n0thing: "I've pondered starting an org for years"

Jordan "n0thing" Gilbert is nothing less than a legend in North American Counter-Strike, spending the early years of CS:GO with Complexity and Cloud9, sharing the stage with other infamous North American such as sawg, seang@res, Hiko, skadoodle and shroud. These days, though, he's further removed from tier one Counter-Strike, making appearances at NA events such as IEM Dallas, but less involved with the scene than some of the other players from his generation.

These days, n0thing spends his time on the business side of esports, working with those in charge to ensure collaborative sponsorship agreements and incredible events. At IEM Dallas, Dust2.us' Daniel "Scoobster" Khurgin spoke with the legend about his time since competitive play, the state of NA CS, and the future of global Counter-Strike.

Our readers, our viewers, they all know you as this former pro player. What are you doing now?

I am streaming, doing a little bit of consulting work, I have a couple clients that are endemic to esports, ones where I exchange time for helping them sort out sponsors, streamers to work with, things like that. Now I also have two children, so I've created a flow for my work the past few years where I am able to limit my time when needed to help out around the house and still leave time for things like this, coming to Dallas, to IEMs, to hang around events.

Doing consulting, what unique experiences do you offer to the businesses that hire you?

Basically, it normally starts with getting an understanding of their goals and their budget size and things like that. A traditional marketing agency would take a lot of focus on just analytics. What I do, I try to get those reports from people and say "hey if you want to work with these people, these are the numbers", but they can get that from other people.

A lot of times, I just cater things, especially around the CS or VALORANT community, communities that I know well, and I will help decide and say "hey, this will feel a bit more genuine for this community," or be there as an advisor to the marketing campaign and help them frame the feel, the wording, sometimes literally helping them script out a commercial.

You talk to certain fans and I say "okay, that's gonna be too snarky or maybe too technical. You have to meme that or recognize you're gonna be made fun of for this. It's cheesy and this is the angle" and then introductions, connecting them to the right group of people, help them fast track working with IEM or one of the other connections I have.

So you're selling your authenticity?

Exactly, sometimes I upsell actually being an ambassador for the company myself, like what I do with Allstar.gg. Then sometimes, I'm just behind the scenes.

As you were a pro player for a long time, was this pivot to business something you were expecting to do?

Yeah, absolutely. I was kind of interested in business when I started school for a couple years before I dropped out for Counter-Strike. I still love Counter-Strike and actually as Valve open up the circuit for 2025, I'm starting to prod and daydream a little bit about some other ways I could be involved in the scene in a larger way.

I've pondered starting an org for years, but it's something you could almost call cringe at at this point because of the amount of people who've tried that and maybe had the wrong approach, think of the investment bubble we had in esports 5-6 years ago. Things like that still excite me. I've always been thinking about that.

I wish I would have done even more projects back when I was competing because that's when things are easier to connect with the community.

Speaking about going back to CS, after you semi-retired, you were a commentator or analyst for a few years. Is that something you'd like to get back into?

Yeah, potentially. Honestly, I probably would be continuously doing it at least quarterly until now if it wasn't for COVID. I think what happened with COVID is it actually encouraged me to shift how my business worked and then I was happy that I had opportunity outside of just being an analyst.

I really loved it. IEM Chicago, IEM New York, I was going to those for a couple years in a row on the analyst desk. FACEIT in London too. I enjoy it. I enjoy watching matches and talking about it.

So potentially as the Counter-Strike ecosystem opens up coming into 2025, we could see more of n0thing on Counter-Strike broadcasts?

Totally and a big part of this is my kids. I have a three year old and a nine month old, so as they get a little bit older it'll be easier for the kids to be left with their mom. She's already doing all the childcare essentially- actually, she wold say "Don't say essentially. Give me credit where it's due!" She's working overtime.

Family is my number one priority so I have to make sure that's set before I commit. But I would love to. To keep the answer short, 2025 and on, I would love to get more active in events again.

Since COVID, pretty much all of Counter-Strike has been focused in Europe, obviously that's a difficulty for you, but can you speak to the difficulties that's caused for North American Counter-Strike?

I think there's a couple underlying things regardless of where CS is being played. Who's our real leaders in North America? I actually think stanislaw was one of our better IGLs but he hasn't been on Complexity, JT is the IGL there.

Let's put it this way. EliGE, NAF, Twistzz, we needed those cores to stay together better. Then of course, VALORANT and our tier two infrastructure, that's the elephant in the room. That affects our practice. Going to Europe is kind of an issue, but historically, that is NA's formula for winning. Play against Europeans in practice. I don't think that should necessarily be an excuse, I just think, what real NA teams with our strongest players have been even playing since the Liquid run in 2019?

Since then, Complexity have been our strongest core and they can get beaten by M80 on any given day. M80 you can argue shouldn't have the same ceiling as Complexity, but maybe their floor is closer.

Anyways, I think we're just kind of a mess top-down. And now we're bit of underdogs.

At least we get to root for Stewie!

Yeah laughs it's fun to watch.

You said the winning formula for NA CS was always to play against EU competition. IEM Dallas and events like that, that's when a bunch of top tier European teams come to North America. How important are events like that for North America's ecosystem?

Oh massive. I think as you see, the turnout here is great. I think bringing more events back like ESL One New York or IEM Chicago or whatever we're gonna call 'em, I think it's great. I think there's an audience for it still, and I think there's a lot of people from the older generation of Counter-Strike fans to newer that are coming in now that love it.

I hope with the open circuit and the years to come, we can embrace DreamHack and how they funneled and had their open qualifiers in the past. I hope the open qualifier thing keeps growing and that's the way we continue to see new talent come up.

When 2025 does come around, we get that open circuit, at least four main tournament organizes who have already announced their schedules. When you retied, you said part of it was because of so many tournaments happening so often and the schedule was tough to navigate; you couldn't find any time at home. Do you see that as a potential issue next year?

Oh yeah. I mean it's always an issue. I think it's gonna take a little time to navigate and the dust will need to settle, bit right now, teams have these agreements with ESL or whoever and apparently either these agreements can't exist or have to exist in a much lighter capacity. People are going to have to solve what is their formula, or how they go about deciding how their schedule should look.

The obvious answer is what's the biggest most prestigious events, what is going to give the most exposure to our sponsors. I think the problem could get first straight away if the barrier to entry is gone for these events, the benefit is more coming in means more competition for said event and it rises the tides again. It makes conditions continue to rise and puts more value on who can run the best event. That's the benefit.

The downside is obvious, oversaturation, but I think ESL and these groups, they're gonna continue to monopolize, not just out of malicious business strategy, but just because they legitimately run the best events and have had so much experience doing so. Some of it will sort itself out and some of it we'll see groups trying to do new events and we'll see how well they do.

Maybe another player's association needs another spark again to re-approach that and say "how do we represent tier one and tier two, tier three schedules and integrate that". We can sit down and talk and I can give my opinions but you definitely need a roundtable discussion to sort this kind of thing out.

Potentially part of the reason ESL and BLAST became so ubiquitous is they were able to lock organizations into these partnership agreements. With this open system, organizations will choose to participate in events in what's best for the team, so travel accommodations, prize pool, things like that.

Correct. And like I said, you can't overlook the production and actual event itself. Sponsors want to ask "is this something fans are having fun at?". Obviously they'll look at viewership numbers and things of that nature. ESL is in a good position. Luckily so are BLAST, because these people are putting on good shows.

What's exciting is MLG. They have pretty solid production value for the size of the tournaments they put on and they always ran pretty smooth. Someone comes back into the fray like that it could be fun. Like you said, we always have to consider what's the best for the narratives year round. We've been trying to sort that out for years.

Some years are better than others in CS where you really say "I'm so excited for this", like back in my day, that would be Cloud9 against Virtus.Pro. We haven't played each other for a couple months, they knocked us out of the last tournament, this one map means a ton.

You lose that when you oversaturate the market, that's not news to anyone. Keeping all the regions strong enough with their own tournaments so they have their practice while limiting international exposure to more meaningful instances definitely helps narratives and strengthen it.

If you're watching the Stanley Cup eight times a year, it doesn't have the same weight. That's something we have to make sure we're balancing. Even if the tournaments are awesome and there's a lot of prize money going around, we can't just say "we need ten ten million dollar tournaments every week". I digress.