C9 Max Waldo on reaching knockouts, beating Rogue in tiebreaker match, career
Roughly 50 minutes into the second tiebreaker match amidst the 2021 League of Legends World Championship group stage, things remained as hectic as when it first began.
Approximately forty kills had been logged so far between Cloud9 and Rogue and the gold lead constantly changed hands in the process. Given how both teams refused to lay down, it looked as though neither could hold the advantage long enough to secure the win.
As the match drew on, ultimately becoming the longest in the tournament thus far, with the significance behind each player’s actions rising to an agonizing degree, players needed to make every move count and be done with great assurance.
What with the assortment of builds on each player reaching their maximum capacity, the game’s margin of error shrunk to a point where just one tiny mistake would cost either team the game.
Two primary outcomes are thus presented to the competing teams: you either hold your nerve during the late game and wait for the perfect opportunity to land the final blow or you crash and burn spectacularly which earns you a ticket straight to the airport.
Such was the tempestuous dilemma Cloud9 Position & Strategic Coach Max Waldo watched from the coach’s room as his team faced Rogue in Day 4 in the Worlds 2021 group stage.
After snatching wins over Rogue and FunPlus Phoenix during Group A’s second round-robin, C9 help enact a three-team tiebreaker that decided the second team going through to the knockout stage alongside defending champions DWG KIA.
Heading into the day, C9 was on the precipice of getting eliminated from the tournament. The LCS’ third seed was coming off a dismal 0-3 record in the first round-robin of the group where they dropped close games to Rogue and FPX and had little chance of leapfrogging both teams for that highly sought after second seed.
What they were left with instead was an intricate set of results that was based beyond their control. Of the 64 possible scenarios where C9 can advance to the knockout stage without having to beat DWG, only one was deemed viable.
That made for a 1.56% chance of progression according to the Worlds 2021 Group Advancement scenario allocation website.
C9 Max Waldo preparing for second round-robin
Be that as it may, however, in the eyes of C9 Max Waldo, who joined C9 after distinguishing himself as one of North America’s promising coaching prospects, he never doubted the team could pull off the improbable.
Through the adjustments made during their day off and FPX’s “weak” display from the first round-robin, there was no reason for anyone, either the fans or the team itself, to lose hope.
One day before the second round-robin, C9 surveyed their VODs to scout what went wrong in their initial set of games and what they needed to do to improve.
READ MORE: T1 Canna: “The thing that pressured me most… it was my first official match in a long time”
Unlike reenacting the traditional movie trope such as making an elaborate and impassioned speech to the players and rejuvenating their morale, Waldo addressed their deficiencies in team coordination normally.
“Really, we just went into the next couple of days and talked about the draft and the games going forward. We just focused on the next match,” said C9 Max Waldo regarding how the team prepared for Day 4. “There wasn’t any moment where we all woke up and decided to play better.
“We kind of saw pretty early on that FPX was going to be weaker. The first match of the tournament was FPX against DWG and we saw right away that DWG had clearly outclassed them.
Then when we played our first match against FPX, we realized that they [were] not actually playing that well. Then when FPX played Rogue, we saw a very similar thing. For every single match, FPX basically played under our expectation of them from previous years.”
Needless to say, their adjustments worked to full fruition. With FPX’s collapse that depicted them losing four consecutive games including the first tiebreaker match loss against Rogue, both Western teams found themselves on the brink of advancing to the next round and achieving that elusive international success.
Cloud9 vs Rogue: Tiebreaker #2
Through the crucial contribution of mid-laner Luka “Perkz” Perkovic on his signature LeBlanc, he bothered Rogue’s composition with her poking abilities to create space in skirmishes and allow C9 to steer ahead for portions of the match.
Save for the moments where Perkz played too assertively in his moves with the mage champion and was caught by Rogue which relinquished his team’s advantage, C9 stayed firm in their draft that centered around him.
Eventually, the game’s deciding moment arrived when Rogue Realm Warped onto Vulcan in the mid jungle bush for a quick kill to create a 5v4 lead in the struggle for the Elder Drake.
But such a move happened in vain, because following the miss, C9 responded with a barrage of ultimates towards the Rogue cluster to make a team wipe and have an open nexus in their hands for the victory.
With C9 pushing towards the enemy nexus, a wave of raw jubilation enveloped the Laugardalshöll in Reykjavik, Iceland. From the players to the coaching staff, everyone rejoiced at full volume as they earned a ticket to the knockout stage of League’s cornerstone event.
Sitting in the middle of the unrestrained mob was Waldo, whose debut year which featured an LCS title and two international appearances continued by staying in Worlds.
Whereas the team’s major figures such as Mithy, Reignover, and Jack Etienne cheered with untamed exuberance, Waldo evoked a subdued reaction, giving only a gleaming smile that starkly contrasted his senior peers’ voraciousness.
Said C9 Max Waldo when asked of the moment he knew C9 would win against Rogue, “I think the obvious response was [during] the last team fight that we knew [we were going to win], but it’s somewhere in between us getting Infernal Soul and when Perkz Q-Rs Jayce and pops his GA.
These are moments where it became pretty obvious to me that we were going to win because it looked like they didn’t have very many options and the way that we were playing team fights was better than up to that point.
“Even though before then they had massively scaled us when we got Infernal Soul and when Perkz’s LeBlanc was at the point where he could kill Jayce so easily. It looked like it would be hard for them to win after the game had gone so long at that point.”
Even when he was asked about his reaction after C9’s victory over Rogue, Waldo took it upon himself to describe the intricacies of the game instead of recounting his emotions on having assisted the team to reach the knockouts. Such is the way of a man who reached this point from humble beginnings.
Looking back at the career of C9 Max Waldo
As one of C9’s assistant coaches, Waldo helps oversee the team’s preparation in strategies and positioning on the map with their draft compositions.
It’s a major step forward from where he was last year in which he streamed and coached amateur players following a short stint with 100 Thieves’ amateur and academy team as a top laner.
Besides his playing career, Waldo was also recruited by notable analyst LS to travel to Korea and hone his coaching skills there, teaching players how to improve themselves in their preferred position.
However, Waldo professed how he wasn’t “equally confident” on coaching every position since he didn’t completely understand them yet in a Reddit AMA thread last summer.
But as the days he spent at the game grew and his credibility solidified, he caught the attention of Cloud9, winners of four LCS championships, and was signed in December as one of their LCS assistant coaches. Additionally, by joining C9, his confidence increased as well.
“Since then, I’ve learned so much about the game, how the [the game] works, and about what incentivizes people in the game that I’ve learned more about all the roles, but now I feel that there’s much more to learn,” said Waldo. “Even though I’ve improved, I [feel] I’ve just discovered a farther horizon of things that I don’t know.
“It’s super, super satisfying to learn these things about the game, and then apply them yourselves especially when they are ideas that you have about the game.
Such as being able to see that they’re useful in the game, applying them yourselves, and giving them to somebody else, it’s like a hugely satisfying task.”
On to the quarterfinals
As a result of beating Rogue, Cloud9 advanced to the knockout stage of Worlds 2021, becoming the first team from NA to get out of groups since 2018. As NA’s sole representative in the tournament, all hopes are pinning on them to overturn the Eastern stranglehold of the Summoner’s Cup and win it for the first time in the region’s history.
As the second-placed team in Group A, C9 is slated to face any team that finished first in their respective group, but when Waldo was given the opportunity to say which team he would like to face in the quarterfinals, he settled on a pair of familiar Western foes C9 faced throughout 2021.
“My immediate response when you ask this question was ‘I want to play against another EU team,’ or that I would want to pick MAD or Fnatic. I think MAD Lions would be fun to play against in quarters. T1 would be fun to play against in quarters, but I think I’d pick an EU team,” said C9 Max Waldo.
Though MAD Lions ended up progressing to the next phase like C9, they won’t meet until the grand finals. Instead, C9 will face Gen.G, the LCK’s second seed that finished ahead of MAD in Group D following a four-team tiebreaker process.
Although C9 is set to face a tough opponent from a dominant region (C9 is 6-12 against Korean teams in Worlds history including playoffs), C9 feels ready to take them headstrong, because as they showed on the final day of Group A, they can surpass everyone’s expectations.
Even when the rest of the world has discarded them, they will continue trudging along in spite of it just like what they did in Iceland.
