Results from the Pokémon 2014 Germany National Championships
The European portion of the Pokémon Video Game Championship Series has kicked off with the very first National Championship of the season! With such a large amount of Championship Points at stake and no Regional or Premier Challenge level events in the region, these tournaments will have a massive impact on players vying for a World Championship invite. Additionally, it guarantees that the Top 16 from this tournament will receive a bye three weeks from now at the event in the United Kingdom. The top 32 players in Europe as determined by Championship Points at the end of the season will receive an invitation to the 2014 Pokémon World Championships in Washington, DC, USA. The top 16 will have their flights and accommodations paid for as well.
The Championship Payout for this event was as follows:
| Placement | Points | Kicker |
| 1 | 480 | 0 |
| 2 | 440 | 0 |
| 3–4 | 360 | 0 |
| 5–8 | 210 | 0 |
| 9–16 | 150 | 0 |
| 17–32 | 90 | 0 |
| 33–64 | 30 | 128 |
| 65–128 | 15 | 256 |
There were 403 Masters, 84 Seniors, and 25 Juniors this weekend and here were the final placements of the top players!
Masters
- Markus Stadter (13Yoshi37)
- Simon Stanford (Falco)
- Nemanja Sandic (Porengan)
- Matthias Suchodolski (Lega)
- Lajos Kowalewski (Lajo)
- Zacharias Daum (Mercury)
- Stephan Appelfeller (Appi)
- Szymon Wojdat (Szymoninho)
- Timo Koppetsch (37TimoK1)
- Florian Wurdack (DaFlo)
- Carlo Arbelli (shinycarletto)
- Baris Akcos (Billa)
- Steve Edgson (SirSmoke)
- Faaiz Ashfaq (Feis)
- Ciskejan Giannakos (sagaciousslowpoke)
- Jake Birch (WhiteAfroKing92)
Seniors
- Nicola G.
- Nathan A.
- Lennard L.
- Alex G. (Pokealex1999)
- Arthur T. (blueboy)
- Adrian S.
- Batuhan C.
- Tim S. (iZocker)
Juniors
- Ahren B.
- Samet D.
- Marvin A.
- Paul P.
- Lucie A.
- Marius H.
- Jaden D.
- Fabian E.
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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48 Responses to Results from the Pokémon 2014 Germany National Championships
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Updated with Junior results.
I had a very long discussion with Chris Brown at the tournament.
Now that we have a 2-day format, things are better than previous years. However, realistically, can you see Bo3 Swiss working? I know there was a delay of 45-60 minutes due to the problems with registration, but we still finished at close to 10pm instead of expected end-time of 8pm. Do you really think we could do Bo3 Swiss and not be there until the early hours of the morning (which the venue would probably not allow)? Even the second day went over by pushing toward an hour when we had no real delays. I’m all for trying to make sure deserving players cut, but I don’t want to be stuck at venues from 8am until gone midnight two days in a row to get it to work. I’m also not keen on events over than Worlds running battles on the Friday as not everyone can commit to this.
The more obvious solution which we discussed was trying to sort out the software and make it so that every player with an X-2 record would progress to the second day, whatever that second day’s format is. He is not against this and it is probably something that will be looked into for the future. Another thing discussed was Regionals for Europe, but apparently there is just no room in the budget for this, so it’s not going to happen. The only way Europe will get more tournaments is if TO’s step up and are happy to run Premier Challenges – supposedly there are a few interested, so these could well be set up starting in the fall this year.
International Challenges via Wi-Fi are also going to be more widespread, there were supposed to be two of them before the German National even happened which would have changed a lot with the byes awarded, but delays cost us that.
The event was supposed to Start at 1pm on saturday (and that is obviously pretty late already) add a 2 hour delay to that and it is no surprise that saturday took that long. In my opinion it is pretty manageable to run 8 rounds bo3 swiss even with delays the event would be over at around 10pm .
still de-salting from this although i’m the only one to blame for my performance
retirement speech coming soon
on another note congrats to the winners and everyone else whos happy with their performances. it was great to see nemanja finally win something, its been about time and this guy is the best german player by far this year. i expect big things from him at worlds 😎 his team also isnt just pure gimmick or whatever people might wanna call it, its just very strong against standard teams.
i also loved meeting everyone again, especially my friends lee, christopher, deku, gec, mean, carletto, conti, sergiomarcos, pokealex and many many more!
2pm was the expected start-time IIRC. We started at 3pm and it took around seven hours to do eight rounds of Bo1 Swiss. Do you honestly think eight rounds of Bo3 Swiss could be done by 10pm just by added 2-3 hours (no delay + starting sign ups an hour or two earlier)?
Starting at 10am, without delays, 65min a round, 30min between rounds and without delays 10pm would be manageable
I’m probably missing something, but isn’t 65 minutes for a Bo3 a bit much? A battle only takes 15 minutes at the most, so won’t 3 take (including the time to pick the Pokémon) 50 min at the most?
Yes, i just added some time for going to Your table, picking mons, waiting for the round to Start etc (would have been better to go with 5 Or 10 min instand, Sry)
So, judging by the way you run it there, every round at this national would be done in 20 minutes? :/
Why did it take around seven hours to do eight rounds of Bo1 if your logic says it should take less then three hours then? None of that part had anything to do with delays. It’s not as quick a procedure as you think it is…
Well it’s because they just weren’t English enough when the flights were stuck on the wall
If everyone formed an orderly queue like we do in England they’d have been done much quicker instead of everyone piling in with the “I must find my name before the paper self-destructs” mentality lol
Well, I don´t know why it took so long. Probably because the TCG-Nats are more important to the organizers than the VGC nats (would make sense as amigo is the tcg distributor in germany), they didn´t have enough people to run the event properly, technical issues (I talked to a staff member I know and he told me that they had some issues with the progamms). Also what MSK said (not to mention that there was more than just one sheet with pairings …).
Not going to comment on the Bo1 vs. Bo3 thing now, but the tournament we have experienced was in fact very slow and this probably was the organizer’s fault. First the registration “fast” line obviously was a joke, should have probably added more manpower to it or at least just tell people to head over to the other line. Then the tournament itself… Every small piece of paper in that gigantic hall, they posted exactly *once* and they posted both flights close to each other. A periodic battle of over 10 hours for everyone to get a glimpse ensues. Easy solution: post them multiple times and spread across the hall, maybe also use the big screens too. (Well, I have no idea why they don’t think of that themselves, they can’t be that stupid, can they…? Or do I not know that TOM doesn’t allow stuff to be printed twice ever, lol.) And then it maybe also took quite some time to post a new round after the previous one was finished, don’t quote me on that though. And on day 2, they had hours between top 16 and top 8 again… Anyway, there’s no way the tourney should have been finishing late with better organization. I shall not be crying for Bo3 Swiss as long as we don’t have at least reasonable qualification requirements for the second stage of the tournament (as well as this bye system killed, it makes no sense and everyone who isn’t lucky enough enough to be benefitted by it hates it), but with smooth organization it wouldn’t really add more time than we lost for no good reason.
How much money do you think removing unpaid invites would give you? How would that help?
At any rate, interesting to read some of the situation in Europe. I haven’t asked as much about it as I probably should have, enlightening to learn a little.
While I agree that the manpower they had just wasn´t enough, it´s partly the players fault for not changeing lines by themselfes when they see there are less people in the other line. Also they posted every bracket at least twice in the hall, also not that far away from each other, but obviously far enough so only few actually noticed them it seems …
I really don’t think it is. We might be getting a tonne of support from bigger numbers thanks to the new games generating an undeniably large amount of hype, but, the TCG is still the cash cow, and we have to follow them a little bit. Now, all the TCG regionals are run without the involvement on TPCi. I know the ones i’ve been to in the UK are put on by TO’s who are geniunely interested in the game, giving people a chance to play and all that. There are entrance fees, and they make a little money off players buying soda and other things in their shop, but they’re not getting any money from Pokemon from this. They’re in a range of venues, from Village Halls to Gaming Shops, and it’s all out of their pocket, then covered by the fees. They’re actually doing us a favour.
They’re not huge earners either, these things really don’t get huge attendance, very rarely breaking 64. I don’t think I saw one over 64 at least. Without this scene getting bigger, I don’t think that they’ll be able to expand and get the VGC on board in the same way. Even if they did, it wouldn’t be the same organised fashion you’re dreaming of that the US has, they’re really erratically scheduled (whenever TO’s have time/venue availabilty), and in really odd locations. Do any of you know of Sutton Coldfield? Well, it’s a tcg regional location, hardly a popular choice.
Unless we get a much larger overhaul of the system for both, across all of Europe, we should be grateful for what we get I think.
I think the key link here is that it is much more cost efficient in the US to have the hybrid TCG/VGC Regionals because the existing TCG Regionals are much, much larger and had more appropriately sized venues to begin with to merge VGC on to. In many(all?) cases TCG needed venues for a second day at the Regional level to finish tournaments anyway, which is why VGC is just Sunday, since we occupy the space TCG swiss had on the previous day. It isn’t even close to apples-to-apples because the European TCG scene doesn’t have the same volume and the opportunities that go with it: German TCG Nationals has fewer players than an NA TCG Regional does. It’s not like “have a VGC Regional” just costs the same amount of money regardless of other variables.
For whatever it’s worth, I still think if I were a European player, the expansion plan I’d want is to have like the current system where three Nationals award points. Rather than sending players to Worlds from there,I’d have those Nationals award fewer points but give stipends to another, higher value National tournament that functions in the way US Nationals does for North America, and then send players to Worlds based on points after that with the existing stipend situation. I imagine it is more economically feasible that way because you’re still working off of existing National tournaments. It still adds a bunch of cost. since you’d want to add at least one more event and then another round of stipends. so it may not be that viable either. Something to think about, I guess, because I think it’s a lot more practical by comparison, and it would at least have more of the intended circuit feel. The Regional expansion plan in Europe doesn’t seem like it has much merit if TCG doesn’t suddenly surge.
On a random note, grats to WAK92’s T-16 finish with the same 6 I brought to my regionals #teambuildingbromates
(Yea it really isn’t a super original 6, but it’s fun to see it up here)
Read this and have to agree with the whole not being loved thing: everyone was saying it and you could really feel that we were more of an afterthought to the organizers. I also remember there being mention of a top 16/32 on the website and it being put as 8/16 on the information card on the wall. Was scratching my head at that one, but guess they just wanted to get it over with faster >.>
Bo3 Swiss would be amazing if they ever implement it as the Hax is a bit too much of a factor in single elimination as many players can attest to. A lot of hax stories were shared this weekend. It would also keep some people from trying to get cheap wins with “gimmick” tactics as those don’t work in Bo3 and they’d have to rely on proper teams and skill to win. I struggled a lot with that as I faced 4 of those people. Hmm, I wonder if just building experience makes those things less effective against me after awhile…
tl;dr Bo3 Swiss would make the tournaments more stable and a Top 32 really is needed. Far too many 6-2 players got shafted this weekend