autimatic: "We'd rather play VP..."

After topping their group on day one, Cloud9 were pitted against Envy in the first semi-final. Running over the Frenchmen on Cache, Jake "⁠Stewie2K⁠" Yip's team began well on Mirage but dropped a significant lead, as Envy took over the rest of the map.

It came down to Dust2, where C9 dropped the first several rounds before taking a timeout and storming through the remainder of the decider to advance to the grand final.

After the semi-final, Timothy "⁠autimatic⁠" Ta talked us through Cloud9's point of view on the veto, each map and the momentum shifts, and the difference between his playstyle in his current team and the previous one, TSM.

A lot of the experts were criticising you for leaving Cache in and banning Nuke first. What was your thinking behind the veto?

I think a lot of teams have this misconception that we're bad on Cache, but we play it. It's just that out of the other six maps we feel like Cache is our weakest, but we still play it and we're still fairly comfortable on it. We've never played Nuke though and didn't wanna risk playing it in a semi-final.

Let's run through the maps, first of all the Cache, a very straight-forward victory there, why do you think it was that comfortable?

We just got off to a really good start and they spent a lot of rounds ecoing, trying to save up for a double AWP I think. We won all the anti-ecos and then after that we would win a gunround and forced another save. It was kinda like a snowball effect.

Going over to Mirage, you had a significant lead at the beginning, but then you dropped it after EnVy took a timeout. What happened there?

When we were on the CT side I felt like they were abusing B and ladder room a lot. After they did that we didn't really have an answer for it. I've never really been abused in ladder, I normally do a pretty good job in there, but they cleared it with three people. After that we didn't really have a mid presence at all and didn't have any info there, and that's basically what happened, they took away all mid control and split us up.

On Dust2, the last map, it was pretty much the opposite, EnVyUs had a big lead and then you took a timeout and ran through the rest of the match. Was there anything special that you talked about during the timeout and changed for the rest of the half?

In the timeout, we actually only talked for like the first 20 seconds, after that we just spent it cooling down and staying composed, because we felt like we had a pretty good understanding of their CT side, but we were playing poorly, weren't getting trades and losing post-plant situations. We just needed a minute to relax and focus up.

It was a very streaky game overall, each team had multiple big streaks, would you call yourselves a momentum-based team? Did the timeouts simply break the momentum rather than one of the teams changing up their strategy?

I wouldn't say we're momentum-based, I would say that if our mood is good, even if we're losing, we normally come back a little bit at least, even if we don't always win it. If our mood is good and everyone has positive vibes, I think we can always come back. So, it doesn't really have to do with in-game, it has to do with out of game more, like if we play a situation wrong and get mad at each other, that's where we start losing. But if we can keep the positivity up, then we can come back.

Virtus.pro or dignitas are ahead in the grand final, is there a preference and who's the better fit?

Honestly, I think dignitas would fit us better just because VP is really dynamic in the way they play, they've been together for such a long time now that they have so many different playstyles, and it's really hard for us to read that. But I think we'd rather play VP just to see where we're standing against the top teams, that would be really interesting.

Lastly I want to talk about you transferring to Cloud9 - in TSM you were always a good player, but never to the extent as now in C9. Why do you think that is?

In TSM we had SicK and Twistzz who are pretty aggressive players, they like taking battles, which is fine, but that made me have to play a little bit more passive. On this team, one of the reasons why I'm doing a little bit better is because everyone on the team can play passive and aggressive and I'm able to do both as well, but I'm more comfortable playing aggressive than passive naturally. Cloud9 utilising that part of me made me play better.