Commentators Announced for the 2014 Pokémon World and US National Championships
The Pokémon Company International has chosen its commentators for the 2014 United States Pokémon National Championships and the 2014 Pokémon World Championships! A few new faces will join the familiar faces from last year to help fill out the more comprehensive stream schedule announced earlier.
In the video game, we will see the return of the most experienced commentary in the community with two of Nugget Bridge’s co-founders, Scott Glaza (Scott) and Evan Latt (plaid), back on mic. Evan’s play-by-play and Scott’s analysis provided the best commentary our game has seen at the VGC ’13 World Championships last year in Vancouver as they helped veterans and newcomers alike follow the complicated thought processes and interactions that happen in high level Pokémon play.
Joining Scott and Evan will be veteran player Duy Ha (Duy), who many in the community may know as one of our tournament hosts and most well-known for being one win away from reaching the World Championships in three different seasons in a row. Duy has casted many tournaments for Nugget Bridge in the past as well both online and at live events such as Regional Championships and Premier Challenges. His experience and skill will surely be an asset to the team.
The last addition to the video game crew will be Justin Flynn (TheJustinFlynn) who started training for competitive play in tournaments with the release of Pokémon X & Y and steadily built up a fan base with regular content produced around the Video Game Championships. He is no stranger to performing live in front of large audiences with his almost daily stream and most recent stint as a host for Twitch’s E3 broadcast earlier this month.
The trading card game will see the return of last year’s knowledgeable casters in Josue Rojano (Crimz), Josh Wittenkeller (TheJWittz), and Dylan Mayo (Exobyte). Joining them to round out the crew will be the most experienced caster in the game, and one of Josue’s fellow Top Cut co-founders, Kyle Sucevich (Pooka) who has been commentating for tournaments since 2011.
If you missed the stream schedule, here it is again. You can tune in at the recently updated Pokemon Twitch channel once it starts up.
- Saturday, July 5, noon–5 p.m. EDT: Video Game
- Saturday, July 5, 5–9 p.m. EDT: Trading Card Game
- Sunday, July 6, 9 a.m.–2 p.m. EDT: Trading Card Game
- Sunday, July 6, 2–5 p.m. EDT: Video Game
About the Author
Firestorm is one of the co-founders of Nugget Bridge and the Community Manager for eSports Tournament Platform Battlefy. He has been playing Pokémon since 1999, competitively since 2007, and attending tournaments since 2010. He lives in Vancouver, Canada with a degree in Interactive Art & Technology + Communications. You can follow him on Twitter at @rushanshekar.
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62 Responses to Commentators Announced for the 2014 Pokémon World and US National Championships
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As a subscriber of JFlynn, I can say that he will learn on the job, is he perfect right now? No. But I think he can pick up the commentary game quickly. Also to people who follow his stream and say he has a lot of “ums and buts” its because there are tons of people in the chat at the time and he has to watch both and also try to keep his head in the game.
I am just glad that someone like Verlisify is not a VGC commentator, that would be horrible.
You can hop off him now
I don’t really care for this Flynn guy or the idea of getting a YouTube “celeb” to do commentary for pretty much the biggest event for Pokémon of the year. It just doesn’t do the community any justice, especially when he hasn’t been around all that long or playing VGC for that matter. I’m not saying he’s going to be awful, but this isn’t a premier challenge or a grassroots tournament either. The auditions should’ve been used to select the most qualified commentators based on a more selective set of criteria, rather than a little bit of charisma and an annoying YT fanbase.
The whole asking for money debacle is volumes funnier too.
I’ve checked JFlynn’s channel, and there isn’t that much VGC content… but let’s not make hasty conclusions, I’m sure he won’t come to the VGC without any knowledge about strategy or players.
I’m not sucking up or anything mate.
I do agree he is not the best, however, we can’t write him off either.
Also I did not know about the money debacle before posting, it does change my opinion somewhat, however, I think it is in the games best interest to go ahead and support him. I think Scott wrote something along the lines of that. The image of the VGC format needs to be portrayed to people who can be interested, and if we are bickering about these things then we are doing more harm than good. What’s done is done.
There is absolutely no issue with someone using Patreon to fund their creative pursuits. I’ve seen it used before by an author and I think it’s a pretty interesting idea. It’s a crowd-funded salary. Really, it’s not much outside of a universal Subscribe button. I’ve seen the reference to “real job” a few times and it really annoys me when people say that. YouTube and Twitch are platforms on which people can make a living these days by creating content and it’s no different from being a self-published author, self-published musician, or anything else in the entertainment industry. I think it’s great that the barrier to entry in the entertainment industry is so much lower now and that tools exist to allow people like J-Wittz or Jenny Marbles or a host of other great role models to be in control of their content and survive off of what they produce.
Now, here’s where Justin went wrong and the fairly justified outrage starts. Many (surprisingly many judging by the comments I was seeing on Facebook) people in the community had never heard of him until this announcement. He has never made much of an effort to interact with the wide competitive community before so people’s first exposure to him has been a page where he asks them for money and says he won’t be creating more content unless he gets the appropriate donations. For a community that is used to contributing content for free — and the ones most outspoken have been contributing significant portions of their time on the side to the game for many years now — it’s pretty irksome seeing someone they’ve never interacted with using his newfound position of honour as a bargaining chip to hold content about their community hostage. This is especially the case when this person received the job over other more qualified candidates.
I’ll be honest, I don’t think Justin was the right choice here. He started playing the game earlier in the season and has been to one event total at which he finished in the Top 64. He hasn’t been to another event since. He has made no effort to be involved in the community enough to know any of the details or storylines involving the players he’ll most likely be casting. His game knowledge is average and his metagame knowledge is probably not quite there as I believe he switched off playing competitively to mostly other games or more casual Pokémon streaming after he went to Long Beach.
As far as experience goes, he has no experience casting other people’s games live and I think he showed that in his first audition video which was taken down and replaced with a heavily scripted version. His stream is him talking to the chat and giving shoutouts to subscribers as he does his own thing, not trying to cast another two people battling. I’m hoping that we as a community can help give him some practice opportunities to try the whole shoutcasting thing a try before the big event. I think a good tip would be for him to watch some streams of people battling this weekend during the International Challenge, muting the stream, and practice casting over it which I remember Scott and Evan doing last year to practice (but not restreaming it of course). Maybe Duy can join as well to make it more realistic as duo casts are different from solo casts. After all, nobody in the community is quite on Montecristo and DoA level yet.
Some have said that it might be a play to attract more viewers and grow the game. I think the fact that he’s running a Patreon is a sign that this is untrue. If he had the type of viewer pull that would be required to boost the numbers of an official Pokémon stream, he wouldn’t need a Patreon. He would be able to survive on advertisements and subscriptions like any other full-time YouTube or Twitch content creator. With over 90,000 subscribers I only saw around 2000 – 3000 watching the stream yesterday. If JWittz couldn’t help pump up numbers last year, I’m not sure how someone with 1/6 his userbase will. This is Pokémon. People will watch if they know it exists. Much like Premier Challenges, the issue is getting them to know that there’s a stream. I was already a little irritated that I received an email newsletter today about Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire which I’d need to have been absent from the internet for the past month to miss but not a single word on Nationals. Maybe there will be one next week alongside a Holocaster message.
Here’s the thing: I think a position for Justin does exist. There are interviews that can be done and all manner of between match content there could be that he seems qualified to do. He seemed a little nervous at E3 but I think that only helped him get some of the jitters out of his system. When Nintendo did the Smash Bros. E3 Invitational, they put Geoff Keighley as the announcer, not the commentator. That’s not what Prog, D1, or Scar were for. That’s not what Scott, Evan, or Duy are for. This felt like MLG holding open auditions for Melee commentators at Anaheim and having Wife passed over for Yipes because “he’ll bring hype” and “maybe get FGC guys watching maybe?”
As far as other choices went, I think Alex Ogloza brought a pretty good mix of personality and knowledge to the table in a colour commentary position. He would have had great chemistry with Duy who he went to university with and is a growing YouTube content creator with around the same number of subscribers as Aaron Zheng. This would have given the community two colour+play-by-play duos instead of three play-by-play and one colour forcing one of the play-by-plays (Duy) to make the switch like we have now. Even if the pbp/colour split wasn’t for some reason considered, I think Andrea Shaffer brought more to the table in the play-by-play role.
With all that said, I do believe Scott’s first post in this thread that Justin will do his best to put on a good show. I have every belief that he’ll study up to make sure he can explain what’s happening on stream. I’ve also heard he has been doing a good job explaining the Video Game Championships and Pokemon to viewers of his stream the last few days after switching back to Pokemon from Mario Kart as gets back into the flow of things for which I am grateful. I think it’s just too bad he wasn’t told he was on the right path and instead told he was at the destination. In any case, as a fan of the competitive game and watching it grow, I’m sincerely hoping we get Scott and Evan again for the Masters finals. There was nothing but good things said about them on the #PlayPokemon hashtag during Worlds by players watching the stream that were thoroughly impressed by the way they made high level decisions easy to understand for players of all levels. I don’t want to give that up and bet on something else.
I’d also like to congratulate Kyle, Duy, and Justin on joining the team and everyone from last year for making it back. 2013 was a huge improvement over 2012. Kyle’s omission last year being rectified is great to see and I’m sure we’ll have a high quality cast again this year with the expanded stream schedule allowing for even more exposure to the competitive side of the game. We hit 30,000 viewers at peak last year with little to no advertising and a game that wasn’t even close to as popular as X&Y so I’m excited to see the new milestones we hit in the coming months. Hopefully we can get a slide up about local leagues and tournaments this time?
I know this is “old” news, but JFlynn did just post on Twitter “hey peeps with 3DS capture cards. I need to practice commentating for VGC can you send me your “live” battles on drive jflynnhelp@gmail.com“
I’m glad to see he’s making the effort to learn to commentate battles outside of his own, which Firestorm justifiably pointed out as a concern.
If there is one impression I have consistently gotten from JFlynn, it is that he interested in and willing to do the work to improve his knowledge. I’m not saying he’s suddenly going to get to where Evan was last year, because that takes both time and more experiences as a player than he’s going to have time to get, but if anyone thinks he’s just chilling somewhere thinking about how great he is and not doing any work to prepare for this, they’re mistaken.
While I’ll admit I was a little fiery Friday too with the timing of his Patreon thing, I have never gotten the impression from interacting with him that he will treat Pokemon’s official casts with anything less than the respect I think they should be treated with. I think ultimately, that’s what the core issue people are raising in regard to the timing of that announcement should be, not in what JFlynn is trying to monetize (which I think was misinterpreted by a lot of us to begin with) and it certainly doesn’t seem like it’s a problem.
Additionally, I have had JFlynn’s stream on most of the time it has been up the past two days, and I have appreciated the effort he’s made promoting VGC as he gets himself more ready for Nationals. Regardless of whether or not you agree with the idea that having him on the cast will cause his reach to increase the viewcount of Nationals and Worlds(I tend to agree with Rushan that it probably won’t matter too much), it is a fact that he’s spreading the word about VGC on his stream to a lot of people that we haven’t been able to target with Nugget Bridge. JFlynn on any random day has more viewers live than NB has ever been able to get for something we’ve done ourselves, and I am sure his replays and YouTube uploads get exponentially more eyes on VGC from people who haven’t been exposed to it before in a short period of time than we could ever hope to on NB right now. That matters a lot, and I would wager over time it will make a measurable difference in the amount of people giving the format a shot.
I have gotten a lot of questions about JFlynn in private from people who are expecting a different perspective than what I’m posting, but I believe what I’ve written in this thread. No one is trying to convince anyone JFlynn has the level of VGC knowledge some of the Worlds players do or whatever, least of all JFlynn himself, and that’s not what he’s on the cast for. I know most of the posts here are aiming to be more critical of the hiring decision than of JFlynn himself, but think about how some of this stuff is probably being read. It isn’t JFlynn’s fault he’s still learning stuff, he’s certainly doing his part to be as ready as he can be for Nationals. He’s always struck me as a good guy. I feel like this thread is going a little overboard at this point — the point has been made that the competitive VGC community prefers commentators with high amounts of competitive experience. The show will be continuing on. Let’s all try to be supportive of the commentators, except Evan, so we can make this as good of a show as it can be.
I will let justin justify his inclusion by judging his commentary performance for nationals and worlds.
as for the Patreon thing… >=(
Apology or not, the Patreon page is still there. What a turnoff. A broadcaster who solicits money for Rent/Internet/Food and rewards us with footage of jumping on hotel beds, pizza, and flexing is not professional enough to be doing casts for a worldwide brand. Will probably still follow standings, but won’t be watching this hooligan..
Thank you all for the support you have shown me in my selection. I promise I will do my best to do the community proud!
On a side note on a subject that has died down, I just wanted to let everyone know that I support the decision for Justin Flynn. I have been in contact with him ever since the decision was made, and he is a great guy to talk to. He brings a lot of charisma and screen presence to the team, something that I cannot bring as well as he does. Mad respect for him. He knows he has faults in his game knowledge and has acknowledged that, but he is definitely willing to learn. This willingness to learn shows me that he is not taking this job lightly, and is going to do his hardest to provide the best show ever. In fact, he was the one that reached out to me to set up practice sessions. We have been practicing and I am pleased with how much flow we have despite him and I barely knowing each other.
His decision to announce Patreon simultaneously with the commentating gig was probably a mistake considering most people were unaware of who he was, that this “outsider” was taking away this position from another member of our community and he was using it as a platform to launch himself. But the thing is he shouldn’t be an “outsider” to us. The thing that keeps me coming back to playing Pokemon is the wonderful community and how welcoming we can be. I was an outsider back in 2009 and banked on living in Huy’s shadow, a much more well known Pokemon figure. But I realized that everyone I met was nice and welcomed me into the group. Next thing you know, I ended up coming back every time (why didn’t anyone pick me up from the airport in 2012?) to hang out. We were all new at one point, and the community I’m sure is one of the reasons why you kept coming back. The way we handled this situation was a poor display of our warmth. We should have been congratulating Justin instead of complaining that he may not have game knowledge. He made it, he got the job. Moving on, we should treat him with the same amount of respect that you would treat the other guy that got selected. I know for a fact that I will welcome Justin and I look forward to meeting him in person.
Without further ado, congratulations Justin and Pooka on your selections as well as all the returning members. Well deserved, and I cannot wait to hang out over the summer. #FlynnParDuy
Maybe I am a little late to the Justin Flynn party, but the jealousy posts in this thread are really cute. I kind of feel bad for the guy though, $500 for rent and Internet? His parents are charging him a lot to live in the basement. And no one has paid to be his friend (some big time Internet celebrity he is).
If Justin thinks he should be paid like a professional to talk about pokemon, I am going to judge him like a professional. I will hold off on judging him. Though, he kind of gives the first impression that he is the kind of guy who thinks he is better than everyone else and deserves to be paid to make pokemon videos. People who think they are better than everyone else don’t fair well on the Internet.
Unless I’m missing something, I don’t understand why some people are bashing Jflynn solely for the Patreon subject.
The timing may be ironic but there’s no mention of VGC in that page as far as I could find. He’s a regular streamer, and I’m not trying to delve deep in his personal life but his financial situation seems fairly dependent on it and his work relating to it. Whether you agree with that or not, many popular streamers rely on that income to survive. Asking for donations is fine so long as the intentions are clear and fans decide that they wish to support.
As far as his knowledge on the game, that’s been addressed well by some of the more popular voices already.
Again, please correct me if I’m missing something. I’m just a fairly strong Jflynn fan and even then, I can understand the skepticism. But a lot of the hate here seems fairly blind.
figo 😉
“) If the YouTube star is the main draw, I have to question why that decision was even made. Pokemon is the draw, not a YouTube “celebrity.” I don’t think he brings any extra viewers that someone like PewDiePie (which would be an equally horrendous pick) or a mainstream celebrity like Hulk Hogan may have (as silly as that sounds). Pokemon is the draw here and should be the main focus of the cast.”
Being a YouTube star is really a main draw for this as shofu, an extremely popular poketuber, also auditioned for the position and he didn’t get it, and his subscriber is more than 4x bigger than Justin’s so we can conclude that being popular is not that big of a draw. And while yes his knowledge of the game is somewhat lacking, he has made a big improvement over the year and he has enough knowledge on the VGC 14 metagame to know what he’s talking about. Also his presence will also help liven up the commentating scene, a point that a few commenters on here have also pointed out. No offense to Scott and Evan but I felt their weakest link as commentators were the fact that they didn’t really keep it engaging, granted they had their moments and by all means they were very good commentators but there were a few times where they really just lost my engagement. Justin’s presence will definitely help keep it engaging. While some may state that he might not be the GREATEST commentator ever, there were many worse options out there that are far worse than Justin.
I agree fully with TheJFrenzy.
From my interactions with Justin so far, it’s clear that he brings his own unique take to the job and I think everyone will be surprised by how well he does. I know I was.
It’ll be better than ever this year, except for the fact that they invited Scott back. That’ll be worse.
I think that JFlynn’s partition thing is being over outraged on. Have we not all done stupid things? For me, $50 seems a too much for a skype call. But. there are rich people, and a lot more rich nerds than you’d think. And if they’re a fan of Jflynn, That might be worth their $50, or pocket change. We’ve seen crazy kickstarters. I think we’ve all seen a kickstarter that was asking for a crazy amount of money that you wanted to pay, or did pay, because it had a reward or for a cause that you wanted to support. I checked, and someone already paid for the $50 skype call. People need to lay off him for that, while i wouldn’t support it, doesn’t mean other people wouldn’t. And let’s face it. Crazy patreon aside. What matters right now is the commentator part. I watched his stream the other day, and i think he wont be a bad commentator. While I would have preferred to have Shofu, I think it would have been much more entertaining, just everyone needs to lay off JFlynn. I think he’ll pull off a great job at Nationals.
Legend has it that Evan thinks we’re still playing on BW2
i thought it was rby
#MegaTauros #TPCIpls
Now, getting my mind clearer about Justin. I do think he will bring positive reactions when the events begin. Since I started watching him I could see everytime he streammed and battled he learnt something new, and I have no doubt he will study a lot for both Nationals and Worlds, he will bring it for the stream
Well, it’s kinda hard to pay to be his friend when the thing in question was cancelled the day after it was announced.
He got another gig or something like that.
his patreon is actually still up and active, just to inform those of you who think it was canceled.
after hearing from scott about how he’s putting in the effort to learn and such, i’m a bit more optimistic but not 100% in the boat yet. after watching him stream a bit i couldn’t help but notice glaring mistakes, and he doesn’t have a ton of time to really practice in the way scott/evan/duy have. of course each of the commentators have made simple mistakes before, but i think i’m allowed to remain skeptical at this point. i’m sure he is a great guy (i’ve heard good things) and he is really open to learning, but when it comes time to commentate i hope he really is ready. with proper guidance i’m sure he’ll fit in just fine, i just can’t help but have a sliver of doubt. i’m sure i’ll have the chance to talk to him next weekend and my final doubts will go away. BUT UNTIL THEN…
also i suppose i want to touch on something AZ commented on, and that would be that we’re lucky to have three commentators from our site on the roster. part of me wants to say that’s not good enough, but most of me is happy we actually have any opportunity at all. we’ve never had anything like this before. remember 2008 and 2009? even 2010. VGC is better than it ever has been, and i honestly think it can only get better, but it might take a while.
It was cancelled. Good to know it’s back up though. He did say it was going to go back up eventually, I just didn’t anticipate it being this soon.
Now it’s apparently back up with a single $200 patron. Before it was cancelled there were more patrons for mostly $5 a month.
It’s probably worth clarifying the Patreon thing a little since people won’t let it go. I don’t want to speak for Justin here, but from talking to him and watching his stream, I think I have a pretty good grasp on what he was trying to do and I think I owe to him to defend him a little, so I’d appreciate it if you all take a moment to read my explanation.
I was definitely pretty flustered by the timing of the Patreon announcement originally as well. At the time, it had seemed to me like it does to many of you — that it sure seems to have been deliberately timed to try to take advantage of the situation to get more money with the commentator announcement. I think this understandably rubbed a lot of people the wrong way: if he was using the commentator position to money grab, it seemed like he was kind of taking advantage of something that both TPCi and Pokemon’s VGC and TCG communities have helped to build, which was especially off-putting to a lot of people because they saw him as an outsider. I understand this thought process — I was definitely there prior to talking to him Friday. In my case, I was particularly irritated because I was concerned it seemed like he was making the announcement about him rather than about the cast, and I take the way people approach this very seriously.
However, like most times you assume the worst about a situation you don’t know about, these assumptions weren’t very accurate. On Justin’s end, I think the point of the Patreon thing was that he’s getting money from his fans anyway — from Twitch subs or whatever — but that he wanted a way to actually give them something for giving him their support beyond the content he was creating anyway. Which I think is why some of the rewards seem silly to people — it’s not that he’s expecting people to pay to get them, it’s more that they were paying anyway and he had to try to think of something realistic he could give back to thank his fans on top of the content he’s delivering anyway. He’s not holding content hostage or whatever. He definitely gets that the timing wasn’t very appropriate and I really don’t think it was deliberate at all, he was busy at E3, he had some flight issues that led to him not getting back until shortly before the announcement, it just seemed convenient to him to make both announcements at once and he didn’t really consider how that would be interpreted. I’m certainly in no position to judge other people for making a sketchy PR move once in a while, but I’m very confident from talking to him that his intentions are in the right place. I think most of you have picked up the fact that I tend to be pretty inherently suspicious of for-profit content creators in Pokemon, but I think Aaron’s initial post before the strikethrough was actually pretty correct as far as the idea that like fellow commentator JWittz, JFlynn seems about as altruistic as they come. Must be the initial.
It’s time to get over this and forgive, guys. He wasn’t trying to take advantage of anything. He’s been fantastic to work with so far. He’s fun to be around, he works hard, he takes suggestions well and improves very rapidly. I think Evan and Duy would probably agree that based on our practice, he’s probably one of the stronger members of our team right now. I suspect he’s only going to keep getting better, so I’d suggest forgiving him and warming up to him — you’re gonna be seeing him commentate Pokemon for a long time, I think. And maybe we can all learn a lesson about not jumping to conclusions.
Good Guy Scott – telling it how it is. Also I enjoyed watching you two battle on stream the other day ;P
I’m not upset with the commentating arrangement, but if this was said, that’s a little annoying. I would think that our members were chosen due to them being the best candidates, not as a favour that we should be grateful for. No one ever claimed that NB members deserved the job for the sake of being NB members.
There is no doubt in my mind that I’m the best.
You suck. Like this post if you agree Evan sucks.
Like this post if cybertron already has enough nb likes
i actually didn’t think about it that way at first but now that you’ve said it i noticed how off-putting that comment really sounds…
definitely agreeing there. i don’t know anything about the selection process but i kind of wish i did.
also evan sucks who else think it
Asking for money in general is a douche bag move. So when justin flynn goes on the internet asking people to support his hobby it is shady. There is a difference between making a living creating youtube videos and streams and begging people for a basic salary so you can pay your rent and eat food. Maybe justin isn’t a douchebag but I don’t think I will ever respect him.
So nugget bridge is pokemon vgc content created by volunteers (the people who volunteer are the subscribers). What if to reward our subscribers we have top secret team articles (much like justin’s secret blog he advertises on patreon) only available to people who write an article every month or subscribe $5. But why stop there? Anyone who subscribes $50 gets moderator status on nugget bridge. Doesn’t that sound a little ridiculous? Whatever happened to creating pokemon content for love of the game instead of too lazy to get a job?