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As I may have mentioned before, I have two sons who are active Pokémon players. The older son has had a goal since last August of competing in the Pokémon World Championships. The younger son just loves playing and wasn’t all that interested in competing. Then the “tournament season” started, first with local League Challenges. The old son competed and did well. The younger son wasn’t interested.

Then came the City Championships season–an eight week stretch of about ten different tournaments–and a change in attitude from the younger son. He went to the first tournament and won first place in his division. The older got third in his (they are in different age groups). Suddenly the younger son became much more interested in competing.

It should be mentioned that to qualify for the World Championships a player needs to accumulate a certain number of points, determined by their division. The Junior division, which the younger son competes in, needed 200, the Senior division, the old son’s level, requires 250. Each level within the tournaments (League, City, State, Regional, National) raises the total number of points that can be won and, depending on how many are participating in each division, lesser points are possible for lower placement. Also, only certain number of wins for each level can be counted toward the total.

So as it was, though both of them struggled through the city tournament season, at the end the younger son was five points short of enough for an invite to Worlds, and he still hadn’t maxed out his points from League Challenges–and he usually dominates there. The older son, however, had maxed out all his points and was still ten points short. He only had a few chances left to get his points, and those would be against much stiffer competition.

His first shot was our own State Championship. Things didn’t work out so well for the older son, and he didn’t place high enough to get more points. The younger son got second place, putting him well above what he needed for his invite to Worlds. So then we took a special trip to the next state for their State Championship. Again, the older son failed to rank high enough for points. The younger son took first. We tried to console the older son as best we could, letting him know that he could still go to Worlds, just not as a competitor (after promising the older son we’d take him if he could get in we couldn’t justify NOT taking the younger son just because it hadn’t originally been his goal).

There was still one more chance for our older son, though after his struggles at the State competitions it didn’t look so good for him going into Regional Championships. But to his credit he knuckled down and really focused on fine-tuning his deck and practicing against as many different decks as he could. At our local league meetings he would even beat some of the Masters level players with increasing regularity. He was probably about as ready as he could be.

This last weekend was Regionals. The younger son was just going for the fun of it, and gave himself a modest goal of tenth place. But the pressure was on for the older son. He had six rounds to earn a spot in the top eight players–and earn points–out of fifty-four. He got off to a great start, winning four straight games to be the only undefeated player headed into the fifth round.  Then he lost round five.

In the final round he would likely need at least a tie to have a chance make the top eight. For the final pairing he was matched against someone from our local player group that he usually has no difficulty beating, but who he is friends with, and who was having her best performance in a tournament yet. If he won it would pretty much guarantee him a top-four slot, but if they tied she would have a chance to make top-eight as well. Pokémon allows for an “intentional draw”, allowing both players to take a tie if they agree. They agreed to take the draw.

As it turned out, my son got in at seventh place. His opponent/friend just missed it, coming in at ninth place.

He earned 75 points for that placement–more than enough to get him into Worlds. Both of my sons are in. The younger son, incidentally, got ninth place in his division, slightly exceeding his own goal (and getting free booster packs as prizes, which was also a plus). Both of them were the highest-placing Utah players in their division.

So it looks like the Stratton Crew is heading to San Francisco this summer for the Pokémon World Championships.

This is the play area, showing the entire turnout for all three divisions.

This is Richard in the first round. He went on to earn a 3-2-1 (3 wins, 2 losses, 1 tie) over-all

Walter had just won a round when this was taken. Table numbers indicate how well you’re doing (the very top players play at Table 1), so he was already well on his way up at this point.