Japan’s Path to the 2015 Pokémon World Championships Announced
Since the cancellation of their Regional Championships in 2011, Pokémon players in Japan have had to deal with an online ladder-based tournament as their first step towards the Pokémon World Championships. This year will be no different as they play for 31 of the 32 spots available at Japan’s invite-only National Championships in the online 2015 Japan Cup. The final spot in the Masters Division will be determined in a different method to be announced at a future date. The top 32 Junior and Senior Division players in the Japan Cup will qualify for the National Championships with no other method of qualification announced at this time.
Players will only be able to play 10 battles a day over the four days the tournament will run for. It will begin at 9:00 AM on Friday, May 1st and end at 8:59 AM on Tuesday, May 4th. The Japan National Championships will be held on June 14th, 2015 at the Pacifico Yokohama Annex Hall.
We do not currently know the number of players from Japan who will qualify for the World Championships or how many of them will receive travel awards. The format of the National Championships has not been announced either. Last year, the qualified players played in a Round Robin stage separated into eight groups with the top player from each group moving onto a Single Elimination bracket. All games in both the group stages and elimination stage were best of one until the finals.
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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That’s a quite interesting qualifier… If you don’t play all of your battles one day, can you play them the next?
(Example: Play 8 games Day One, 12 Day Two, 4 Day Three, and 16 Day 4?”
This is so so bad once again. I really hope the Japanese players, who are definitely at least on par with the best western players, will still stick to this game and excite us with great games and clever strategies at worlds once again. The quality and quantity Japan has is far greater than what 32 spots at “Nationals” might suggest and an online tournament as qualifier once again reminds of the old lottery days. If there is any possibility to help improve their structure, I hope the people in charge can help out their respective counterparts in Japan so that we might finally see the big Japan vs the world showdown at worlds we’ve been waiting for so long.
RIP
the only thing I hate about this is the DC’s that will come.
Please see Yoshi’s comment. He nailed it.
Sorry for the question, but why where regionals in Japan canceled?
Wow thats wild
Wish this was in NA
I do wish we had a way SIMILAR to theirs,but still have regionals and all.Make the online part of the season be an LCQ for worlds.
no you don’t
you definitely don’t
wish this was in SPAIN
Yeah this would in NA be and is A horrible format indeed Braverius
I completely agree with Yoshi, It’s a shame, Japan is one of the bigger countries if not the biggest and they deserve much more than that. I remember when they had 50 qualifiers or so and then nats, it was amazing.
And for those wishing this was in NA or EU or wherever, I wish countries without nats at least had this way to qualify, but for those countries that already have nats and some sort of circuit this would be a huge stepback and I think everyone should wish the best for the rest of the regions, that is the best way to grow as a community and to grow the circuit as a whole.
What are you talking about bro you don’t wanna wish that for any one
Good luck to the Japanese players who have been forced to do a final day 40 game marathon against many of the top players in the world. My condolences for having to deal with this.
Wait, they have to play against other players in the world? As in, the Battle Spot Rating Battle? I thought they have to play online against each other.
Sorry I’m newb so this is my first time hearing about it. Can someone explain what the logic behind this kind of format is?
can someone explain to me Yoshi’s comment?
Basically what he is saying is that there are a lot of good Japanese players , top 32 is no where enough for them . Honestly I agree with him the way they dominate bs ladder , they can dominate worlds too if they have a better circuit system
How has their system not changed yet? Surely they’ve voiced their concerns for such a ridicous qualifying system.
Oh man I can’t imagine a system where you don’t need to spend hundreds of hours traveling and thousands of dollars to compete over a course of a year to have a shot at worlds. It’s too bad the pokemon company in Japan doesn’t force it’s TCG organizers to host crappy VGC tournaments on Sundays in cheap convention centers 2 hours away from the nearest airport.
Japan’s system will probably produce better world’s candidates than a system where whoever gets to attend the most 8 man premier challenges makes worlds.
People in japan destroy the BS rankings the other day it was like top 35 were all japanese players with 2000s+ flipping good players over there this format pretty much blows for them
It really does look odd to me that they don’t have awesome PCs and regionals like we do, but I’m glad that they’re at least doing something with the wifi capabilities that are available right there in the game. It’s ridiculous, completely ridiculous that we don’t utilize this in conjunction with our in-person events in the US. TPCi just had a wifi VGC format tournament a couple weeks ago… for ZERO CP. I didn’t play and neither did my daughter because there was no significant payoff. At least this wifi tournament will mean something for them.
lol why?
One of the best parts of the Pokemon scene (IMO) are the live events. Why would you want to limit those?
I understand that people like live events, I like them too, but the current system in the US and Europe simply privileges those who have the time and money to attend a lot of them. It’s almost pay to win really. Therefore I think the Japanese system might not be that bad after all.
Do they have to lock their battleboxes? Otherwise it would be a real pain for them, if you don’t pick the right six Pokémon for the four-day-event, lol.
And as long as it requires a good result on the japanese ladder, I don’t see that big of a problem in that system. Sure, the lack of events sucks, but hey – what you get is what you get, lol!
It is a real shame about the number of spots, 32 really isn’t enough at all and I really hope that that number can be expanded on in the future. Japanese players deserve a lot more chances since they are obviously very talented.
That being said I do agree that I would like there to be online events alongside live events, since as it has been said this way it is pretty much “pay to win”. I enjoy the format and playing it but I know I’ll never enjoy VGC as it should be because I don’t have the time nor money to be hopping around the country.
No, not at all — unless bribing opponents is a thing nowadays. Nationals are the only tournaments that actually get you to Worlds and just attending them obviously isn’t doing it. Can go to them all, can bomb them all, literally paid to lose.
Back to Japan, I just don’t get it. What happened to the times of 2010 and before!?
Hmmm, so I’ve been to 5 Regionals and have flown to 4 of them. Know what that means? I’m taking my 40 CP from them and going to Worlds!
Zach could have elaborated more (even though he didn’t need to, this shouldn’t be a hard thing to understand).
Wifi tournaments are a kind of shaky way to distribute CP to begin with, though I don’t think the way they’ve been done in US for the past few years have been too bad. But when you’re talking about invites to Nationals, all of the issues become MUCH more glaring. The big ones I can think of are:
1. Disconnects. Though they can’t be abused like they could in 2013 (this fix made wifi tournaments much more legitimate), their largely random nature can easily cheat players out of won games when they did essentially nothing wrong. With a limit of 30 games, one random loss like this could be an enormous setback, not something that can be remedied just by cranking out a few extra games.
2. For lack of a better word, the ‘gambling’ created by an indefinite point limit to pass to make Top 31. If you have 18XX after 29 games, do you play another game to feel more confident about your point total, and risk locking yourself out of Top 31 on a loss, or not play another game, feeling comfortable where you are. I know this came up for the player Bicho last year, where a crucial last game threw him just out of the cut which, if he hadn’t have played it, he would have been in cut. On the other side of this issue, fixing the invites to something like all players over 1830 would give the Nationals an indefinite amount of players, which can be seen as a problem.
The wifi tournament isn’t a few points that, for most players, won’t make a difference in the end, or are a safety net of sorts. This is the only way that the season keeps flowing for every Japanese player. Wifi tournaments still seem too fickle to be such a deciding factor in Worlds qualification.