart guy, he’s very meticulous. The only area he lacks in in-game leading is experience playing with and against such high level players, if anything sometimes he gets too strategic when we need to simplify and just use our skill, but at the same time he’s got a great attitude and he’s really attentive to our feedback. Normally on any given map when we give him a suggestion, he takes it to heart right away and tries to integrate it.
Aleksei: Looking back at the time when you were in-game leader, what was your experience with it? Could you go through the struggles and the things you liked about it?
Jordan “n0thing” Gilbert: My main struggles were because I’m a very over-analytical person. I felt that there was a pressure on myself from myself and from my team and the community, that I didn’t mind taking on actually. When Ryan stepped down every said “maybe we can bring a strat caller in” and the plan was if the strat caller thing doesn’t work out maybe we’ll go back to our setup and I’ll call again. I actually didn’t have as big of a problem calling as it might have seemed, I think one of the main issues was the way that I presented some of the info to the team. I was getting used to the caller role. Sometimes you have to be very assertive and conclude what you’re going to do for the round and other times you need to get feedback, so those are all little things that I understand very well, but implementing them for me was definitely a process and I didn’t get where I wanted to by the time “slemmy” got here. Despite this, I’m happy to have another guy calling, because it makes my playing a lot easier, for sure.
Aleksei: On the topic of Ryan stepping down, how has that impacted the team?
Jordan “n0thing” Gilbert: Ryan was our entry-fragger and someone who would create space a lot of the time naturally, because that was just the player he was. Over time, as he got used to our team, his timing got better. A lot of people criticised him for making a lot of “not very smart plays” but I think his timing actually got really good at the end and I think he was definitely a valuable player to have on the team. Unfortunately we didn’t align on some things and he needed some personal space, so he stepped down. This doesn’t mean the team can’t figure it out; it’s just a different dynamic. An example would be if “TACO” would leave Luminosity, instead picking up another star player, it wouldn’t necessarily be better, but it could be, so we just need to figure it out.
Aleksei: Just a matter of adaption, right?
Jordan “n0thing” Gilbert: Yeah.
Aleksei: Talking about team dynamics, how do you guys prepare for large events?
Jordan “n0thing” Gilbert: The more we got comfortable with “slemmy” , this event specifically is the first time where we sat at home and talked more mid-game and late-game, whereas the first couple of events we didn’t literally have strats down, we were spending time just getting ideas down and connecting “slemmy” to some of the strats we already had. I feel like if you want to be one of the top five teams in the world, you can’t just have that initial conversation about a strategy, you have to dive deeper and figure out how you want to finish rounds and create openings for individuals to make big individual plays. Like Fnatic, really hard to counter, because they’re always going to have the flexibility of someone else step up if you shut someone else down. We’re trying to focus in on that mid to late game.
Aleksei: In the second half of 2016, what would you say are the goals/aims for Cloud9?
Jordan “n0thing” Gilbert: For the remainder of the year I think we just need to establish ourselves as a top eight team. Now there’s a lot of competition in the top eight, currently I don’t feel like we’re in there. I think it’s due to a lot of different factors, so we’re targeting those factors, focusing up, getting results and aiming to make a couple semis at the least.
Aleksei: Short term, ECS, what are we looking at?
Jordan “n0thing” Gilbert: Same kind of mind-set, we have a tough opponent tomorrow, Fnatic. I feel like it’s a Bo1, anything can happen. We can definitely take Fnatic, Astralis and TSM down, so we’re trying to get into the semis at the least.
Aleksei: Fantastic, thank you very much for the interview and best of luck tomorrow and throughout ECS.
Jordan “n0thing” Gilbert: Appreciate it, thank you.
Images courtesy of DreamHack Flickr/Alex Maxwell and Cloud9.gg
