Now I Am Older
The day that I’m publishing this article, May 21st, 2021, marks the 10th anniversary of my first Regional in San Jose, California, which I won when I was 14 years old. To me, it’s the day that I really entered VGC.
Ten years is a long time to be doing anything. It’s almost as much time as I had been on Earth back then. It’s hard to believe that I’ve known some of these people for ten years.
This article is a retrospective on my ten-year journey through this game. I’ll tell you right now, it’s going to be a whirlwind. I have a lot of stories and nearly every section here briefly skims my experiences. But here’s my attempt to put it all together.
My First Tournament
Pokémon games were a focal point throughout my early childhood. One of my earliest memories is hiding behind a couch at my grandmother’s house on Cape Cod, trying to play Pokémon Red at 6:30 in the morning without attracting that much noise. I was 3. It took me a few months to get through Mount Moon, but as I got older, I was eventually able to progress in the games. I played with my best friends in kindergarten and elementary school, and before long we were glued to our Game Boy Advance SPs after school, swapping and trading.
I’ve always loved to compete — I like to put myself in situations where I can work hard and see myself progress. I don’t know if I would say that I’m a competitive person, but I discover niche interests and focus on improving at them.
In 2006, I found out about the Journey Across America tournament in Massachusetts from the Pokémon.com website, and asked my parents if I could go. The day of the tournament, my dad had some bad news for me: he was doing work with the Pokémon company, and the rules forbade me from playing. I was crushed, even though we went to the tournament to watch and had a great time. My desire to play in one of these tournaments grew and grew. My dad’s company eventually stopped working with Pokémon, but I wasn’t able to make it to any tournaments from 2008–2010, as my parents weren’t willing to drive to Newark for their Regionals.
In 2011, I had a stroke of luck: the San Jose Regional timed perfectly with a conference that my dad was going to in California. He offered to take me with him and I readily accepted. I eagerly began to prepare.
2011
It didn’t click for me until watching Ray’s 2010 World Championships win live (on Ustream, a super primitive streaming site!) that there might be other people who were interested in VGC online, too, and that I could talk to them. The number of people who found competitive resources on the internet was much smaller back then, and nearly everyone knew a good chunk of everyone. I found a group of people in the #smogonwifi IRC channel and they became my first friends. We bred Pokémon for VGC use, chatted about teams, and I slowly got to know more of the people that were or would become mainstays at these tournaments.
Given that I was 14, I would be playing in one of the first Senior division Regionals. The Senior division is composed of 10–15 year old players, and the distinction is almost as awkward as it is to be that age — you’re not really the youngest (Junior), but there’s still a barrier between you and the adults (Master). Senior Division players usually have a chip on their shoulders and a desire to prove themselves. I found a group of other Senior division players who were active online, and we started our own IRC channel, naming ourselves Team Seniors. I met Aaron Zheng (known as Cybertron) and we became close really quickly. Maybe because our names were both Aaron?
I hit the ground running in teambuilding. I wanted to win, and I had to if I wanted to qualify to Nationals. My first teams that I made were silly and didn’t have much thought behind them. In the run-up to the tournament with only a month to go, I didn’t have a team that I liked competing with, and I was starting to get nervous because time was running out. One night on my April vacation from school, I was thinking about the popularity of Beat Up Whimsicott + Terrakion, and lamented that it was so common and that there were few ways to innovate it. It hit me! I shot straight up in my bed and ran to check Serebii on my computer, to see which other Pokémon learned Beat Up. I found Krookodile, threw it into the teambuilder with a Choice Scarf, and assembled a team that looked perfectly standard but had a hidden deadly mode that turned it on its head. The moment I knew that I was ready for the tournament was when I ran into Ray on the ladder and beat him with my Landorus using Fly as the finishing move.
My dad made a 10-minute home video of my first Regional, and I think it’s the best record of what Senior Regionals were like back then. This is the first time that I’m posting it publicly!
My prize for winning this single elimination tournament (out of ~150 people?) was a 3DS, a sweet medal, and an invite and a trip to the National Championships in Indianapolis. Looking back, I was extremely lucky to win the Regional— if I had gotten any other placing, I probably wouldn’t be able to go to Nationals, and then not Worlds, and I don’t know if I’d be here right now writing this.
I was besides myself with joy at winning my first tournament. Holding the medal to this day fills me with pride.
Nationals rushed in before I knew it. The best part of Nationals in 2011 was that it was my first time meeting in person the friends that I had made on the internet. We had spent the better part of a year talking online, and now we could hang out and really get to know each other. We spent our time exploring the Indianapolis convention center, playing spirited battles on our DSes, and just chatting wandering around the city. When we played in the tournament, our rallying cry was “Take it easy, Trainer!”, a spoof on one of legendary commentator Nick McCord’s signature lines. We all set it as the messages on our trainer cards, and would shout it at each other from across the tournament tables, waiting for our next matches to begin.
In the big tournament, I placed 4th and won an invite and a trip to Worlds, and Aaron won! I was over the moon happy, and we all celebrated our success in the pool in the swanky hotel afterwards. Nationals was a magical experience, not just because I met new friends that I loved, but also because it was the first time that I really got to share and enjoy a tournament with other people. These memories hold a special place in my heart.
After Nationals, Team Seniors worked hard to perfect our strategies for Worlds, but I worked especially closely with Aaron. Wouldn’t you know it — out of everyone, he was my round 1 opponent at Worlds. Having to play against a close friend that I had spent all summer preparing with just as the day started felt like the inverse of that magical time we had just had at Nationals. It crushed me. I lost in a close 2–1 set and it hung over my head like a cloud for the rest of the day. I finished 3–2 and got 14th place at my first Worlds. We had fun in San Diego together, and celebrated Ray’s second Worlds win, but it would be a weekend of falling short on our dreams for most of us. That was my first and only year in the Senior division.
2012
Back in those days, after Worlds, there was a break of several months before the VGC circuit started back up again, so I had time to think about how I felt about the game. Coming up short at the Senior World Championships didn’t get to me, and I redoubled my resolve to try another time. After my first World Championships appearance, I wanted to go all-out again — I wanted to go to the World Championships and fight for the title. I became engrossed with the problem of VGC, as I think happens to a lot of people that join because they’ve always loved Pokémon, and stay even though the Pokémon are boiled down beyond recognition to their numbers and math. Anyone can put a team of Pokémon in their party, and anyone can play a Pokémon battle, but knowing which Pokémon to use and how to navigate the battle is a lifelong skill. I desperately wanted to master it and find success. But I didn’t really know how to get there.
I aged out of the Senior division and began to play in the Master division. I had trouble adjusting to the stronger level of play, and I struggled to find my footing across the Regionals and Nationals that I went to for several years. I gravitated towards teams based around a “surprise factor”, which is a story that many who enter VGC know well. I didn’t do this out of a need to be unique or to show off my creativity: I chose surprising teams because I thought they would let me navigate the board to game states that I was more comfortable with than my opponent would be. At this point in time, I was of the mindset that I could find success with my team as long as I played enough and knew the team perfectly. I grinded games and stuck to one team for the entirety of the summer (and much of the next season).
At 2012 US Nationals, I made Top 32 with a strange and unique hyper offense team (shown above) before taking an exit to Bright Powder Sand Veil Garchomp. However, Top 32 wasn’t good enough to win me a trip to Worlds (in Hawaii!), and that August I sat on the couch on Cape Cod, watching the tournament play out.
Between Nationals and Worlds in 2012, Wolfe and I became friends. We knew of each other before 2012 Worlds, but that was when we really started working together. I was an early guinea pig for a lot of his teams, and we spent a lot of time that summer playing matches together, testing his off-the-wall strategies. Soon, we began to talk much more frequently: I remember texting him my teambuilding ideas with my phone under my desk in chemistry class. I think our obsession over this problem brought us together, but we approached the game from different angles, which made the collaboration fun.
Many of my friends went on to achieve insane levels of success. Aaron, Wolfe, and Gavin went on to do amazingly well at 2012 Worlds in Hawaii after stellar Nationals performances. In 2013, Gavin and Enosh faced in the finals at Nationals in their first/second year in the Master division. I helped some of my friends prepare for their tournaments, and it felt good to cheer them on and to be a part of their success, but the game wasn’t really clicking for me like it was for them. I was happy for my friends, but some day, I wanted to understand the game in the same way and reach the same heights. I felt left behind.
My takeaway from my experience in 2012 wasn’t that I should change up my strategy of picking teams or practicing, but rather that I was locked into it and should keep picking teams that succeeded in navigating my opponents to unfamiliar board states, but that under a microscope lacked strength, flexibility, and consistency. I think this is where I started to think less of myself as a player, and I doubted myself and thought less of myself in comparison to my friends. I started using self-deprecating humor more frequently, especially in regards to tournament performance.
In Pokémon, it can be challenging to deal with thoughts that someone else or everyone else has the answers and that you don’t. I think this is how many more people feel than they let on. Pokémon is a subjective game, and at the end of the day, your opinions and your principles shape your perspective in a unique and personal way. Teambuilding is almost a form of art. To rely on other people — thinking that their opinions are that much more valuable than your own — can stunt your strength and growth. I think I kind of felt that way a lot during this time in my life, seeing all my friends get stronger around me.
2013
I worked a data entry job full-time over the summer to pay for my Pokémon travels. I spent breaks and weekends on IRC talking about Pokémon with my friends. Spending all this time on Pokémon, we became closer out of the game, too. Once the school year kicked back up, Aaron even visited my high school for a day.
My next tournament up was the Last Chance Qualifier for Vancouver Worlds in 2013. I had bombed the 2013 Regionals in Foxboro, MA, using the Nidoking/Cloyster team once again, and then skipped Nationals in 2013 for a family trip. I needed a new team, but I didn’t feel confident making one for myself. While battling against Wolfe practicing for his 2013 Worlds run, he helped me put together a weird concept featuring Tornadus-Therian and the (brand-new!) Landorus-Therian.
Vancouver Worlds 2013 ended up being one of the best Worlds ever. Aaron, Brendan, Ed, Jonny and I stayed in a hotel room away from the venue with a balcony and a beautiful view of the city. We made sure to explore and eat poutine and get into trouble. The city was teeming with friends and we spent nights at the tournament hotel, laughing, playing Pokémon, and swimming in the pool. As far as the Pokémon goes, Aaron made Top 4 at Worlds in his first Master year, and Brendan (Aaron’s younger brother) won Junior Worlds for the first time after coming up short the two years prior. I was out of my seat screaming cheering them on. As for myself, I lost in the top 16 of the Last Chance Qualifier (I needed to finish top 4 to qualify). Two more wins and I would have made it into Worlds, but my opponent played well and I had overlooked some specific Pokémon in matchups in teambuilding. Again, I was bummed especially given how close I was to success, but the awesome weekend made my performance an afterthought.
2014
I entered my senior year of high school and had to apply to college. I think one of my supplemental essays for one of them was about Pokémon, which became a popular writing topic for our friend group.
The 2014 Regionals and Nationals played out similarly to their predecessors: test against my friends a lot, try teams, head to the tournament, wipe out at X-3, and enjoy the city before flying home. I kept having fun seeing my friends at the event, and loved seeing them keep succeeding, but I knew I hadn’t succeeded yet in the Master Division, and I felt like my growth had stagnated. The ends of events were tinged with quiet doubt even though my friends encouraged me. One conversation with Wolfe sticks out, where he mentioned that he legitimately didn’t want to face me at a tournament. I thought it was because we had worked together and I knew his style of play, but he insisted that it was because he thought I was a good player. I put this conversation aside in the moment, not really taking his words at face value, but looking back on it now it was really touching. He believed in me even when I didn’t.
Worlds in 2014 was in Washington DC, and I was going to play in the Last Chance Qualifier once again. This time, I brought a crazy team focused on Transform Smeargle, which you can read about here. The theory was that opponents would double Protect versus Fake Out + Dark Void, which was exploitable. Although the Smeargle team ended up falling short, it was another me team: do something standard, but switch a small element up to turn the whole team on its head. I went 1–1, defeating someone’s mom and then once again losing to Bright Powder Sand Veil Garchomp. Once again, sidelines. I had come to expect it at this point, and really just enjoyed using the wacky team. Once again, my friends cleaned up the Master division, as nearly everyone except Brendan had left the Senior division.
2014 was the start of when local VGC tournaments started up — beforehand, you could only go to Regionals, Nationals, or Worlds. This meant that it was also the death of the “off-season”, and there would no longer be an extended break between Worlds and the first set of Regionals. My friend Jake and I cruised around Massachusetts to high-attendance local tournaments, which enjoyed the post-X/Y popularity boom. These tournaments quickly became full of raucous laughter and hype matches as we made new friends with the people that we saw often. It was fun to have Pokémon friends in Massachusetts, and I looked forward to the weekends when we would go.
2015
By 2015, it had become clear that there was a new path to try to qualify to Worlds — rather than just playing in one Regional and one National, you could rack up points from local tournaments or attend multiple Regionals. The top 40 players in North America got to play in Worlds. This alternative pathway coincided with me being able to save up a bit more money to travel, so I decided to go to St. Louis Regionals to hang out with some friends and get some points.
My team focused around some synergies of Mega Kangaskhan and Bisharp. You can read about it here. The standout move, though, is Clefable’s Minimize, which in combination with Follow Me really defined the team. I justified this team choice to myself partly because of my practice games against Aaron and Wolfe, where a well-timed Minimize could turn the tables in my favor — if I got lucky. I thought I needed the extra advantage to beat opponents who I thought were better players than I was.
I ended up winning the tournament! This tournament was extra cool because it was the first ever streamed Regional, so there was a huge audience of maybe 30,000 people for the finals. I hammed it up on stream. For the first time, my friends and family back home could watch me play, which made it special to know that they were watching live. A few months later, someone recognized me from the stream at a fencing tournament.
Although I won the Regional, my team choice was based on the fear that I wasn’t as good as my friends. That year, once again, I had a mediocre Nationals performance. I finished 6–3, losing a close set to my friend and local player Amelia in the last round. I ended up finishing 41st out of the 40 slots to play at Worlds in North America, missing out on a chance to play at my home Worlds in Boston.
In the moment, I was really, really devastated. My near miss of Worlds isn’t something I really like to talk or think about. In all honesty, this is the first time I’m mentioning it since the summer it happened. More than anything, I didn’t want to define myself as a person or a player by it. I took the game easy for a little bit to give myself a break.
2016
2016 was a special year for VGC: for the first time since 2010, we were allowed to have two “restricted Pokémon”, also known as “box legendaries” (because they’re featured on the covers of games). I was excited to try a new teambuilding challenge in a competition similar to Ray’s 2010 win, the first VGC games I ever watched.
At this point, I was well into my sophomore year of college. I became more involved with my fencing team, and actually moved into a dorm full of fencers, where we got into hijinks very quickly. I began researching computer science for the first time and quickly enjoyed it. 2016 would be the last season where I would attend one Regional, one Nationals, and one Worlds before heavily ramping up the amount of Pokémon that I was playing. I wiped out at the Massachusetts Regionals after sweeping the Premier Challenge the day before.
Something changed for me in the run-up to US Nationals in 2016. I realized that I was looking down on myself and my own play and skills through the lens of the success of the people around me. I learned that if I wanted to get out there and find success, I would have to work on my process and believe in myself. I changed my practice mentality and tournament preparation process entirely. I stopped making self-deprecating jokes.
Lightning rarely strikes once in Pokémon teambuilding — if it’s a good idea, more than one person is going to come up with it. When Wolfe, Ray, and Aaron all mentioned separately on the same day putting both Cresselia and Bronzong on the same team, I knew that the idea was worth following up on. I worked intensely until Nationals. I made a team that could take full use of either Cresselia or Bronzong, making me feel like I was subtly walking up to the tournament with two teams in one. I spent the whole summer learning how to play this team inside and out, and grinded practice sets against my friends.
I got 2nd at Nationals and then placed Top 8 at Worlds in far and away the best season of my life. You can read my report on my whole 2016 season here, previously published on Nugget Bridge. 2016 was a season known for its centralized teambuilding and heavy RNG, and to get these results together after what was really five seasons of falling short and watching my friends succeed around me felt like an unmistakeable signal that I could reach the success that I always wanted. These results were more than the sum of their parts, together more than individual capricious wins— they were a sign that I had learned something about the game.
Each of these tournaments was a whirlwind of emotion. My battles were front and center, and the eyes, for once, were on me. The crowd saw the work that I had put in and cheered (or didn’t). I basked in it and messed around on the stream. Reaching those heights made me so unbelievably happy. The attention and the stakes made the losses cut that much deeper, but I tried to put them to the back of my mind, like I had with my 2015 loss. On the social side, I didn’t realize that getting further in the tournament meant less time to hang out or stay up all night talking and playing games together. I collapsed in my hotel room after each of the tournaments, exhausted but totally happy.
2017
Thinking that you have something figured out about Pokémon can be deeply dangerous, especially when the format changes. For me, I absolutely thought that after my 2016 season I had nailed the process down pat, and looked forward to the 2017 season. I had won a free trip to the first London Internationals (replacing the Nationals tournament), but I prepared poorly, brought a garbage team, and had the worst placing of my life after starting the tournament 1–3. I was stunned and felt low again. Definitely a reality check.
In 2017, I went to as many local tournaments as I could — partially because they were fun, and partially because I was determined to make it to Worlds again. Tournaments began to be a more frequent event, where I would travel to meet friends in different places and play high-stakes games, and more of a constant presence bearing down on my schedule. I saw friends every month rather than twice in a year, and traveling for Pokémon began to feel a little bit more like work. That year, I spent 18/52 weekends playing Pokémon. Because of the points that I earned from my performance at Regionals and local tournaments, I ended up not needing Nationals to qualify for Worlds, and skipped the tournament to start an internship.
I prepared hard for the World Championships and came up with a team that I thought had a unique angle. I worked on it with Chuppa and Zach, and the team can be found here. Again, though, I didn’t test it enough publicly, trying to keep it under wraps, and it bit me with a 1–3 Day 1 exit from Worlds 2017. The losses were happening so much quicker than they had before I did well in 2016, too fast for me to process them after the tournament, and I wondered where my preparation had turned sour.
I turned 21 at Worlds 2017! Weirdly, it was hard to find a bar in Anaheim, California, on a Sunday after midnight, so we all filed into the Disney tiki bar. My first drink ended up being some super fruity thing. I don’t think I could have picked a group of people that made me happier to be with.
2018
I entered my senior year of college. I was the president of my college’s fencing team, submitted an academic paper to a workshop, and sent out PhD program applications — it was a tall order to stay on top of Pokémon, even though I still devoted a lot of my weekends to the tournament circuit. 2018 was also my worst season of Pokémon, performance-wise. I traveled to 5 Regionals and never really found my footing in the format. I stopped cleaning up at locals in Massachusetts and Connecticut.
At one point, sitting at Charlotte Regionals 2018 after losing my third match and failing to advance in a Regional tournament for the fifth time in a row, for the first time in my career playing Pokémon I realized that one option that I had was to walk away from VGC and be done with it. I recognized that traveling to Regionals five times as frequently I had done in the past only to fall flat at all of them wasn’t making me happy. In some ways, thinking I had figured out the path to success and then falling on my face afterwards made me feel worse than before. I felt like Charlie Brown getting the football yoinked out from under him. I don’t know if I ever considered it seriously, but it’s the first time that I visualized the possibility of quietly dropping off the map.
I met those thoughts with a determination: I needed to keep trying. Even though I wasn’t performing as well as I wanted to, preparing for events seriously and trying my hardest at them meant a lot to me. I stubbornly made up my mind to keep going.
Wolfe and I prepared extremely hard for the North American International Championships — he wanted to make Day 2, and I wanted to moonshot myself a Worlds invite, because I was well outside the range of CP needed. We came up with this Hitmontop/Volcarona team, which is a combination last popular in 2012 that we dredged up from our memories. We actually prepared only with test games versus each other — we didn’t play a single game on the ladder. We ended up each going 6–3 in Day 1 at NAIC (and the same person actually knocked us both out). Although we both fell short of our goals, it would be a dry run for our future work together. I skipped Worlds that year and drove my sister to Canada for school.
After 2018 Worlds, I entered a PhD program, which is a 5–6 year commitment. A constant fear that I've had throughout my career has been — what happens when I don't have time for Pokémon? What I learned is that Pokémon matters to me, and I'll always find a way to make time for it in my life. That isn't to say that it's easy to juggle Pokémon and work, though. I work in computer science. It can be hard to focus on work stuff when the entire Pokémon world is right there, a click away. But on the other hand, if I'm procrastinating my work, I'm also not going to be focusing on Pokémon when I play it. It's a negative feedback cycle. I think that managing the battle for my own time is going to be the most challenging obstacle to overcome for tournaments in the future. I definitely won’t pretend to have begun to master the time management needed to make both work.
2019
2019 was another restricted Pokémon format-- in some ways, it felt like a throwback to 2016, but in many ways it was its own beast. In an early tournament, I got Top 4 at Dallas Regionals, and you can read about that here. Jake won his first Regional! I traveled to Berlin with some friends, and made Day 2 there after a 1–2 start. Wolfe and I played against each other for the first time at Berlin! It felt exciting, like things were ramping up like they had in the earliest parts of my career.
After Berlin, Wolfe and I built off of the lessons from our previous collaborations and really began working together fluidly. We built a Celesteela team for North America Internationals that ended up being our first real success as a team. I made Day 2 and he ended up winning the whole thing. It was so cool to be able to share the success together. The whole process brought me joy: from brainstorming and testing teams to executing them in high-stakes live tournaments.
We worked incredibly hard that summer to make a Worlds team. We knew better than anyone that centralized formats reward time and hard work. I worked closely with Markus for the first time, too, and it was great to learn from his perspective. You can read about the team and our process here. What made this preparation special to me was that, rather than work on one team for an extended period of time, as I had done in the past, I focused on the metagame from many different perspectives. I made it through Day 1 and placed Top 16 in Day 2, and this year felt like the climax of what had been a long time learning, growing, and working on myself as a player in Pokémon.
2020
Deeper now into grad school. While the first year of grad school is about adjusting, as you get older you get more in sync with your advisor and their expectations, and the work piles up. A lot of the time that I had to work on Pokémon came from voice calls walking to/from work and watching replays riding on the train.
Sword and Shield dropped and changed everything about the game. The removal of barriers to competitive Pokémon within the actual game, and the newly introduced Dynamax mechanic (which works much better for Double Battles than the classically popular Single Battles), led to the rise of popularity of VGC in ways that few could have seen coming.
Wolfe and I added Justin Carris to our teambuilding group and we began working hard. I think the difference between my “2016 success -> 2017 new generation” and my “2019 success->2020 new generation” transitions is the amount that I focused on the tournament process in the right ways. We worked hard, collaborated, paid attention, and built a team that could stand up on its own while making use of the mechanics introduced by the new generation. I went to Dallas Regionals, not wanting to miss the first Regional of the year. It was, once again, the first Regional streamed by the Pokémon company since they stopped mid-2018.
I won the Regional! You can read my Dallas report here. What was most interesting about my performance at this tournament in comparison to other tournaments was that, although I celebrated with my friends, and was incredibly happy that the tournament worked out my way, I wasn’t surprised by the win. I felt like it was a natural extension of the work we did. We put together an incredible team that I knew inside and out, and I was ready mentally to perform. It’s one of the best feelings about Pokémon that I’ve ever had.
Shortly after, Wolfe ended up placing second at the Collinsville Regionals in February 2020, making our team efforts 4 for 4 over the last large events that we had prepared for. It felt like we were on a roll, and I was quietly confident about our chances for the rest of the year.
2020–2021 Lights Out
The pandemic cut all of that short, of course. No more traveling! No more circuit.
Playing Pokémon in the pandemic feels like I’ve lost an important part of myself. Not having high-stakes tournament travel and the promise of nights hanging with friends to look forward to leaves me feeling empty.
The pandemic has changed Pokémon in lots of ways. It used to be the case that, compared to scenes like Smash, we had very few grassroots. Over the course of the year, VGC players have sustained tournament circuits with huge numbers of players. Rental codes have made high-level VGC play extremely accessible to anyone. It’s really exciting to see. At the beginning of my career, nearly everyone knew everyone at these tournaments, and now our game is really worldwide and there’s a lot of people I don’t know.
As far as VGC goes, I truthfully haven’t had much success in the grassroots circuits or in the Player’s Cups. Paradoxically, it’s been harder than ever to balance life and work alongside the game. I see all of these new players consuming and creating as much content as they can and grinding the Showdown ladder and I wish I had that spark, too.
Rather than improve directly at VGC, I picked up some side projects. I started writing articles, learning Japanese, and working on Pokémon AI. I also started coaching people in VGC. It became a challenge to myself to put the underlying phenomena, the skills that I had picked up from years of working on this problem, into words that anyone could understand no matter who they were. Coaching has given me more people to support and root for, even when the game is kind of inaccessible to me at this moment, and that makes me feel much more connected to the tournaments.
And now we’re in the present! The years have flown by, honestly, like one long day. I can’t believe it’s been ten years. When I started, I was just 14, running around the Indianapolis convention center with friends that I had just met.
Now I am older.
I think I’ll probably look back on this article later in life and laugh about how young I was when I wrote it. 24! Over the hill. Older readers may already be smirking. But the truth of the matter is that I’ve lived in this space for ten years. I know these walls. I can see all of these memories so clearly, and I miss brainstorming team compositions on the back of my notebook in class, daydreaming about a climactic summer. I miss traveling to random cities with friends of a lifetime and ending up sitting in a circle in the lobby of the hotel with our DSes out. I miss the people and the Pokémon that are in the past.
And I know that everything that comes with getting older is coming in hot for me too. My friends are moving on, getting married, and buying houses. Soon they’ll have kids. Maybe I will too. Soon all my joints will hurt and my brain won’t work as good. Someday, I’ll play my last Pokémon battle and put my Game Boy down.
Pokémon, narratively at its simplest, is a coming-of-age story. You leave your home and your mom and you travel the world and your Pokémon evolve. How lucky am I, then, to have the privilege to recast it as my own story about growing up, traveling, making friends, and finding some meaning in my young life? This game that has defined a decade of my life has given me purpose and escape in ways that I could have never imagined.
So I’ve gotta keep going for as long as I’m able. I can’t outrun what life has in store for me, but I can give it a good shot. I’m not going anywhere. I will work harder and keep learning about this game that means so much to me.
Writing this retrospective, hopefully closer to the end of the pandemic than the beginning, has made me really realize what parts of this game I love. I want to be the World Champion. I would love to say that the performance doesn’t matter to me, and that I’ll walk home at the end of the day happy no matter what. But there’s no way that I can disentangle my desire to be the best in the world from my story. And looking back at my constellation of results — I don’t always come out on top. It’s not winning, winning, winning. There were a lot of bumps in the road, even after I thought I had figured it all out. There will be further bumps, too.
But I think to think that anyone can win, win, and win in Pokémon is disingenuous, to an extent. We love to compare Pokémon to chess and to poker, but the truth is that both of those games are stable. The rules of chess haven’t changed in years, and probably won’t ever (until they release Chess 2). Although the opponents in poker change, the odds and mechanics never do. The rules of VGC change every year (or every couple of months, now), which means that you have to unlearn and then relearn everything. The closer you look at Pokémon, the further away it can be.
When I look back at my results and my friends’ results, I think that I thought at first that there was something that I was missing that my friends weren’t. I had to unlearn that before I could make progress as a person and as a player. Comparing yourself to other people in this game is a trap. At the end of the day, we’re all at the mercy of what we’ve learned and what we haven’t, and dice rolls litter our summers like mines. It’s always someone’s day. All you can do is celebrate the successes of the people close to you and treat them like your own, take opportunity for success and roll with it, and keep trying.
I have to keep going.
I have to try to make the next day mine. Another quarter into the machine.
I’m Aaron Traylor. And I will be your next World Champion.
Thank you to my family and all of my friends who have supported me. I love you more than you know.
