LCS star Berserker breaks down C9’s improvement from MSI to Worlds 2023

After a disappointing loss to LNG Esports at the 2023 League of Legends World Championship, the Cloud9 faithful looked towards its favorite players for a source of reassurance.

Luckily for them, some of the organization’s stars remained as confident as ever while acknowledging their own pitfalls over the last year. In an interview with Korizon Esports’ Ashley Kang, for example, superstar AD carry Kim “Berserker” Min-cheol explained why C9 wasn’t as successful at previous international tournaments, such as their unfortunate exit from this year’s Mid-Season Invitational.

The 20-year-old said that although the roster is strong with individual laning and raw mechanics, the mid-to-late game was rather lackluster due to communication issues and a lack of mid-jungle synergy. He also broke down how C9 lacked a clear goal when it came to macro and why it led to multiple losses over the course of the year.

“Back at MSI, the moment an objective was up, we’d go up and fight for it,” Berserker told Ashley Kang. “If the opposing team is smart, they’d just give away the objective and try to get global gold leads by CS in side lane and turrets. So, we’d actually come out very gold deficient as the results of our decisions, especially around contesting the second Rift Herald.”

He also admitted that at MSI, they were relatively inexperienced with different game aspects, such as side lane wave management, which is an important tool in managing game tempo. As a bottom laner, Berserker would ask his teammates to push out mid since it allows him to push his own lane, but this negatively impacted the rest of the team since they weren’t able to farm up and gain their own advantages.

For Worlds, C9 has worked at learning more strategies for the mid-to-late game, especially because Korean teams are so adept at keeping up with good farming, wave management, and macro play. This has been a downfall for many different LCS teams over the years, even if the players can keep up mechanically with their laning assignments.

Although C9 did fall to a 2-1 record, they still have plenty of chances to work with as they battle for a spot in the knockout stage later this November. They will, however, have to get through Faker and T1’s star-studded lineup when the two squads collide on Sunday, Oct. 22, at 2am CT.