I got super into Pokemon as a child. I watched the show, I played the games, I collected the cards, I read and reread a book detailing the moves, types, evolutions, and personalities of the original 151 until it literally fell apart, pages with Primeape and Sandslash and Ditto tumbling onto the ground wherever you tried to open the covers.
A few years ago while strolling through YouTube, I discovered there are videos of people playing the very games I used to play under ridiculous self-imposed conditions and, more germane to the purpose of this article, battling each other in different competitive formats. My Pokemon obsession came back in full swing.
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Now, playing Pokemon casually is a fun, kid-friendly experience about exploration, discovery, experimentation, and forming a team of your favorite monsters. Playing Pokemon competitively is a savage, zero-sum mash-up of chess, rock paper scissors, and dice with all the chill of an artillery barrage and the friendly, welcoming feeling of getting mugged on your first day in a new city.
My deep dive has taught me that winning a game of Pokemon requires four things; preparation, skill, reads, and luck.
Preparation: Before you can play, you need a team, usually of six mons. Players will look at a list of the three percent of available Pokemon that are actually viable and try to choose six that work well together. Picachu? Hah! More like modest, zero attack iv Zapdos with just enough investment to outspeed choice-scarf Cinderace under tailwind. For added fun, you also have to choose each Pokemon’s moveset and item.
Skill: A Pokemon battle is over when all the mons on one side are eliminated. Before the battle starts, you see their mons. They see yours. Both players begin feverishly building a plan for victory. Their Urshifu RapidStrike can kill anything on your team except for Zapdos, so you'll need to preserve Zapdos while trying to set up Roaring Moon for a dragon dance sweep and maintaining hazard control with Glimmora.
Reads: A game of Pokemon is divided into turns. Each turn, both players decide what their Pokemon will do simultaneously, lock in, and then the Pokemon move according to speed order (an article in itself). It’s like rock paper scissors, any move is only good or bad based on what the other guy ends up doing. Say you got the situation you wanted with your Zapdos out against the opposing Urshifu. Great. Now, you can go for Thunderbolt and cleanly KO Urshifu. But knowing you want to do that, they might switch out to Landorous so your t-bolt does no damage. Ok, so you could go for Air Cutter instead, still doing great damage to Urshifu and chipping Lando, but if they see that coming too they might switch to Kingambit. You could switch yourself to Gliscor, who threatens Kingambit and isn’t threatened by Lando, but if they read that they could just click surging strikes with Urshifu and murder poor Gliscor. Of course, you could also just click Tailwind and…
Luck: Hydro Pump has a twenty percent chance to miss and deal no damage. Ice Beam has a ten percent chance to freeze and cripple the defending Pokemon. Every damaging move has a one in twenty-four chance to critical hit, dealing fifty percent more damage and ignoring all stat changes that would lower its power. Sometimes luck doesn’t make that much of a difference. Sometimes one crit or miss can change the outcome of a battle. Love it or hate it, luck is a huge, unavoidable component of Pokemon.
What does this all mean? Well, it means that sometimes you’ve lost before the game’s even begun. Tired of getting owned by Fluttermane, you built a team with two normal types? But not only did your opponent not bring Fluttermane, they brought three whole fighting types? That's it. Gg. Without a miracle, it's over before turn one. Sometimes you can play out of your mind and still lose. You miss three hydro pumps in a row. Your opponent pulls the craziest read ever and nails Zapdos on the switch in. It happens.
I've watched a lot of people play this game. Most of them play the way I would, just better. They celebrate their victories. They lament their losses. They get mad when they miss or get frozen. They're happy when they get a critical hit and annoyed when the other guy gets one. Many arguments are had in chat about why my crit didn't matter but yours totally did. When facing an impossible matchup, they get frustrated. When a match isn't going well, they lose focus.
Now, that's the normal guys. But I've also watched the pros. These are the best players in the world, guys who've dedicated years to Pokemon, serious contenders at Worlds (yes, Pokemon has world championships. They're pretty lit actually.) While they're certainly not immune to human emotions, the pros all seem to approach the game differently.
A laser-focus on winning: Pros understand the importance of reads and luck and match up. They understand you can't win every game, but they can try. The match locks in, and the opponent’s team pops up. If it's a bad matchup, the pro says, “Oh, this is bad. This is super bad. How do I win this? What needs to happen for me to win?” If it's a good matchup, the pro says, “Great! We got this. Now, what has to happen for me to lose, and how do I stop it?” The battle's going badly. “Wait, I can still win!” cries the pro. “I just need him to miss Rock Slide against both Pokemon.” The battle's going well. “I can still lose,” says the pro. “What will I do if he crits?” The worse things get, the more the pro thinks about the dwindling chance of victory. The better things look, the more the pro focuses on eliminating any vestige of risk. I’ve seen them angle towards a win condition that involves a crit and multiple misses on the opponent’s end. I’ve seen them juggle Pokemon around to avoid relying on a ninety-five percent accurate move to cinch out a battle. They never get complacent. They never give up. Until they do give up, when there is no mathematical possibility of victory, and then they forfeit the match with good grace and move on.
Moving to the next battle: Every battle in Pokemon stands on its own, but over the pro’s career they’re going to play a lot of them. Some battles are going to be high-stakes championship matches. Most will be just hanging out on the ladder, trying out different Pokemon and strategies and getting a feel for the meta. A pro’s first goal in any match is to win, but their second goal is to learn. Obviously they all want to win big events, and they don’t love losing to opponents who were luckier or better prepared then they were, but the thing about big events is that they happen every year. Just because you didn’t win Worlds this time doesn’t mean you don’t still have a chance. Get mad, get depressed, give up and the game really is over and you really did lose. Treat this game as just one in a long series of matches, and you still have a chance to win eventually.
An understanding that the opponent is not the enemy: In any Pokemon battle, one player’s going to win and the other’s going to lose. That’s just how it works. Nevertheless, pros know they’re going to play a lot of games and the circle of really, really dedicated players is only so big, so they’re going to bump into each other a lot. They may compete with these people for all the big titles, but, ultimately, they understand that they have a lot more to gain by being on good terms with them. They collaborate, they work together on strategies, they talk about the meta. Pros know that even though the other guy got a crit and a flinch with Rock Slide, it doesn’t make him a bad person. Even though you didn’t prepare well enough and got six-ohed by his Fluttermane, it doesn’t make him a bad person. Even though he hard read you and knocked out your Gliscor on switch in, it doesn’t make him a bad person. Even though he’s dropping racial slurs in the chat, well, that might actually make him a bad person, but you have so little to gain by hating him that what’s the point? The pros are here to win and they’re here to learn how to win but, beneath all that, they’re here to make friends.
The funny thing here is the way my dive into the world of really serious Pokemon players has slowly been changing my outlook more generally. I know, I know. Caught me by surprise too. But, for example, it's depressingly common in life to find yourself in difficult situations with the odds stacked against you. The human tendency is to give up. The other human tendency is to just try harder until you either push through to success or collapse to the floor like the smoking cartridge to a spent bullet. The pro Pokemon player mindset, however, suggests that you evaluate your odds, do what you can to maximize your chance of success, and then move on because you understand the process is iterative. Whatever it is you're dealing with, looking for work, addiction, poor health, conflict with a loved one, whatever, you can bet you're going to be dealing with it again tomorrow or next week. You're never going to win every game every time, you're just trying to boost your win percentage as high as you can. I've found this takes the pressure off while incentivizing experimentation. Ok, yes, this is basically just growth mindset, but framing it in this way really brings it home for me.
This world is full of people with goals and motivations that run contrary to mine. My boss wants me to work weekends. My neighbor wants to leave his fifteen noisy dogs barking outside all day. My phone company wants me not to notice they're increasing my bill by fifteen percent. This idiot just cut me off in traffic. My tendency is to try to view these people in the nicest light possible, right up until they really piss me off and then I start making plans to slip cyanide into their coffee. When you start thinking of life as a game you can honestly acknowledge that these people are your opponents, but not your enemies. Opponents can be resisted, outsmarted, or defeated; but tomorrow they could also be allies. Tomorrow I might be using their strategies (People would rather pay more for a service they’re used to than shop around for a new provider? My next article will cost $97). Just like everything else, conflict iterates. Tomorrow my boss will still be my boss and my neighbor will still be my neighbor and I’ll still have to share the road, so maybe the cyanide is going too far. It’s no secret this country is in the throes of ah, what we might call a mighty dissension, and I’d just like to remind my readers that we’ll all still have to live together after our next president is announced in November. The other side isn’t going to just disappear. By all means, do what you can to get your candidate elected, the stakes are real, but do it like a pro Pokemon player would, who can tell the difference between an enemy and an opponent, and who always remembers the next game.
That’s the article! Thanks for reading! If you’re filled with passion to watch some pro Pokemon players yourself, here are some of my favorites.
https://www.youtube.com/@WolfeyVGC
https://www.youtube.com/@CybertronVGC
https://www.youtube.com/@FreezaiPokemon
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