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Published on July 10th, 2013 | by Scott

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What We Learned: 2013 United States Nationals Edition

During every Pokemon event, we learn a little bit about the game of Pokémon and the community that surrounds it that is worth reflecting on. This Masters-centric column will appear following major events and highlight important trends and moments during the previous weekend’s events.

Now that most of us are home and experiencing the infamous post-Nationals depression, it’s time to look back on what was by a pretty crazy margin the best United States Nationals VGC has ever seen. Frequent Nugget Bridge readers have probably picked up on the fact that I am the type of guy who enjoys complaining a lot, but there just isn’t much for me to use my talents on this time! The tournament ran a lot quicker than I expected it would, the event had no major hiccups, the format of the tournament was perfect, and the environment was exciting and fun. I felt like there were a few Regionals this year where it felt like the staff were just trying to get through the event to the players, but Nationals this year had something special, and everyone seemed to be doing everything they could do to make the event great. From little stuff this year like the message from community icon Nick McCord and the vastly improved side events, to big changes like dedicating Sunday to showing the finals and adding live commentary, the event just felt like it was more complete and exciting this year. I usually say that Worlds is the only tournament where I care about the Pokemon and that I’m mostly just coming to hang out with people at the other events, but the Pokemon at Nationals was spectacular this year.

Improved Finals Schedule

I think the biggest story for Nationals this year is that we finally broke away from the constantly-maligned simultaneous finals format. This change was something the players had been asking for basically since the simultaneous finals format was instituted to begin with, because it took away a lot of the spotlight away from the Seniors and Juniors finalists. The players had always felt like the people in the finals deserved the spotlight and their moment of fame for making it to the end of such a prestigious tournament, but most of the crowd tended to watch Masters over them when all the finals happened at the same time. The format issue was something I always tried to bring attention to a little bit, but it was because I thought it was the right thing to do rather than because the other finals were something that I thought I was really interested in watching.

The part of this that actually surprised me is just how much better everything was this year and how exciting getting to watch the other divisions’ finals actually was. I wasn’t in the crowd for the finals, but it’s the reaction to the finals people have had in the last 72 hours or so that is really amazing to me. I would wager I’ve had at least 10 different conversations about the Juniors finals with people since Sunday afternoon. I literally hadn’t watched a single Juniors match since 2010 Worlds before Sunday, and I’d wager that was true for most of the other Masters, too. In spite of that apparent lack of interest, not only did we actually enjoy watching the Juniors finals, we’re still discussing it days later. While I think most of us were rooting for Maylee Hornak (maykiri) to win, both because she’s adorable and because she’s the sister of Nugget Bridge administrator-buddy Paul Hornak (makiri), Beau Berg (Oreios) absolutely stole the show on this one.

I feel that the veteran members of Nugget Bridge are a pretty tough group to impress by playing Pokemon, but pretty much to a man we were shocked by how strong Beau’s understanding of the game seems to be at his age. He had a team that required the player to understand the higher level game concepts to use effectively, with a roster that looked more like a team for a Master than a Junior, and he even had a pretty good understanding of how to adjust in the best-of-3 format, something that many more experienced players struggle with. Beau is a really deserving champion, and I know Evan Latt (plaid) also mentioned that he was able to talk to Beau a little and was really impressed by his demeanor. I think it’s really important for Pokemon to give the kids a chance to shine, because even as a guy writing for a site that is visited mostly by the teenagers and adults playing this game, I’m aware that the kids are the biggest part of what keeps Pokemon magical, and the improved finals format gave Beau an opportunity to do shine like he deserved to… an opportunity that he absolutely nailed. I think he’ll do great at Worlds, and he has definitely made a fan out of me.

Oh Right, Seniors

I know the disclaimer says this article is Masters-centric, but I want to write about the Seniors finals this time, too. I knew basically what I was going to get from the finals of the other two divisions, but Seniors is always a big wild card because I feel like the variance in skill between players is really high compared to Masters but that the potential is really high. Fortunately, there was no reason for me to worry this time: if Paul Chua (WhatARandomName) and DeVon Ingram (dingram) had been playing as well as they were in the Seniors division in Masters instead, they would probably have been contending the finals with the big boys.

I was pretty fixated on it while I was commenting live, but I want to touch on how well DeVon was predicting in this series, even in a losing effort. To use myself as a reference here because I’m convenient, part of why it works for me to do color commentary is because I have vastly above average prediction skills and knowledge of the game; this is why I finished 5th in Masters CP. With that as your reference, DeVon was predicting what Paul was going to do better than I was almost every single turn of both finals games, yet he didn’t even win. I don’t think I can recall ever seeing a game where someone was double targeting the correct Pokemon while its partner protected with the reliability DeVon was. I think there were probably some holes in his game that led to him losing beyond just the bad luck with Paralysis in Game 1 — specifically that he had a ton of support Pokemon, so it was difficult for him to do enough damage to capitalize on his own brilliant predictions — but he was absolutely predicting on a level that could put him in Worlds in any age division.

I talked too little about Paul live, and I don’t want to make the same mistake here. He’s probably the less interesting story here just because while DeVon was the one making the flashy plays, Paul was making the safer ones and playing the battle management game. I think the way Paul played the finals and his team kind of represent another part of the skills you need to be an elite player at this game. While his opponent was better on a turn-by-turn basis, Paul was managing the battle as a whole really well and knew exactly what positions he needed to get his Pokemon in. He made sure Pokemon he needed to keep around weren’t getting knocked out, he managed the health of his most important Pokemon well, and even though he was getting outpredicted he stuck to his plan and didn’t tilt when things were going against him and came out with both wins. He managed the tools he had to control the game well, like his Scrafty’s Intimidate — something I was surprised DeVon had opted not to use on his own Scrafty — and his ability to manage the game into a winnable situation even when he was spending so much time on the defensive was really admirable. It’s very difficult to play Rain against a team that has tools like Snarl and Sunny Day that cripple most of Rain’s best attackers, but Paul was able to navigate through the counters and take the win. I think the constant battle between the two Scraftys was a good show of Paul’s skill. While he had an advantage with Intimidate, he kept his health higher and made sure he came out on top.

Seniors tend not to get very much respect for any success they have in the Seniors division from the Masters players because the quality of play is thought to be lower there. I think this reputation is pretty inaccurate for the best players in Seniors, and I would imagine after a match that was played as well as the Seniors finals was this year that a lot of players who held that opinion are going to be rethinking it. DeVon and Paul may have completely changed the perception of the better players in Seniors with their match last weekend, which was another really awesome benefit from TPCI splitting up the finals so that their match wasn’t ignored by most of the community like the great bout between Aaron Zheng (Cybertron) and Jonathan Hiller(MrFox) last year was.

The Top Cut We’ve All Been Waiting For

I think I forgot to say this in person, so let me lead off with it: thanks for the top 32 cut in Masters. The announcement that the top cut would remain at 32 players like it was last year was something the denizens of Nugget Bridge, and I think most of the competitive VGC players in general (except Enosh, ironically), were extremely excited to hear during the player meeting. I imagine this is one of those changes that might not seem as huge to people who aren’t neck deep in this like we are, but this was just as big as the finals change to me.

I think the most important part was that it worked out beautifully. I hope this was never about being right to anyone, and was instead about trying to help make sure the best decision was made. I would argue we got the best result anyone could have hoped for: US Nationals had the cleanest top cut I’ve ever seen in a VGC tournament this year, especially one of this size, with the combination of byes/total attendants/drops/pairdown games leading to a beautiful situation where every 7-2 cut and no 6-3s cut. Having been the only X-2 that missed cut in 2011 Nationals, I was pretty glad we didn’t end up one off in that direction this year(close call for Jonathan Rankin (JRank), though!), and I was similarly glad we didn’t end up with any 6-3s cutting, because even though I think most of the high 6-3s were good players, I get the impression that was something the staff really didn’t want happening. I think everyone got to go home happy thinking the format was fair and reasonable this year, which was fantastic. I also certainly felt a little justified for my efforts on Sunday when I was watching the 21 seed knock out the 19 seed in the finals… two players who wouldn’t have been in the match with a top 16 cut. I’d have cut either way myself this year, but I think I speak for everyone when I say that we appreciate TPCI considering our viewpoint and making what I think ended up being the right decision for everyone.

Canada’s Back, Eh?

I know this seems counter-intuitive, but I was kind of ecstatic when I heard Canada wasn’t going to have VGC Nationals this year. I know, it’s odd to be happy at someone else losing something even for me, especially given that it meant that we were going to have more competition at US Nationals. Let’s not forget I predicted a Canadian to win our Nationals, and he nearly did!

Competitively, having to deal with one of the best players in the world in Randy Kwa (R Inanimate) again, as well as some other great players like the Canadian finalists last year Tony Cheung (Chinese Dood) and Mike Papagianis (skarm) is definitely not an improvement for anyone’s odds trying to win a National championship. However, VGC has an extremely tight community. There’s still a lot of us who have known each other for years and years — I’ve known Mike for about eleven years now, for instance — and having to compete against them is well worth getting to meet up with them. We’re pretty spread out geographically here in VGC, but I can’t think of too many other games where I could say that I talk to probably 3/4 of the top 20 players in CP five days a week, most weeks of the year, and where I talk with basically all of the top players at least occasionally. As far as the players go, VGC’s community has a bit of a family feel to it, so in addition to the guys I just mentioned, I was really happy to get to see people like Geoff Hamilton (PROFESSORLABCOAT), Jimmy Kwa (Team Rocket Elite), Rushan Shekar (Firestorm), Aryana Welch (feathers), and Rosalie Bolduc (Roz) at our Nationals, even though they were stealing wins and a trip from good old ‘Merica. The community is more than worth the extra competition.

12 Mans To Worlds

It’s all been sunshine so far, but I think it would be pretty disingenuous if I didn’t even touch on the invitation situation after all the complaining about it we did.

For anyone who didn’t take the lack of news as no news, nothing changed regarding invitations for North America, so there is still only invites for the top 12 in CP. This has predictably led to a little frustration, particularly for the two players who bubbled Masters at 272 points with 12th place sitting at 274. I’m not sure what I can even write about this anymore, but I feel obligated to say something. Like the tournaments within it, the North American circuit is a competition, and only a few players can “win” by making it to Worlds. I understand the line has to be drawn somewhere. However, I do think that with four CP separating 11th to 14th place, determining Worlds Invitations by Wi-Fi tournament standings is extremely unfair to the players involved. TPCI has done the best they could do with the Wi-Fi infrastructure it has this year, and I have a hard time justifying myself as I try to argue that an undeserved disqualification can happen to anyone because it didn’t happen to me, but there were a lot of players this year were disqualified from Wi-Fi tournaments that I’m confident weren’t intentionally disconnecting on their opponents and who I know had stable connections. I don’t think it’s my place to analyze whether or not I think, say, t-13th place Simon Yip (TDS)’s disqualifications were likely to be fair or not, but I do wish TPCI would at least consider extending the invites a couple more slots considering that everyone understands that the current Wi-Fi tournament infrastructure is flawed and I think we all know it’s a really poor tiebreaker as a result. It just seems really unfair to me for players to lose their Worlds invitations over something that may not even have been their fault because the infrastructure is faulty.

I wrote on our forum before Nationals that I wished TPCI would just decide to also give everyone with at least 250 CP a Worlds invite, which would have solved the potential paid-trip-but-no-invite issue that didn’t end up happening as well. It would only wind up sending two extra players in Masters with the way things played out this year, both of whom have played in Worlds before and who are 23 points ahead of the next player, a much more meaningful difference than 2 points. Assuming the policy would have to be applied to all divisions, it would have no change in Juniors and only invite one additional Senior, which I think would be pretty reasonable.

Wait, I Thought This Was The Masters Finals

Perhaps the most entertaining story for the Masters finals this year is how young both the competitors were. While young National Champions is nothing new for the Masters division given that Wolfe Glick (Wolfey) was basically as young as it’s possible to be in Masters the first time he won US Nationals, this years finals featured two players with something in common the Masters finals had never seen before: they both had played at least one year in the Seniors division after the Masters division was created.

I remember that back when the Seniors division was split off in VGC, like most of the Masters at the time, I wasn’t very excited about this new division stealing our prize money away. This year’s finals shouldn’t be the first bit of evidence why the players who were annoyed about Seniors division being created were wrong(at least as far as the division definitely being good for the tournament circuit), but I think it’s a good excuse to point out how good some of the graduating Seniors have been. This year’s second place finisher, Enosh Shachar(Human), only had one year in Seniors, but he was great when he was there, finishing 3rd in 2011 Worlds. He immediately followed that up by making top 8 at US Nationals during his first year in Masters, losing only to eventual champion Wolfe Glick. He kind of skarmed it in Worlds LCQ that year, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone to see him in Worlds this year.

Gavin Michaels (kingofkongs) is probably a little more surprising, especially because he’s a first year Master, but he made top 8 of Seniors Worlds last year with a pretty awesome team using some uncommon Pokemon like Bronzong. I think Gavin had a pretty admirable 2013 season because he kind of came out of nowhere at Nationals. It’s really easy to keep playing well and to focus when everything is going your way, but unlike, say, Enosh, Aaron Zheng or former Seniors World Champion Kamran Jahadi (Kamz), Gavin didn’t find a whole lot of immediate success in Masters. He was close to cutting his first two Regionals, but barely missed twice in the two Californian Regionals, where he finished 9th and 11th. He then ended up caught up in the PTO errors in the Boston Regional that cost him his earned bye and ended up with a weak third Regional performance. Rather than just kind of collapsing and calling it a season after some tough events and controversy, he came to Nationals with a strong team and played well all tournament, winding up as the winner of hardest event on the North American circuit. With all of Pokemon’s luck elements, it can often be seen as a game about overcoming adversity, and Gavin’s season reflects that this year.

Because of the players, this was a really cool finals to watch for me. Partially because they’re young, a few of the older guys were worried our competitors would be a little insufferable after the finals, but I think both Enosh and Gavin have been handling their success really well. They’re both guys who’ve been around for a long time in the community and have grown up with us a little, similar to some other community fixtures like the aforementioned Aaron Zheng. While they’re my competition and definitely people I consider my friends, I’m also proud of them in an odd way as one of the older guys in the VGC community these days, too. They’re both deserving players and it’s kind of neat to have watched them age up and start taking tournaments in Masters. I think it’s really good for the game for the younger guys to be really competitive in the highest age division, and while I think the players I just mentioned are all naturally skilled enough that they’d have made it fine in Masters without the aid of Seniors anyway, most of their friends from their Seniors days are still around, too, showing that the creation of that Seniors division has really helped build the VGC community and help make some of the younger guys into the biggest threats in the Masters division.

That Megahorn

Perhaps the most discussed turn I can recall in a Pokemon battle came when Enosh decided to Megahorn his own Abomasnow. I could write about why he made that play, but that would be pretty pointless because he was nice enough to explain his thought process for us already, which is a must read for everyone who watched the finals.

What I do want to comment on is something I regret not having enough time left in his battle to say to the audience Sunday: I have a ton of respect for that play even though it didn’t work. Ignoring that it would probably have been the single craziest victory in VGC history had Enosh pulled it off, I think it is indicative of an attitude that makes him a winner. Too many players are afraid to make the big plays because they might not work and then they’ll look bad, especially when an audience is watching, so they lose games by slowly letting themselves get choked out without ever trying to make a play that could really get them back in it. I think this is foolish: you don’t get more points for losing slowly than losing quickly. Especially given the massive audience, I think Enosh’s willingness to take a huge risk like that where he was bound to look a little silly if it didn’t work out was really admirable. It wasn’t just this game Enosh was making plays in, either — there’s a pretty cool battle video of Enosh hitting a double Trick Room as Ben Rothman(Nightblade7000) double Protects during Top 32, which was similarly amazing. I have a lot of respect for players who play to win instead of just not to lose, and I think Enosh really gets it. I also have a lot of respect for the fact he didn’t just fall back on the infamous “it was a misclick guys, I swear xD” excuse when it didn’t work out. He got to the finals for a reason, and hopefully people can learn from how he played here.

Pokemon All Year Long

The biggest adjustment players had to make this season was that while in the past, the only tournament that really mattered in North America was US Nationals, this year we were playing in a circuit and that each tournament mattered. I touched a bit on the importance of Wi-Fi tournaments before in the invites section, with the irrelevant-looking CP from Wi-Fi deciding the last two Worlds invites, but the early Regionals are a really interesting place to look to see how the season progressed, as well.

Let’s take a look at how some of the 12 players who made Worlds from North America and the players closest to them in CP did in the first set of Regionals. Aaron Zheng got 2nd, while Enosh Shachar got top 4 in the Philadelphia Regional. Zach Droegkamp(Zach) won Ft. Wayne by defeating Stephen Morioka(Stephen), who had beaten me in Top 4. Ben Irons (benjitheGREAT) won Houston, and the players in 13th and 14th — Duy Ha(Duy) and Simon Yip — both top 4’ed Regionals, too. Of the 14 players who were in reasonable Worlds contention in Masters this year, 7 finished in the top 4 or better of the first Regional. Of the remaining players, I know Randy Kwa didn’t even play in a Regional, and Trista Medine (ryuzaki) lost in the top 8 of Texas while our National champion finished 9th in California, so they were right on the edge, too. For the most part, the players who were going to end in the right spots started well, emphasizing the importance of taking all of the events seriously in this system. I think the CP system might have caught some people off guard at the beginning of last season, but especially with the way byes rolling throughout the season worked, I think it did a good job of enabling and rewarding consistent success while requiring consistent participation. Here’s fair warning for next season if people thought they were just going to show up at Nationals and be fine…

Related entertaining tidbit: practicing online early in the season seemed to have helped, too. Of the 15 players qualified for Worlds right now from North America, seven were VGC starters in the Smogon Premier League last winter, with the full cast including Randy, Enosh, Gavin, Kamaal Harris (FonicFrog), Aaron, Toler Webb(Dim), and me. Even more entertaining, Gavin’s team had a terrible start of the season and then came out of nowhere to win that tournament, too. Randy, Gavin, and Ben Rothman all made it to at least the semifinals of the first Nugget Bridge Major, and Aaron, Zach, and Wolfe made it to the semifinals of the first Nugget Bridge Invitational. It pays to keep in practice all year!

“Right you are, Cotton…”

I don’t want to write much about the specifics of how the commentating went at VGC Nationals because of my obvious bias as one of the commentators. What I do want to comment on is commentating in a general sense: that I think having that sort of commentary is incredibly important, and that I was very excited that TPCI was willing to try it.

The biggest part of why this website exists is to help try to promote VGC. We do what we can, and while there’s a lot of things we could improve on, one of the big things we’ve been trying to produce in the year+ of Nugget Bridge’s existence so far is commentated streams and battles. Having commentary for battles, both live at events and online for tournament matches like we’ve done on Nugget Bridge, is basically a requirement if the game is going to be reasonably accessible to potential players. Pokemon is a pretty easy game to follow if you are given a little guidance, and an audience that is getting some help at understanding the action and being entertained a little is much more likely to start or continue playing the game competitively. There are tons and tons of players who understand the basics of Pokemon, but who have very little exposure to more competitively specific concepts like the VGC ruleset, and having decent commentary is really important to help make those players understand what we’re doing here and to try to get them interested enough to increase VGC’s playerbase. While I was wincing at many of the uneducated comments about the VGC finals on Jwittz’s YouTube channel, at least a lot of people were watching and seem interested, but we need to find ways to players like those understand how our game works and to get them coming to events. Commentators are one of the most important people to help bridge the gap to people in that situation. Pokemon’s massive fanbase is inspiring, and I think there’s a lot of potential to get more of its current consumers playing the game competitively, which would likely keep them invested in the brand longer than they would be otherwise, like the Pokemon-lifers on this site have been, if we could get them into competitive play.

I did feel like even just having live commentary at Nationals was a big deal. A lot of parents and TCG people told me or told people who told me that they understood what was going on a lot better because the commentary was there, and  parents especially were surprised at how complex the decisions their children had to make in the game were. Observations like that again, are good, because I think Pokemon is a game that helped trained my critical thinking skills when I was younger, and that is something that could be sold to parents to make them feel more positively about the time their kids are spending playing video games. I was really grateful for the opportunity to help out with the commentary at Nationals, but I dropped from the tournament to help with it because I think it’s extremely important that Pokemon has someone performing that role to help grow the game. I don’t know exactly what everyone on the other side of the fence’s vision is here, but I think it’s worth stressing that as someone who follows a lot of other competitive games, building up the commentary here is a really important part of what could help both make the competitive end of this game grow and help make the experience much more enjoyable for spectators.

Stop! Rogue!

I haven’t really gotten a chance to talk about the metagame at Nationals much yet… which is because there isn’t much to say, I’m afraid. We’re a year into the Black 2/White 2 metagame now, and closer to two years when you consider how little B2/W2 actually changed the metagame. As such, the game is pretty stable. For the most part, trainers know the threats they have to deal with and the general pool of Pokemon they should probably be choosing from. Outside of some things I thought were notably missing, like the rarely seen Rain and Swagger in Masters, there weren’t too many big metagame trends. The trend I did see was that more and more trainers were experimenting a little with one or two slots on their team and using some uncommon Pokemon alongside the staple options.

What I do think was cool was the amount of rogue Pokemon we saw toward the end. I’m using that term in VGC in a little different way than I might in the TCG, but I had this conversation with a lot of TCG people and I think it’s worth touching on a little now that I can compose my thoughts a little more. I don’t think VGC is a game where you’re ever going to have much success using a team full of Pokemon that are normally never picked, because the power gap is just too hard to get around in VGC, and most of the Pokemon that help glue teams together by countering a lot of things are popular. What I do think is plenty viable is sticking some lesser seen Pokemon, the rogues, if you will, on a team with some more common Pokemon. In TCG, I think this would technically be closer to teching because of the presence of the metagame mainstays on the team, but it’s not really a match-up thing here, so I think rogues are a better parallel.

Anyway, I would argue that with as stagnant as our metagame supposedly is right now, there were a ton of rogues at Nationals even just looking at the very end of Seniors and Masters. Almost Enosh’s entire team would qualify as rogue. I literally had never seen Misdreavus used competitively in VGC before, so that was pretty amazing in its own right. Even some of his other Pokemon like Rhyperior and Abomasnow are not the sort of Pokemon I’d expect to see in a Masters final, yet he got there because he used them with proper support from some more common Pokemon like Cresselia, Rotom-W, and the popular Nationals metagame call Scrafty. Gavin actually had some cool Pokemon in his employ as well, with the rarely seen Ludicolo giving him some interesting typing to go with fast Fake Outs and Landorus-I functioning as his main option for quickly doing chunks of special damage. Like Enosh, Gavin had some more common Pokemon next to his quirkier Pokemon to keep the team tied together, including another popular metagame call in Amoonguss, as well as mainstays like Tyranitar, Volcarona, and Metagross.

Seniors had a similar story; while Paul’s team was about as metagame-standard as it gets, DeVon had a bunch of neat choices. Joej M must have given him some tips, because he was rocking the Latias to help support his team, as well as some other less common support Pokemon such as bulky Gyarados and my favorite Pokemon, Raikou. DeVon’s only really common Pokemon were Volcarona and sort of Scrafty(which was still odd because of Moxie), though I imagine he needed the really common Pokemon to tie his team together a little less than normal as he was basically running with four support Pokemon and only two sweepers.

I guess the point here is that, yes, you can make a lot of awesome Pokemon work in this metagame, and there are still things in the metagame we haven’t found. You just have to support your rogue choices carefully in VGC.

Have We Met?

Perhaps the most surprising part of Nationals to me is that I had expected that the CP system would have led to significantly fewer surprises in the top cut in Nationals than usual. That didn’t happen so much.

I mean, the top players in CP didn’t totally blow it. Enosh was already in Worlds position before Nationals and made the finals, as was Randy, who impressed with his top 4 finish. Stephen, who I think we vastly under-hyped going into Nationals considering his season and skill, was on a ridiculous tear prior to losing to Randy in top 8 and had been completely undefeated prior to that point. Beyond that things got bleak in a hurry, but Aaron and I finished top 16 and Ben Rothman and Trista at least made the top cut, though they were rewarded with really terrible opponent draws when they got there. That’s still only 7/12 of the former top 12 making the cut, which is kind of weak when you consider we had 8 events to make the rankings. Most of the remaining players were pretty close to the cut, but the trend kind of continues as you drop down a bit, with more and more players falling below projections.

What interests me about this is that with a few obvious exceptions, the quality of play in the top cut didn’t really drop as a result. Don’t get me wrong — I’m still pretty confident most of the best players are still the best players, but I think if anyone toward the top of the CP ladder right now thought they were untouchable except by the people closest to them before Nationals, this tournament should have been a rude awakening. There were no shortage of capable players ready to take the top cut slots the higher end players couldn’t earn, and many of them played very capably in their own right. While only three of the final eight players were in the top 12 CP spots going into Nationals this year, I think once we got to that point in the tournament we ended up with an extremely solid grouping of players. I’ve talked a lot about Gavin already, but I don’t think people were very surprised to see Harrison Saylor(Crow) or Jason Fisher-Short(Fish) in the top 8 given their histories, though I think our collective hearts broke for Harrison somehow winding up a game out of a trip to Worlds for the second year in a row. While Alex Valente(avdc90) and Demitri Camperos(darksoulSP) aren’t as famous as either of those players yet, I think they played really admirably, too. Alex was someone who had definitely been on my radar already, and while I didn’t know Demitri before, I thought he played well in the matches I saw from him and coming out of Nationals Swiss as the second seed is a pretty impressive feat. Every year at Nationals a few players make names for themselves, and I think Demitri was the big winner of the fame game this year. I’m eager to see how he does at Worlds after an A+ Nationals performance, which is the fun part of some of the bigger names falling off… there’s always someone ready to replace you if you have a bad day.

Next Stop: Hockey Rinks

While I kind of wish Nationals could have just gone on forever this year, we’ll be back on the road soon enough with Worlds just about a month away. I hope everyone else had as much fun at Nationals as I did this year, though if you even had half as much fun as I did, you were probably doing pretty well for yourself.

Have any ramblings about the tournament you’d like the community to hear, or thoughts on how the tournament went? Post and let your voice be heard!

About the Author

Scott started playing VGC in 2011. He finished 17th at US Nationals, then lost in the final round of 2011 Worlds LCQ. He finished 10th in the 2012 World Championships and qualified for Worlds again in 2013 after going into US Nationals second in CP. Instead of playing, he commentated at US Nationals and the World Championships in 2013 and 2014. Follow him on Twitter @NBNostrom!

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