At about lunchtime on a Saturday a few weeks ago I found myself temporarily top seed at a major Pokemon tournament. I had five wins and no losses under my belt. To say that this was not what I was expecting when I woke up that morning after three hours of sleep would be the understatement of the century. How did I get there? Was this really happening? When was it all going to come crashing down? Well, it didn’t. I carried on winning and got into the fabled ‘Day Two’ of the Seville Special Event in Spain. Eventually I got to the knockout stages and took 10th place of roughly nine hundred players. It still seems very strange to me to see that written down. I am not good at this game.
Perhaps I’m okay at the game; I don’t want it to look like false modesty. Perhaps, as someone said to me in a subsequent small competition, my result was ‘a bit of a statistical anomaly’. That one hurt my pride but I do think there could be something to it. The comment got me thinking about the game, about variance within it and about how I approached this tournament in particular. Why did it go so well? After the third win on Day Two and the sudden realisation that I had a small shot at winning the whole thing, it did strike me that at the very least I could drag an interesting article out of this. I was also thinking a lot about sangria and jamón ibérico.
I’ve been playing the Pokémon TCG since the Autumn of 2023, when my wife and I got hooked. We started playing in the odd Challenge (the lowest level of official competition) or Pre-Release, an event where new card sets are used in a limited format. We graduated to attending the weekly league at our local gaming bar and soon became committed regulars; battling for a spot on the leader-board spreadsheet. Over time we both started to occasionally do okay and my wife in particular began to see some success at league. She won a couple of tournaments and we both had some good placements at Cups, the next competition grade higher. We had in the meantime booked ourselves into our first Regional in Liverpool, UK. Regionals are massive 1,000+ player events with big cash prizes, Special Events are their direct equivalent in territories that don’t allow these prizes but follow the same format. All of these events carry the reward of Championship Points for good finishes, and these points go towards your invitation to the World Championships. This ‘invite’ is what the real gamers are chasing year in year out, the method of getting there is tweaked by Big Pikachu from time to time but the goal remains the same. Quality has a way of bearing out and the big players get their invites every time. Often the same names predominate in the top cuts of these big tournaments and many have managed to make the game their principal income through a mixture of sponsorship and cash prizing.
As the 2024-2025 season started last summer we decided that we were having a lot of fun, travelling to a lot of fun places in England and meeting a lot of fun people – so we were going to do more of that but we were also going to try and get some nice wins too. The plan was ‘let’s get good but let’s not get sweaty’. We gave ourselves a goal of hitting each affordable Regional in Europe and trying to do it as a little city break with our friends or as a couple. Maybe if things were going well we would hit the big one and go to the North American International Championships in New Orleans in June 2025. Well for me, things started pretty badly and got worse. I could not catch a break; I was practising at home all the time and with friends, I was reading about the metagame and I was listening to podcasts, I was going to every tournament going and working on my deck list constantly. Lille was really bad, Gdansk was quite bad, I couldn’t face Dortmund. My wife had an amazing run in Lille and beat one of the best players in the world. I went out and celebrated on her behalf and then snored all night before her Day Two, what a guy! She was relaxed and doing well, I was just starting to hate the game. I had that creeping sense of it all being ‘unfair’. It is a card game for children, Tom. Get a grip.
My mental state as far as the game goes was atrocious; as soon as things didn’t all fall perfectly for me I could feel myself ‘tunneling’. Literally a sensation of your mind narrowing and your point of focus being on the solitary (wrong) card in your hand, with no way out of it and no clever plans or strategies springing to mind. It was like this week in and week out, and the worst bit was the bargaining stage on the way home trying to figure out how it wasn’t all my fault and then veering towards doom-and-gloom self-loathing. Not a great place to be when you’re trying to enjoy a hobby as a couple. I had one tournament where I was just so annoyed at myself and how I was playing that I had to leave, it had got to that point. On the way home I was searching online about ‘tilt’, the phenomenon first identified in poker where a player is in such a state of emotional and mental confusion as a result of perceived failure that they begin to make rash decisions or costly unforced errors. I was aware of tilt already, but it didn’t seem to match what I was experiencing. (Reader, was this also tilt?)
I was feeling something closer to golfers’ ‘yips’. Another strange sporting psychological condition characterised by self-sabotage through sudden loss of fine motor skills. The thing that cracked it for me came from the most bizarre source, I’m almost embarrassed to admit it. As I searched for what was going on with me one of those terrible AI answers appeared underneath the search bar, prompting me to look at the ‘process-orientated mindset’. This was something I had not heard of. I did a bit of digging and it all seemed to just open up in front of me, I could recognise my disordered (and frankly annoying) behaviour, I could see how all I was really caring about any more was winning, or rather why I wasn’t winning. In a low-key way I had become totally obsessed with the result above anything else, let alone having a good time with my mates. I had been tracking my season progress and colour coding how tournaments had gone in traffic light-style. I could see now how opening that up and adding another bright red BAD tournament every weekend was probably not the best idea I’d had for self-improvement.
It was time for a big change. The first thing the reading I had done advised me to do was to focus on the process of gameplay before anything else; in the context of the card game this meant to work on operating an archetype proficiently. To start with I focused on getting from the start of the game to the end without making any big mistakes or taking any big risks, trying to just use my resources well and Do The Thing each Pokémon is designed to do. When this felt locked in I moved to trying to see if I could engineer one elaborate combination play each game; could I take a 4-prize turn instead of the usual 1- or 2-prizer, for example? It just started to flow from there. Each week I was adding a little private challenge to myself and doing what I could to forget about the scores or who else was in the room. I felt chattier, and had a general lightness of heart that seemed to be making me feel more relaxed. The more relaxed I felt the better I started to play. I began to really enjoy myself again and feel excited by what was happening on the table. Bit by bit the results started to improve too, cart following horse rather than what I was trying before. This improvement culminated in my wife and I reaching a Cup finals together and facing off. I conceded in gentlemanly fashion (or by way of apology for the previous 6 months). It remains the best day I have had so far in this game.
Seville was pretty good, too, though. So, how did that happen? There is a strong element of good fortune; I am not going to pretend otherwise. But a lot of it was me, too; I’m trying to learn not to be ashamed to say that. I’ve had two people so far suggest to me that it was down to ‘good match-ups and good luck’ but I think that might be a bit of sour grapes. I played 8 games on Day One, losing only one game naturally and agreeing to tie two (referred to as an ID or Intentional Draw), in order to secure enough match points to be admitted to Day Two. The games were overall quite tough and I hit a few rocky match-ups that I didn’t have much experience in. I played well without too many mistakes but I was also the beneficiary of playing an archetype that is fairly new on the scene. Some opponents were a bit unsure about what I might be doing next and overall were less aggressive than I would expect, or were targeting down the wrong threat on my board. The feeling of making Day Two was surreal; I really did not feel like I ‘deserved’ to be there but I had a lot of people convincing me on this point so I tried to just enjoy it! I decided rather than getting back to the hotel and training I would like a nice meal and a couple of beers. Seville is a beautiful and elegant city and I recommend it very highly. The people are very warm and hospitable and I could rave about the food all day.
I won all three games in Swiss pairings on the second day and then had a play-off match to secure a spot in the top cut of eight players. I lost this play-off round to Kim Pobega, currently one of the top European players and winner of last year’s Bologna Special Event. Kim is a great guy and he demolished me on the broadcast, the better player definitely took the win. It was a really intense experience being on the stream with anti-cheating white noise blaring through headphones and hot studio lights plus the crowd. I found it totally disorientating; the combination of all this and my general excitement and tiredness made me feel like I only had about 40% of my brain available right when I needed the whole thing. This shows the difference in quality between someone like me and the real players; they are so experienced and engaged that they can ignore all these distractions and focus entirely on the match. I hope if there is a next time I will be a lot more relaxed about it and can give a better account of myself.
One thing about all of this that really struck me has been how kind everyone has been; I got so much support and was able to share in the experience with my friends in a way that I hadn’t expected. My phone didn’t stop going off for hours and for the next week I had people messaging me to say well done and how happy they were for me. One misguided fool even asked me for coaching! I’m sure I will have tough times again in the future with this game including failures and frustrations but I know that fixing my mindset has been key me achieving something I can be proud of. The plan now is really to continue with the approach that has been working for the last six months and keep enjoying the game. I know I am seeing incremental improvement and I am learning all the time; watching my Seville stream match back was a brutal bit of free coaching. Seeing my mistakes in real time but with the knowledge I couldn’t stop myself was very tough, but it was a laugh all the same. I’m looking forward to finishing up this season a better player, but much more importantly a happier player – and one that isn’t such a drag to be around. Trust the process!
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