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Published on August 19th, 2013 | by Scott

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What We Learned: 2013 World Championships 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(ish) weekend’s events.

Another fantastic World Championships is in the books! In fact, Worlds was so fantastic this year that we all had to take a week off to recover from its greatness, but I’m back to give a look back at the final event of the 2013 VGC Season. This year gave us three new champions, a weekend of excitement, and a video of a baby kangaroo punching a Conkeldurr.

And the Winner is….

The biggest story of the weekend was certainly Arash Ommati (Mean) winning it all and becoming the World Champion. I think we have a tendency to exaggerate the greater meaning of individuals winning Pokemon events, but it was really cool that we got our first Italian World Champion and by extension, the first winner from the European region. I’m not sure if Arash’s win will change anything for the greater community or not — I don’t think anyone ever contested, for instance, that Europe (and Italy in particular) has some great players or that Arash himself was very good. What I do hope, though, is that maybe Arash’s win will make a World Championship seem more attainable to players all over the world after three years of Ray Rizzo (Ray) dominating the field. Players having the dream to win it at all and believing they can achieve it is what makes the circuit exciting. Hopefully someone like Arash winning, who wasn’t riding the hype train coming in, helps remind everyone that it’s how you play the game that counts, not how other people expect you to do.

With that said, if Arash himself winning was super surprising to anyone, they probably weren’t paying attention. Obviously, he wasn’t among the big favorites coming in, even if you only look at Europe — that would have been Ben Kyriakou (Kyriakou), Abel Sanz (Flash), and Matteo Gini (Matty). I think other than maybe Daniel Nolan (Zog), who was another player getting the respect predictions for having cut Worlds before, Arash really should have been the next player on most people’s minds who didn’t already have the big Worlds finish under his belt. In my own predictions, he would have been the next European player I had mentioned if I had kept going (and he was slightly higher than that on Scott’s Amazing Pokemon Worlds Fantasy Draft Rankings(tm), which I unfortunately never got to use). I think he flew a little under all of our radars because he’s not a player that self-promotes much, to the point I actually completely forgot he was going to Italian Nationals when I wrote the preview for it this year, but I think everyone who’s played him this season knew he was a good player coming in. I was more surprised that he ended up finishing so low on CP, which was more because he didn’t play the whole circuit than because of his performance, than that he won Worlds.

Especially now that I write so much promotional stuff on Nugget Bridge, I worry a bit about who the champion is going to wind up being when we get close to Worlds, because for better or worse, being the world champion means more than just having won a Pokemon tournament to the community. I’m really happy that the winner this year was Arash. He’s a strong player, and more importantly he’s always struck me as a good guy. He’ll be a good champion for our game as we head into a new generation, and I hope he takes the chance to be around in the community a little more this year. People will like him.

And a Top Cut For Germany

Germany might seem like an odd story to draw out for this. Korea had the 6-0 in swiss, Italy had two players in top cut, Japan made it back to the finals… and it was a good year for all of those countries, but I don’t want what the German players were able to accomplish to get overlooked. Prior to this year, no German player had ever had a winning record in Worlds before. Three different players managed to break that curse this year in Masters, with Matthias Hellmoldt finishing a bizarre 4-1-1 and Christoph Kugeler (drug duck) and Baris Akcos (Billa) both finishing 4-2. Matthias also became the first German Master to make top cut, and was only about an hour away from being the first German player ever to do so… an honor reserved for Baris’ sister Melisa Akcos in the Junior division.

Variety is the Spice of Whatever

One of the cherished aspects of the way Worlds qualification works right now is that it allows for players from many different countries to compete. We were all excited that the variety in VGC was greater than it has ever been before this year, with 47 total players competing in Masters this year from 11 different countries, an increase from 33 players from 9 countries last year. The new additions this year came from Singapore, who had a player qualify through LCQ, and Australia, who had its own VGC National tournament for the first time this year. Outside of Masters, the Senior division also had a player from Austria, bringing the total of participating countries to 12. Sadly, a Swedish player in Seniors and an Irish player in Juniors were also invited but were unable to attend, which caused us to fall short of a potential 14 countries involved with VGC Worlds.

It’s a Shame So Few Pokemon Are Viable

It is perhaps the most common complain in every ruleset of Pokemon that has ever been and ever will be that the most powerful Pokemon are too good and that serious players can only use a small variety of Pokemon because of them. If you haven’t already seen the list of teams from 2013 VGC Masters Worlds, you should definitely check it out, because I think that myth should absolutely be dispelled by what the game’s best players selected if it wasn’t already. While there’s a few things I would certainly have changed in this year’s ruleset if I could have… mostly related to Prankster… Pokemon variety was definitely not an issue this season. Between the 47 players in Masters VGC Worlds, 54 different Pokemon were used at least once. There were no teams of off-the-wall nonviable Pokemon inflating the statistics this year, and there were still a handful of reasonably strong Pokemon like Raikou, Machamp, Rhyperior, and Ninetales that weren’t selected in the Masters division this year in spite of the great variety present.

I’ll leave you with a few Pokemon that were selected by teams in the top cut that might surprise people expecting to see only teams similar to Ray’s 2012 team on top:

magmarrhydonmarowaksableyemamoswine

Ryosuke vs Aaron

While I usually try not to comment too much on specific games in these columns, especially games that aren’t the finals, I think the top 4 match between Ryosuke Kosuge and Aaron Zheng (Cybertron) has been controversial enough that it’d be helpful for me to touch on it.

I want to get my bias out of the way up front: I try and stay as neutral as I can, but since Aaron is kind of the communal little brother for the admins I was definitely rooting for him to begin with. Ryosuke is someone I expected and wanted to see in the top cut, but the familiarity isn’t there with him. I wanted Aaron to win even more after I saw how Ryosuke chose to play game 2 and 3 of their series, since I had given up my spot in Worlds to work on the stream because of how important I thought it was for the stream to give a good impression of VGC to the viewers… something I suspected the frequent use of Swagger and Thunder Wave was going to work against. To say I was frustrated when Ryosuke won playing the way he did would have been an understatement.

But you know what? Ryosuke played that series exactly the way he should have. Let’s take a moment to look at both players’ teams:

Ryosuke:

cresselia thundurus landorus-therian heatran tyranitar conkeldurr

Aaron:

cresselia rotom-wash landorus-therian heatran tyranitar conkeldurr

It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out the way these teams stack up. Ryosuke was using his Nationals team again, completely verbatim. Aaron’s team was based on Ryosuke’s Nationals team, but had some changes that made it a little more comfortable against the metagame in North America and Europe. Most notably, Aaron was using a more standard Chople Berry/Protect Tyranitar instead of Ryosuke’s Iron Ball/Fling, as well as using ChestoRest Cresselia to free up the Sitrus Berry Aaron instead used on his Light Screen/Will-o-Wisp defensive Rotom-W, which he chose to use over Ryosuke’s infamous Thundurus-I. As we saw during Game 1 of their series, these changes gave Aaron an extremely large advantage playing a conventional game of Pokemon between the similar teams, and he won pretty easily.

If you’re Ryosuke there, you have to look at your options and figure out where you might be able to draw an advantage. He had several Pokemon, like his Landorus-T, Heatran, and Conkeldurr, which were either identical to Aaron’s or were functionally identical against him, and even trying to use them better than Aaron wasn’t likely to work because of Rotom-W, so the odds of winning through those three were bleak. Worse yet, Ryosuke had a small disadvantage between the Cresselias and Tyranitars because of Aaron’s changes. The only piece Ryosuke had that was appreciably different from Aaron’s in a positive way was Thundurus-I, who also had the advantage of being at its best against support Pokemon that don’t do a lot of damage on their own… which was exactly what was beating him before in Cresselia and Rotom-W.

We all know how it goes from there, and it isn’t pretty, but Ryosuke is in the semifinals of Worlds. He has to do whatever he can do to win, and I think he picked the highest percentage route to try to do that. Ryosuke’s odds were actually very good the way the match played out because Aaron rarely switched out of confusion, and even when Rotom-W and Cresselia were able to attack, they weren’t going to put out much offensive pressure on their own, so Ryosuke was able to put himself in relatively safe situations to do slow damage. Rotom-W also put the odds further in Ryosuke’s favor because Hydro Pump and Will-o-Wisp are both inaccurate moves to begin with, which further increased the odds of Aaron not being able to attack, though obviously Will-o-Wisp was much less accurate than what would be expected in that series.

I think not getting the best of luck understandably caused Aaron to tilt a little bit, especially after game 2, and he started making sub-optimal decisions in situations he might normally have played better. He chose to switch only rarely, and by failing to at least create pressure with a sweeper occasionally to threaten Ryosuke with meaningful return damage if Swagger didn’t work, he lost control of the games. Aaron also chose to allow Thundurus-I to stay alive for quite a long time, healing with its buffet of Leftovers. Opting not to use Tyranitar  in game 3 after getting run over by Thundurus-I in game 2 was also a strange decision, but I think it’s easy to understand why Aaron was a little shaken after game 2. However, these decisions were as big of contributors for why Aaron lost that series as the RNG was.

It’s unfortunate Aaron lost the way he did, since he didn’t really get out-Pokemoned, and while I’m a little flustered the top 4 match we showed the viewers was what it was, Ryosuke absolutely adjusted the way he should have to what happened in game 1 and played the series extremely intelligently. People shouldn’t be faulting Ryosuke for winning.

Stats Part I: Average Record of Countries

I think the international rivalry aspect of Worlds tends to get overblown in what is both fundamentally an individual event and an event that is more about having fun with other people who love Pokemon from all over the world rather than actually competing in a tournament. However, since the trash talk gives us something to do the other eleven months and three weeks of the year, I compiled some data about the tournament. First up is the average record of each country in the tournament:

Country Players Wins Losses A. Wins A. Loss Win %
1 Korea 1 6 0 6.000 0.000 100.00%
2 Italy 4 15 9 3.750 2.250 62.50%
3 Japan 4 12 10 3.273 2.727 54.55%
4 United States 14 42 40 3.073 2.927 52.50%
5 Germany 7 20 20 3.000 3.000 50.00%
6 Canada 1 3 3 3.000 3.000 50.00%
7 Spain 4 11 12 2.870 3.130 47.83%
8 Great Britain 8 22 25 2.809 3.191 46.81%
9 France 1 2 4 2.000 4.000 33.33%
10 Singapore 1 2 4 2.000 4.000 33.33%
11 Australia 2 2 10 1.000 5.000 16.67%

Notes: Byes are excluded from the wins column. The tie between Matthias Hellmoldt and Ben Rothman(Nightblade7000) is completely ignored.

Obviously, everyone isn’t playing on even ground here. Especially in Europe, sending a bunch of players to Worlds is a sign that a country has depth. With this type of analysis it makes countries like Great Britain, who sent a bunch of players, look weaker compared to countries like Italy, who had only their best players competing. Still, I think this is an interesting stat to look at and I think at least it does a good job of showing how strong Italy and Japan were this year.

Stats Part II: Record Between Regions By Round

While this is another stat that has some limitations because all games have equal weight regardless of the record of the players playing in them, the head-to-head record between regions is another stat I figured would be interesting to people. It should be noted that I used qualifying region instead of country this time. I think qualifying region is much more relevant than country given that most of the European Worlds players played in more than one National and the Canadians played with the Americans, with the added bonus that using regions instead makes this table a more reasonable size and less redundant with the last one. I didn’t do all of the match ups in reverse to save space, but I hope everyone can still find the data they are interested in easily enough.

Rnd. 1 Rnd. 2 Rnd. 3 Rnd. 4 Rnd. 5 Rnd. 6 Total
NA vs. EU 4-5 3-4 4-0-1 4-3 4-4 2-2 21-18-1
NA vs. JP 0-0 1-1 1-0 1-1 0-1 0-1 3-4
NA vs. KR 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-1 0-0 0-1 0-2
NA vs. AU 0-0 0-0 0-0 1-0 1-0 0-0 2-0
NA vs. SG 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-1 1-0 1-1
EU vs. JP 1-2 0-1 1-0 2-0 1-0 0-3 5-6
EU vs. KR 0-1 0-1 0-0 0-0 0-1 0-0 0-3
EU vs. AU 2-0 1-1 0-1 1-0 1-0 2-0 7-2
EU vs. SG 1-0 0-1 1-0 1-0 0-0 0-0 2-2
JP vs. KR 0-0 0-0 0-1 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-1
JP vs. AU 0-0 0-0 1-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 1-0
JP vs. SP 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0
KR vs. AU 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0
KR vs SG 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0
AU vs. SG 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0
NA vs. NA 3 3 4 2 2 4 18
EU vs. EU 4 6 8 6 6 7 37
JP vs, JP 0 0 0 0 1 0 1
KR vs. KR 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
AU vs. AU 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
SP vs. SP 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Perhaps the most interesting information to draw from this table is actually how frequently same-region match-ups occur, with 37 total (a little over six per round) between European players and 18 total (exactly three per round on average) between American players. Round 6 featured the second highest total of these matches for a single round, which included six of the eight games in the top eight tables and contributed to round 6 having the fewest games between North America and Europe of any round.

Decreasing Age of the Field

While Worlds wasn’t quite the same party for the younger guys that the National tournaments were, with graduated Seniors taking both spots in the US National finals and the runner-up positions at both the Italian and German National tournaments, it seems like the average age of the players in the top cut at Worlds gets a little younger every year. While I unfortunately don’t have exact enough data to get some more sick tables going here, almost everyone in the top cut was 20 or younger this year, and we saw three of the biggest threats from the first Senior World Championship in Enosh Shachar (Human), Aaron Zheng, and Sejun Park making it to the top cut and managing to become the favorites once again in the Masters division. Both of the 2012 Senior finalists finished at 4-2 as well, with the reign of the youngsters getting slowed down a little by former champion Toler Webb having to face off with Aaron Zheng in their 4-1 game to decide which of the two would move on to the top cut.

While the representatives from the European countries and Japan are staying a little older than the players from the United States and Korea, there is a distinct change in how young some of the top players are at the end of generation 5 compared to the end of generation 4. For a long time in VGC, the top spots in the uncapped age division have been dominated mostly by the players who have been playing Pokemon since they were kids and are much older now, but the times are changing. The younger guys are just going to keep getting better, and 2014 will be another season where some more strong Senior players graduate into Masters… it makes an old guy like me wonder how long my buddies are gonna be able to hang on!

LCQ Records

One of the more interesting storylines from 2012 Worlds was the improved performance of the players who made it to Worlds through the LCQ. Partially because of the addition of the best-of-three format to the LCQ portion of the event, the matches seemed to send the right player forward more often than usual. I think it was reasonable to expect a bit of a drop-off in the LCQ performers this year because the addition of Championship Points led to Europe and North America qualifying most of their best players before the grinder this year.

As a result, the LCQ thinned out a little, unlike past years where sometimes the LCQ would have a dozen players that seemed like they should have been in Worlds to begin with. 2013’s LCQ wound up having one of the more surprising results we’ve seen, with the Worlds field gaining two Japanese players, a Singaporean player, and American Alan Schambers(Metabou), who also qualified in 2010 and 2011. While the average finish of the players from the LCQ was understandably a little lower than it was last year because the actual Worlds field was a lot deeper, the LCQ players at least managed to keep their heads above water again this year. Here’s some bonus data:

Masters LCQ finishes in 2011(best-of-one LCQ, no CP, 34 total players): 9th, 10th, 12th, 14th, 19th, 20th, 24th, 34th
Masters LCQ finishes in 2012(best-of-three LCQ, no CP, 33 total players): 6th, 9th, 10th, 17th
Masters LCQ finishes in 2013(best-of-three LCQ, CP, 47 total players): 23rd, 28th, 38th, 41st

Wins Losses Avg Wins Avg Loss Win %
2011 LCQ Players 22 26 2.75 3.25 45.83%
2012 LCQ Players 16 8 4.00 2.00 66.67%
2013 LCQ PLayers 10 14 2.50 3.50 41.67%

I think what we should draw from this data is that the change in LCQ performance over time is evidence the Championship Point and LCQ systems are working pretty well. While we did have a world champion coming out of the LCQ in Seniors, at least in Masters it seems the qualification system worked pretty well and the strongest trainers of the season were already in the field. Additionally, the LCQ adding the best-of-three format for the last two years is still helping deserving players get through. Even though 2011 was still using the unreliable system of only sending the top players at each National forward to Worlds and more extremely skilled players were in the LCQ as a result, the win percentage of LCQ players in 2011 was still pretty similar to the win percentage of LCQ players in 2013 in spite of the tougher field, because 2011 also sent a few players who weren’t as strong as some of the others.

Any Given Saturday

The most surprising story this year is definitely how much some of the favorites struggled during swiss. It’s easy to forget that the top players are human just like the rest of us and bad things can happen to them too, but even considering their humanity there seemed to be an avalanche of misfortune for some of the top players this year. Seven players in the Masters swiss field had top cut Worlds before, but outside of Sejun Park no one else was even within a win of repeating that feat this year. Matteo Gini, Wolfe Glick (Wolfey), Ray Rizzo, and Daniel Nolan all finished 3-3 with low enough resistances that even with an extra win they wouldn’t have cut. Abel Sanz and LCQer Alan Schambers ended up finishing 2-4, both having even rougher tournaments. I know some of them had some weird things happen to them like getting paired with a bunch of people they had practiced for Worlds with, or having some crazy strings of bad luck, or inexplicably spending all their teambuilding time working only on Torkoal, but it’s still amazing that all of them had an off-day at once. I feel like with most of these guys, if we were to play the tournament again in two weeks they’d finish with better records, but I think the way the Worlds that counts played out is indicative of how much better the players in the field have gotten.

While making it to Worlds is prestigious in itself, in past years there were always a good chunk of players who weren’t quite ready to compete with the best in the world who qualified to compete anyway. We all knew this was going to be a tougher year because of the Championship Point system sending more consistent and deserving players to Worlds this year, but I don’t think we had all quite grasped exactly how much tougher it was actually going to be, and I think the tournament experience some of these guys had is as strong of a statement about the increased challenge as we’re ever going to get. Maybe some of them deserved to do a little bit better and maybe some of the people above them overachieved a little, but the bottom line is that just being an elite player isn’t good enough anymore because the field is full of elite players. I’d expect most of the guys who had a rough go of Worlds this year to bounce back hard next year because they are all extremely good players, but this should be an eye-opener for everyone who wants to do well at Worlds. It’s never been as challenging as it is right now, and everyone who wants to do well is going to have to work hard to be ready next season.

Streamin’

I was pretty critical of the Worlds stream in 2012. While I think we were all excited that Pokemon had finally decided to try the streaming thing, something most of us who are fans of other games had expected Pokemon to do for years, the product was disappointing. Since the commentators weren’t players from the community, the commentary was essentially a comedy of errors. I feel a little bad for the commentators in retrospect because they did the best they could with the situation they were given, but they messed up attack names, Pokemon names, told the audience Metagross was a Garchomp counter, that Skill Swap had ended when Trick Room ended, were completely baffled by a game ending through the timer, and even failed to understand some basic mechanics like Sandstorm. I didn’t pull any punches criticizing their performance in last year’s version of this column, which I’ll admit I half-regret because it was fairly obvious from some of the things the commentators said that they had read our site prior to Worlds.  Like seemingly every time I run my mouth about something related to Pokemon, I quickly found myself having to put my money where my mouth is this year.

While there’s certainly plenty of things those of us who got to commentate this year need work on ourselves (perhaps someday I’ll figure out where the camera is and actually look at it), I think this year was a huge step for Pokemon. Pokemon is not a game that wants to try to be, say, what League of Legends is, but it’s still really valuable for Pokemon to bring the competitive game to as many fans of the brand and of gaming as possible, so that hopefully next year more people attend events than this year and so people keep purchasing the game in the future. I think what we did this year was a big step toward helping make that happen and getting people back in touch with Pokemon, whereas last year the Gamespot stream probably turned as many current fans of the game off with their sloppiness as they may have regained old ones by bringing the product to them to begin with.

While unlike the Gamespot guys last year, commentating this sort of a stream was something none of this year’s commentators had much(any?) experience with, I think at very least the content of what we were saying helped the product, because everyone speaking was someone who is very dedicated to Pokemon and who knows their stuff. During the cast of the VGC finals, we ended up hitting around 30,000 simultaneous viewers, which is pretty crazy when you consider for comparison that the record for a Nugget Bridge cast is something like 150 viewers. There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done to improve on what we did this year and expand the experience for viewers, but there’s sure been a lot less criticism of the stream this year than last year, and I think a lot of people came away from the stream with a positive view of the event and the game this year.

Growing the game is something I think is really important and is a big part of why we made Nugget Bridge to begin with, so it was really exciting to get to contribute to that some this year. I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of this game and this community, so having the opportunity to help build up the game a bit was exciting. It’s something I’d love to do again, but for whatever segment of the VGC community this platform lets me speak for, for this year I just want to comment that I’m thankful TPCI reached out to the community to let us do it rather than shaming the game with Gamespot again. I think the people who weren’t able to make it this year at least got a coherent picture of what was going on at Worlds from the stream, and maybe some of the casual fans understand the game a little better and will hopefully check out what the competitive game is like when Pokemon X & Y come out in a couple months. I think that’s as much as we could have hoped for this year. Just have to keep building!

Spotlight At Just the Right Time

While I was checking last year’s article to read myself ripping into Gamespot, one thing I noticed was that I complained about the finals being simultaneous last year. The stream kind of forced that to change this year, but I think the denizens of Nugget Bridge at the very least are really thankful it did.

I had a lot of really awesome moments at Worlds and with Pokemon in general this year, but I think the moment I’ll remember most from the 2013 season was watching Brendan Zheng (Babbytron) finally get his Worlds win. He’s been so close twice, and with as hard as he tends to take his losses, it’s been really tough to watch him the past few years. We all knew he was good enough to take that championship home and it just never seemed to work out for him, and the defeats were pretty devastating. It was his last chance as a Junior this year, and seeing him take the crown was really cathartic. It had the added bonus of leading into what was by far the best interview of 2013 Worlds, but it’s weird to think that if this had happened last year, most of us wouldn’t even have been able to see him win. It was an experience I think a lot of us really valued having, and I’m sure he was glad to have his audience — which I think was the loudest of all of the finals at Worlds this year — so I appreciate the format change letting us have that moment.

The Seniors finals was one I had less personal attachment to, but as I write whenever this comes up, making it to the finals of an event like this is a huge deal that very few players ever manage to accomplish. Players who do accomplish the feat of making it to a Worlds final deserve their moment in front of everyone, and I’m really glad they got this year… especially because Machamp dominating a final was another great show the crowd enjoyed.

The CoroCoro Cup

While Pokemon has few enough events that we have a tendency to overanalyze all of them to death here at Nugget Bridge (as seen for Worlds in the article What We Learned: 2013 World Championships Edition), the one thing I feel like the community overlooked a little this year was one of Japan’s qualifiers, the CoroCoro Cup. If you aren’t familiar with it, the CoroCoro Cup was an event for elementary school students where three players teamed up to form a team and battled other teams, with the team that won two of the three matches advancing. Species clause applied to the whole team, so they could only use one Cresselia between the three of them, for instance. The top team at each of two tournaments received invitations and trips to Worlds. While it was something I think most of us outside of Japan originally only had two reactions to — that at least one division of Japanese players was going to get an acceptable amount of representatives and that we were fiercely jealous of the awesome format — I think there’s a lot more to read into it than what we saw at a glance.

To get to the point of why I’m mentioning it in a Worlds article: like all of the Japanese representatives, the CoroCoro players did extremely well. Junior runner-up Fuko Nakamichi qualified through CoroCoro, and her teammates Ryusei Yasue (3rd) and Izumi Motoe (8th) both top cut as well. The other team of CoroCoro qualifiers included Haruka Narita (4th), Kippei Takaki (25th Seniors), and Ryuma Sugie (10th). While it sure seems like the Japanese players were just that much better than everyone who wasn’t Brendan Zheng this year in the Junior division, I think this tournament is an incredibly brilliant way to help these kids become excellent players and also make them more likely to stick with the game. Honest players know that no one becomes an elite player on their own in this game, you get good by practicing against other people and working together to build teams and share ideas. By forcing the kids to work together to qualify for Worlds, they learn these important skills and I think they’ll all continue to be stronger players as they grow up because of it. I have to imagine they’ll keep playing longer for similar reasons, too — they’ve now made these friends and teammates they won with and traveled across the world with, who wouldn’t want to keep playing the game with them? I think this is probably the single most brilliant Pokemon tournament I’ve ever seen and would love to see it emulated elsewhere in the world. Even ignoring the benefits to the players, it sounds like a lot of fun!

This isn’t really analytical in any way, but I have to add one thing: how awesome of a feeling must it be for those kids to make it to Worlds working together with their friends and then to all do so well at Worlds like that, for Fuko’s team especially? I think working hard with your friends and having success together is what makes this game fun to play competitively, it’s cool that they’re getting that experience so early.

Now on the TVs: Matches People Want to Watch

Perhaps the most frequent spectator complaint in the past has been the choice of games for the audience during swiss. While Worlds is the only event left on the circuit where swiss rounds are played on television for spectators, until this year both of the TVs were placed at the weaker end of the field, including the very last table, leading to some frustrating matches for spectators who often feel like they’re stronger players than the people they’re watching. Gone are the days of Air Cutter Tornadus and Minimize Drifblim, however, as one of the TVs this year was placed all the way up at the third table, giving viewers a much better experience this year.

The audience ended up getting treated to some fantastic shows even before the top cut as a result of the change, including a couple great games from Japanese Nationals runner-up Yuki Matsumoto against United States National runner-up Enosh Shachar and Italian National champion Matteo Gini. Perhaps the highlight match for the audience during swiss was Aaron Zheng vs Jordi Picazo, with the crowd coming alive to cheer for Aaron’s close escape from Jordi’s perish trap.

Don’t Dream It’s Over

I think the last night of Worlds is always a great indication of why these events are so great. Everyone is tired, we have a new champion, and as a result the other players’ dreams are dead until the next year. So do the players get depressed and think about their losses? No, they enjoy the game and the event and spend the night multibattling with players from all over the world! Pokemon has become what it is because of the community it has created, and every year at Worlds we’re reminded of that. I know everyone who went had a great time this year, and hopefully I’ll see all of you in Washington DC next year. The dream isn’t over for long, with Regionals presumably in a couple months, so I hope everyone is excited to get at it again… next year, it could be you finishing the year as champion!

Expect Worlds team reports to start being published starting tomorrow, with a bonus What We Learned next week to take a look back at the whole season, which will hopefully double as a feedback thread.


About the Author

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!



8 Responses to What We Learned: 2013 World Championships Edition

  1. Arbol Deku says:

    Well scott. What i’ve learned on my first WCS participation. First of all, if you want to attend on a world championship and you don’t have enough money for pay the travel directly, the only way that you can attend with all of the expenses payeds is got the qualification on the nationals of your country (Continent in my case), and then play safe the national championship with a team wich you manage pretty well, in my opinion that’s the correct way to have more chances to get the trip for WCS. Second, enjoy the travel. That’s the most important stuff in my opinion if you attend in the WCS. Vancouver was an amazing expirience for me, that i’ve never forgot in my life. Meet up all of us, had more friends, and also stablish a close relation with my spaniards freinds. that’s amazing and fantastic, the 60% of the reason why i play pokemon was that. Finally the tournament. Won a world championships for so much players that i knew is a the most greatfull dream of their lifes. In my case was also that, but maybe not
    than others. When i’ve started play pokemon seriously on 2009 my only goal of play pokemon is attend on the WCS. Maybe in those 4 years before i don’t get the quealification for this reason, in part of the hax, if your mind is programed just for attend on the WCS the most probably thing that will happen, is that you don’t be attending. Why? because i learned this f***** stuff playing for five years VGC.If you point just to qualify for the world championship play, the pressure will be very high when you’re playing nationals. you have two options. Or play relaxed, and remaining calm is what I did in Birmingham, your chances will be higher. Another way is to aim to be the champion of the world from the first national round. So your batten will be very high and as you pointed so high, if you fall, you will fall so low and you should have the qualification maked, or almost maked. After my few words (because i’ve can write about my feelings so much) Thanks for write, and sorry if i’ve do some mistakes my english no ser perfecto. Hopefully see you all of us on Washignton DC.

    PD: Thanks to Misi, Carleto, Mean, Drug_Duck, Flash, R-5, Robygold for trust on mine and in my possibilities all of this season. You can count your close friends with the fingers of your hand, thats another lesson what i’ve learned this VGC season.

    See you next VGC season folks!

  2. Maestro says:

    While I have tried my luck and had moderate success at the Masters level, I’ve tended to be more focused on the Juniors game over the past several years. For that reason, your section on the CocoCoro Cup was particularly interesting to me. There’s no arguing with the success of the Japanese players at this year’s World (for Juniors), and I agree that the format for the CocoCoro Cup may very well have helped mold the players; however, I continue to contend that behind the scenes of every strong Junior is a very good coach. Simply put, while the older, more experienced Juniors show a tremendous amount of skill, I have no problem going out on a limb and saying they generally aren’t in position to win without a devoted coach. That having been said, I wonder if the success of the Japanese players is akin to the success we saw at the Juniors level in cards (where multiple members of the same Pokemon club finished high). What leads to the success of a group/club? Is it the grind of playing tons against peers, the fortune of having a strong coach/leader, or some combination of the two?

    Information/discussion boards like this site (and the Smogon site) are invaluable to me and my family as we do not live in an area that has a Pokemon club, and as you know, even if there were a Pokemon club within an hour’s drive, that wouldn’t necessarily help a VGC player (the clubs in the US are heavily TCG-focused). I expect many good VGC players are working largely in isolation as they ready for competitions, maybe sharing info with a few friends met along the way. We play in as many events as we can, online and at Regionals, and we play online outside of tournaments too, but we don’t have a group we’re working with. There are several Juniors who have clearly benefitted by working closely with strong players in the Nugget Bridge community, and I know of a few more Pokemon clubs that also have several strong Junior players; however, I wonder if the Japanese are a bit more cohesive than other countries when it comes to a competition like Worlds.

    We (and I’ll only speak for my family here) generally consider the U.S. competitors our rivals–not our teammates–though we always cheer for other U.S. players at Worlds when we’re not playing one ouselves. There is certainly no leadership that is set on getting all the U.S. competitors ready for Worlds, and I’m not saying there should be, though I do wonder if there’s more solidarity in other countries–especially Japan–when at least getting the young players ready for Worlds.

    I still think one of my kids would’ve done better if we’d used Thundurus (with HP Flying, Taunt, and Charti) over Zapdos (with HP Flying, Heat Wave, and Choice Specs), as success can simply come down to a correctly-guessed hard choice before the first game is ever started. I actually thought all the U.S. kids would do better this year, as they got a ton of “best 2 of 3s” and thus seeming were more prepared for the format than any other country. Understanding the metagame is so important, and that’s something few kids can tackle on their own. That, I think, is where a club/community working together can really make a difference. It’s tough, though. When information is shared, it might make us all better, but when one shares info, there’s also the worry that one might help their competitors get an edge. It’d be interesting to know how much the winning Japanese CoroCoro Cup teams really worked together, and it’d also be interesting to know who coached them.

  3. Braverius says:

    Excellent read as always, who doesn’t look forward to these recaps by now?
     
    Going to offer a thought on one thing here, because a week later, I amusingly still can’t comprehend:

    Aaron was using a more standard Chople Berry/Protect Tyranitar his brain instead of Ryosuke’s Iron Ball/Fling…”thing”, as well as wisely using ChestoRest Cresselia (accidental niche use hilariously clear to everyone now) to free up the Sitrus Berry Aaron instead also wisely used on his Light Screen/Will-o-Wisp defensive Rotom-W, which, understandable to anyone except Ryosuke himself, he chose to use over Ryosuke’s infamous Thundurus-I-actually-really-wish-I-had-HP-Ice.

    I have the utmost respect from Ryosuke as a player after watching Top 8 and Top 4, but as a teambuilder…well, I think that sentiment is clear. How he got that far with two absolutely ridiculous Pokemon will forever capture my respect and (☞゚ヮ゚)☞ confuse me simultaneously.
     
    I don’t want to hear the Marowak / Magmar comments. Neither one of those were even doing anything combined as remotely horrifying as dropping their own special defense, having capability to set up two types of weather, running no protect on a Pokemon that gets one-shot by very common threats, having two moves of the same type, carrying a one-hit wonder move, or fearlessly running no defensive item or reliable offensive item on said non-protect Pokemon. That definitely was the most ass-backward ridiculous Pokemon that has sniffed success at a tournament this year. Kudos to gebebo on the finish, though, you managed to amuse the hat off of at least one person with your performance. 
     
    Also a ton of credit to Aaron for taking the loss like a champ. Not much has been said about that, but you really deserve a high five for how you’ve handled taking a heartbreaking loss like that, especially after playing well game one. Fidning and mistakes (and looking to improve on those) among a minefield of hard-to-control situations You’ll be winning that scholarship in no time if you keep that attitude ;)
     
    Also congrats to Arash, loved the team, hard to find a flaw with something as meta-crushing as that team was. You also made Mamoswine shine (although unfortunately quite literally) on the big stage, which I definitely can only be 100% satisfied with :3
     
    This article brought so many good feels to life. Again, great work Scott, you’re curing PWD pretty effectively here.

  4. Crow says:

    I have a fair amount of opinions about how worlds went that I’ll keep to myself, but, in regards to what Zach said, I have a 90% written “Worst sets of the year” article. I originally included Ryosuke’s Tyranitar on Zach’s suggestion, but after watching it play a bit more I decided to remove it on the grounds that it wasn’t as bad as I first thought. It’s meant to function like Bronzong does next to Eruptran. And in all honesty it probably does a better job and has more overall consistency than Bronzong. I’m not sure I can fully get behind it due to the Earthquake and Conk weakness, though…

  5. Braverius says:

    It had a couple cool niches on his team. I completely agree he had some good uses for it, and the practice he had only helped him out. The amount of things that could go wrong far outweighed any comfort level I could possibly imagine having with such a Pokemon, though. 
     
    I don’t think it was 100% pure horrible, just way too ballsy without enough positive traits to be something understandably more consistent for his team in the long run. But as a player, he deserves a ton of credit for pulling it off.

  6. Mean says:

    Great job with this article and thank you for the compliments Scott!
     

     
     
    I hope he takes the chance to be around in the community a little more this year. People will like him.

    Thank you also for this. I’m honest, I’d really love but I’m often held back from doing it because of my not-well-enough language knowledge.

     
    Speaking of the tournament. I was and I am still contrary to the extension of the invites for Europe, for the usual reasons, and since I was 17th in Europe i was maybe more focused on doing well in the the tournament than others who, maybe because they had the paid trip, were looking at this more like a vacation+tournament than WORLDS, like I did instead.

    Also, speaking of Ryosuke, he may have played very well his quarter and semi finals matches (and i can confirm this after seeing those games) but when he played me he did terrible choices. He often predicted, especially during game 2, me doing very risky moves that i had really no need to do. But well, he surely has the merits of getting there and being a cool guy =) 
     

  7. Scott says:
    Appreciate the discussion here, I have a hard time getting much from these articles usually…
     
    On Japanese Juniors: Honestly, I’d like a lot of answers about how the Japanese Junior players prepared beyond the qualification events, too. I feel like the understanding of how to play Pokemon well in battles is much greater in Japan in every age division than in North America or Europe. Totally ignoring the top players, who are going to have well-rounded skillsets in any region, there’s just a level of understanding of what not to do and how to work toward winning positions that seems to be stronger for Japanese players as a whole… I know at least the older players meet up in person a lot more and that probably contributes to a better communal understanding of the game, but I’m not sure how much that extends to the kids. Admittedly, a lot of their game sense tends to be negated by how quirky some of the team choices many players in Japan seem to favor are, but there’s something going on there that isn’t here for players in general to understand the game as well as they do there.
     
    The key thing you pointed out there I think is that idea of considering the other Americans rivals. I think that’s always going to have to at least half be the case — they’re competing for the same pool of invites — but there’s room for lots of players to succeed now that we have CP, so I think some level of cooperation is pretty important. I don’t know the actual dynamics of the younger divisions as much, but at least in the Masters division, there is some level of that cooperation and I think it’s really important for success. Everyone kind of has their own little circles, but to speak only from personal experience I know I would be a much weaker player if it wasn’t for the frequent insight I’ve gotten from people like skarm, Ray, Danny, Fish, and Paul over the last couple of years, and I’ve had some insightful chats with most of the other American Worlds players too, even though I don’t teambuild with any of them. I think it’s important for every player to find that circle, regardless of age, and CoroCoro is a neat way to force the Japanese kids to do that. I think it just makes the game more fun, too — I imagine for your kids the family angle helps a lot, but it’s a lonely game for people who try to fly solo.
     
     
    On gebebo’s team: I feel like at some point we’re all gonna have to accept that his team working is pretty good evidence that he was doing something right with it. People were (mostly good-naturedly) giving me a lot of crap for the Europe invites thing after Worlds, but I think it was almost a bigger foot-in-mouth moment for a lot of us when we were saying gebebo’s team wouldn’t work in Worlds, which some of you extended to saying that it shouldn’t have worked in Japanese Nationals, either… since obviously it did, and finishing first at Nationals and second in Worlds in Masters,  feat only matched by Wolfe(and Matty was close with 2nd Nationals/Worlds in 2011).
     
    I don’t have as much specific insight with gebebo’s team as I want to have to try to discuss it, because Japanese Nationals was so late in our season that I never actually tried it out verbatim, though I did use it to influence to adjust some things I was doing before our National tournament in spite of never trying out the original. I have, however, played some similar stuff seriously so I feel like I can at least sort of talk intelligently about his team, with 5/6 of my Nationals team being similar to his (though I made the Thundurus change Zach described and intended to use the same Tyranitar Aaron did), and I have tried the Eruptran team as well, though I’ve never put it all together at once like those teams do. I think Eruptran is the key here because it is something I think we all knew after the Japan Cup was probably going to be a major threat at Worlds, but it was something that I hadn’t seen used in a way I thought was going to work yet as it was pretty obvious that Weavile/Bronzong/Togekiss/Heatran/whatever else was on it team wasn’t going to win a live tournament. I tried Heatran with Iron Ball and Fire Gem, I tried Bronzong with it, I tried Cresselia with it both with and without a Power item, and nothing I used really felt quite like it was reliable enough at getting TR and Eruption off safely to work, because there were constant obnoxious speed issues with being too fast or too slow and problems getting setup to begin with. I think Ray’s solution to this (using Torkoal to outslow everything in Heatran’s slot) may actually have been the road to a more elegant solution, but getting a Pokemon that could underspeed Heatran and protect it from some threats, and protect the TR setup from Thundurus-I, while also providing a way to get Sunny Day up was pretty cool. I’m still curious if he expected the rest of the world to be using more Rain and if that helped contribute to why he ran it that way again, but from the perspective of setting up Eruptran it has some interesting unique benefits, I think. He actually made pretty good use out of both Dark moves, too, with the Fling effect probably winning him a series in top cut. I don’t like the risk of not using Protect on Tyranitar either, but I think not Protecting constantly has some game flow benefits and he clearly knew how to play around not having it.
     
    I also don’t think the HP-Ice-less Thundurus is bad. I definitely don’t like playing with it — you guys know a big part of how I try to get a better understanding of the game is by playing other people’s teams, especially people who play in metagames that are a little different than ours, However, pretty much every time I decide to play a Japanese or Korean team that uses Thunderbolt/Thunder Wave/Taunt/Swagger Thundurus, I drop Taunt or Swagger for Hidden Power Ice, because I find losing the win conditions against Ground-types and a handful of Ice-weak Pokemon to be really frustrating(apparently, I should have just Swaggered the Ground-types and it would have been fine). However, that Thundurus was on a ton of successful teams over the last year and a half… it definitely works if that’s the game players want to play, I think. I’ll definitely be sticking with HP Ice myself, though.
     
    Don’t get me wrong — if I had to pick one, I would have use Aaron’s variant instead of gebebo’s, and I don’t even have to think about it– but I think what he did worked out for him for reasons other than him being a good player, if only because being a good player isn’t good enough in Worlds. I’m definitely going to try to play with gebebo and Sejun’s Worlds teams before XY comes out a little bit, because I think I can learn a lot from what they did this year that I’m not sure I’m completely understanding just looking at their teams.
     
     
    Also I want to draw out this Mean quote
     

     

    He often predicted, especially during game 2, me doing very risky moves that i had really no need to do.

     
    I feel like most of the spectators I talked to didn’t understand why gebebo did what he did in the finals. I think this is the best description of it — Mean played basically a perfect high percentage game, and gebebo predicted that he would not do so, so he kind of lost twice as fast, as Mean was getting maximum benefit from minimum risk plays. I would agree it was a poorly played series by gebebo — I wonder if he wasn’t tilting a little bit after the way he won during top 4.
  8. Firestorm says:

    Just to touch more on Juniors because I’ve talked a little about this on IRC as well, but I love the idea of CoroCoro Cup for the reasons you stated. This may not be a team game at events, but it’s so important to have a few people (keyword: few) to bounce ideas off of and I’m glad that there’s a way to get the kids into the mindset of working with others towards success like that. I think people who have played in team tournaments online — or really any team-based competition whatsoever — also know how rewarding it is to succeed as a team. Having that feeling at a young age is also great. By buiding these bonds between players early, Pokemon drastically increases the chances of them sticking with the game as they grow older too.
     
    I think earlier in the year, Pokemon correctly identified that they had a problem with the disparity in attendance between divisions. Schwimmer publicly said this was something they were specifically trying to address with their new prize structure which a lot of people were up in arms about. It’s not something I really understood until I saw him post about it. I personally still disagree with the way they used travel awards as incentives to draw Juniors and Seniors to play. I get that it is supposed to get them that Nationals or Worlds experience to make them want to go again as they age up, but I don’t think it’s a very efficient strategy.
     
    I would say building friendships between players based on Pokemon works much better. The infrastructure for this is already sort of there with Leagues. We just need it to be known! The people are what keeps people coming back and until the kids meet their people, their continued participation in Play! events isn’t assured. Even if you’re winning travel awards, a Pokemon event isn’t fun alone.

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