Getting Lost and Losing – The Pokemon Regional Tournament

Only at a Pokémon tournament would the senior division be for players 13 and older. But that’s where I found myself last Saturday, at the Pokémon Heart Gold/Soul Silver regional tournament in Dallas, Texas.

Nintendo runs the tournaments in major cities around the world each year, featuring the appropriate version(s) of the game for that year, followed by nationals, and finally the world tournament in Hawaii. As with most enjoyable things in life, the closest location to Oklahoma was at the end of a four hour drive to Dallas.

My roommates and I had to leave at 6:00 a.m. and I still wasn’t done with my team, but I was excited for the trip. Last year Nintendo decided to use this randomizing system to decide who even got to compete, and I didn’t make the cut. This year they were letting everyone in. Plus, the shiny Eevee they were giving out to everyone who showed up was pretty cool.

Google Maps got us fairly close to the convention center before it pulled its usual shenanigans and tried to send us down a road that doesn’t exist. That part of Arlington (suburb of Dallas) is weird. It’s either a huge attraction like the Cowboys Stadium (complete with its 175-foot diagonal TV), Six Flags or there’s nothing at all.

We staked out our places in line and got to work polishing up our teams before we had to turn them in to event staff. For those that have never seen the official rules, here’s how roughly how they break down:

Each trainer needs their own team on their own cartridge.

2v2 battles, only four Pokémon entered per match, but you can have the full team of six.

Some Pokémon only available in events (like Mew and Darkrai) are banned from the competition, and many of the legendary Pokémon (like Lugia and Palkia) are restricted, meaning your team of six can only have two of them.

Everything above level 50 will (temporarily) have its stats scaled back to that level, but any evolutions or moves learned at higher levels are still legal.

No hax, and staff will be walking around checking people’s games at random.

Without going too deep into strategy, I was running a team of three things that explode, and one thing that’s immune to it. I hadn’t really tested it, but going into the first round I knew it would either wipe my opponent out in just a few turns or fail spectacularly, but either way it would be fast. So basically, I took the Max Powers approach.

I waited my turn in line, checking out the systems they had for the competition. I don’t know if these are some kind of dev units or just a special set up they bring out for this tournament, but I haven’t seen anything like them anywhere else. As you can see, there’s a box in the middle with two slots for DS cartridges to be inserted and cables running out to two DS lites.

I assume it’s another anti-cheating measure, but the systems also have some video out capabilities, as random matches were displayed on TVs facing the audience so they would have something to look at other that 40 people looking down at their DSs.

The actual tournament didn’t go great for me. I made it through the first round OK, but my strategy completely fell apart against my next opponent and just as soon as my competitive Pokémon career had started, it was over.

One of my roommates who was running a pretty similar team to mine was already out, so we walked over to the monitors and waited to see how the one of us who put some thought into his team would do. He made it a round further that us, but just barely lost. It turns out that someone else running almost his exact team ended up winning the entire event, but he just had more experience using it.

We made a detour to Meers, OK on the way home so we could grab one of the best burgers anywhere, so despite the long day, Google Maps doing everything in its power to get us lost in southwest Oklahoma, and general failure in the tournament, it was a great road trip.

Check out the gallery below for some more pictures from the event.