My Pokemon Is Fight

I have been participating in and running Pokémon tournaments for a long time. I played against neighborhood kids in grade school, built teams to face my friends in high school, and developed complex strategies in college. When I worked for Gamestop I started a tradition of having a Pokémon tournament before the launch of each new game in the series. At its peak my tournaments hosted over 120 players, and resulted in a number of angry complaints by mall security. Even though I’m no longer with the company, friends of mine are continuing the tradition and this Saturday will mark their second annual tournament without my help.

The biggest thing that gave our tournaments drive was our awesome district manager at the time who authorized us to offer prizes, including free copies of the new game to the winners. Runners up would win things like DS storage cases and Pokémon figurines, one year we even had a custom engraved trophy for the winner. So far every tournament winner has been a friend of mine, including our current reigning champion who is also a two time winner. That doesn't mean that you need to be college aged in order to win, in our second year we had an 8 year old boy in the quarterfinals, and last year a young girl whose team was her starter and five dragons made it to the semifinals. People of all ages come out to participate, from toddlers using their in game team to full adults who compete alongside their children.

For the years that I ran it, I didn't get to participate for obvious reasons, but I did get to face off against the tournament champion each year in an exhibition match. In those battles I was undefeated for three years running. Every year the matches would get closer and closer, including the famous frozen Togekiss moment, but I managed to pull off a win every time. Last year I entered at the last minute with my championship team basically as a gimmick to see how far I got, and got eliminated in round 3. This year I’m significantly more prepared, and I’m ready to reclaim my title.

If you've never played competitive Pokémon it’s a crazy beast. The best way to describe it is really really complex rock-paper-scissors. There are layers upon layers of strategy, team synergy, and countering options for you to consider when building a team, and then actually playing involves equal parts luck, skill, prediction, mind games, and tactics. There are over 600 Pokémon now, and hundreds of attacks, items, and abilities for them to use which leads to literally billions of possible teams, and on top of that every year or so a new game comes out which adds new moves, forms, or Pokémon to be considered for use. There is a massive Pokémon metagame that is maintained by websites and communities across the internet, and countless hours have gone into testing and perfecting certain strategies.

Just a little trip down memory lane I guess. I’m very excited for the upcoming tournament this Saturday (10/5) and I’ll be there with the 3^rd year champion and some other friends. It will be good to really get back into the swing of competitive battling, since I haven’t been seriously competing for a number of years. If you’re near the South Shore Plaza feel free to come by and see what all the fuss is about.