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one of the things i’ve been talking about for the past few weeks is the Pokemon Regionals. i’ve been a competitive player of the hand held games for years. this past weekend myself and a few friends attended the Pokemon Video Game Regional Championships in Philadelphia. a good few months ago i had made a post letting everyone know that this event was coming up.

people from all over ranging from the extremely young to the ever so old attended this event. my friends and i spent weeks practicing different team strategies and getting familiar with the Double Battles system of the game. we were SO busy tweaking teams the night before that we didn’t even get to leave for Philly until around 4:30am. we arrived around 7am and it was immediately time to get in line and attempt to register. yeah, tackling a tourny with ZERO sleep. ugh…

Pooplip, Chamchur, and Turdwig all enjoy a nice Grinder…

here is a video i took with my phone during one of the final matches of an unlucky player’s Zapdos getting frozen and determining the match. there are a lot of children screaming at the top of their lungs. pokemon is clearly SERIOUS BUSINESS. this shit got me pumped when watching it.

READ MORE ABOUT OUR POKEMON TOURNAMENT EXPERIENCE AND SEE HOW ZOMGROB DID AFTER THE JUMP!!

there were well over 1000 people at this event screaming in a sea of Nintendo DS’s. the way entry for this tournament was set up was complete bullshit. there was a Junior Division and a Senior Division which was fine. what didn’t work at all was that there were around 600 registrants for the senior division alone. how many do they RANDOMLY choose to get in? 128. yes, you heard me. 128 fuckers. and it’s totally random. i felt really bad for the dedicated players who traveled so far and didn’t make it in. the competitive pokemon community known as Smogon.com has created a petition to give to Nintendo about changing the qualifier procedures for future tournaments. a link to signing that petition can be found HERE.

people were given wrist bands with pokemon names and numbers on them. if your pokemon was one of the random 128 shown on the flat screen TVs, you were in. if not, you were fucked until you either traveled all the way to another regional qualifier across the country, or waited till next year. Nintendo and Pokemon Organized Play definitely needs to get this shit under control.

everyone seeing that they were NOT on the list...QQ

these devices are where you would put your DS game into and battle your opponent. interesting. yes, hack checks were issued throughout the tourny.

when they showed the names, unfortunately none of us had made it in. i was so determined to enter that i ended up paying a friend of ours 10.00 for his wristband and took his spot. so how’d i do you might ask? i ended up doing pretty well. i got through the first few rounds and then into the finals. the team i used consisted of some high tier pokemon along with a fairly simple, yet extremely effective strategy.

the scary card they give you once you hit the finals bracket.

here is the line up of the four pokemon team i had used:

Azelf

Gengar

Metagross

Zapdos

i’m not going to go into full strategy, moves, IVs, EVs, etc for the sake of my team being spoiled. a lot of its wonder works with the element of surprise. let’s just say there’s a big KA-BOOM involved. *cough* explosion *cough*

i ended up losing in the finals bracket. i lost to a player known as Ethan (PokEthan on Smogon boards). he had a very well versed team and i lost my cool due to not having any sleep in the past 48 hours. it was a great match, and the fans certainly seemed to enjoy our action on the big screen TVs.

my good friend Fil and Turtwig together. without my glasses on, i can't tell them apart.

in the end, i received 5th place out of 128 senior division players in the tournament. it was SUCH a fun time. when you made it to the finals bracket, the final 16 players were escorted to a Finalists Lounge. in this lounge we were interviewed by numerous websites and given time to get pictures taken and chat with other fans. it was probably the coolest i could possibly feel being at a pokemon event and all. oh yeah, this was one of the few events i celebrated my 22nd birthday at. (June 7th to be exact lol.) bars, BBQs, and pokemon. good shit.

one journalist known was Shane from Examiner.com was nice enough to interview me and include me in his article which can be found HERE.

me, just chillen. in the pokemon Finalists Lounge.

over all, i had a really amazing time. i may not of won, but the experience was a literal BLAST. i can easily say that double battles are the new single battles of the competitive pokemon scene. i used to hate doubles but now i’ve seen the light and can accept that there is far more strategy involved. singles forces too much switching of pokemon and such. hopefully Nintendo and Pokemon Organized Play hold some more tournaments throughout the year. good luck to the winners of the World Championships towards the end of the summer.

PS: anyone who would be interested in battling me over Wi-Fi can contact me through my Smogon account known as “blurr”.

i leave you with this random picture of myself from a few months ago with some random bro in an Ursaring costume. legit.

Tags: blurr, ds, dsi, finalist, nationals, nintendo, philadelphia, pikachu, pokemon, pokethan, regionals, smogon, vash, vgc, worlds, zomgrob

This entry was posted on June 11, 2009 at 12:56 am and is filed under conventions, games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.