autimatic: "If anything, [the 1-16 loss on Mirage] made me really mad"

We had a chat with Timothy "⁠autimatic⁠" Ta after Cloud9 lived to fight another day despite a poor start to their series against FURIA in the fourth round.

Cloud9 have survived day four at the Major despite starting off their best-of-three series against FURIA with a 1-16 loss on their pick, Mirage, as they returned the favor with a 16-1 win of their own on Inferno and closed things out in a rather close affair on Cache.

With the fifth round still ahead of them, we spoke to autimatic about their poor showing in rounds two and three, in which they lost one-sided maps to TYLOO and ViCi, and their latest series against the Brazilians.

The American also discussed their coaches, Soham "⁠valens⁠" Chowdhury and Ronald "⁠Rambo⁠" Kim, not being able to stand behind the squad during matches and the dynamic between the two.

Cloud9 started off well with a win against Grayhound in the first round, but then it all fell apart in the next two rounds as you had two blowout matches against TYLOO and ViCi. What went wrong in the second and third round?

I think the obvious thing is that we just played awful. That's for sure one thing. And the second thing is that we had no idea how they like to play and they do a lot of unorthodox things that we were caught off by and also everything we practiced we didn't get to do because we were getting reset constantly. I think on Overpass versus TYLOO, in practice I always have an AWP and in the match I didn't buy an AWP once. Things like that. Our T sides, we normally feel like are pretty strong, but we didn't show up with the right mentality and that's something that we tried to change for this match.

Well, this match didn't start out very differently, such a beatdown on Mirage, how were you able to reset from that, especially after the previous couple of days, to return the favor?

If anything, it made us really mad, or it made me really mad. We just talked and we just said to focus up and let's play. I felt like we came here with our minds on strategy and things like that, but we just needed to play our game and take things slow.

What was different, then, from those three maps compared to the rest of the series against FURIA?

I think for the two games that we lost and also the first map, we had some prep and we went into the match thinking a lot about what they did and it backfired on us because we just didn't play our own game. So for the second and third map, we didn't talk about what they did at all, we didn't even talk about what we were going to do. We just played and it worked out.

Was the morale down?

I think the morale was high the whole entire time. On this team, I don't think anyone really gets down, so that's a good thing, but I think we just had to adapt and that's what we did. We just decided to throw strategy out of the window and just play off feel.

Something that is specific to this tournament is that you can't have the coach behind you as they aren't part of the official roster - how does that change the role of valens and Rambo?

The thing that I noticed is that before the match they would give us basically their scouting report of the other team and everyone would be there listening to it, we would talk about it as a team. But in the match, every player was thinking too much about that, and I think the main downside of not having them is that when we take a timeout, they can't just tell us what they know. They have to tell us beforehand and that affects our game.

What is the dynamic between them, do they each have different roles?

I think there is no real difference in roles. I think Ron is just slowly transitioning into the coaching role, so he's just kind of watching Soham and also he's giving his input and we're just easing our way into the transition. There's no difference in roles, but I think the difference in personalities is I think Rambo is obviously a really good player from back in the day and I think he has a really good feel for the game, whereas I think valens has more of a learned feel if that makes sense, he's learned a lot of what should happen whereas Ron just has a feeling for what's going to happen. That's the biggest difference between the two and both have its up and downs.

With Zellsis being a rookie at the Major, generally quite inexperienced, and a target of a lot of criticism, how is he dealing with this all?

I think the good thing about Jordan is that he has a good attitude. We've given him a lot of feedback and things that we think he can improve on and he's always just taken it and tried to work on it. And he played pretty well in this match, I think he pretty much won Cache for us with that clutch.