GK PokeMom here to talk about the Pokemon National Championships held at Americas Center in St. Louis on June 28th & 29th.
For those unaware, Game Kastle hosts an awesome Pokemon League every Sunday from 12:00-3:30. Among these league players we have a big group of us that travel the country playing in high level tournaments for prizes and college scholarships. We call ourselves Team Invasion and have been together for around 8 years. We have played in many cities in California including, but not limited to Berkley, Long Beach, San Diego, Los Angeles and Anaheim, We have also played in Washington state, Ohio(several times), Florida(twice), New Jersey, Hawaii and most recently in St Louis Missouri for this years’ National Championship and Pokemon Professor Cup.
Let us first talk about the Professor Cup and then move on to the National Championships. A Pokemon Professor is someone who is very knowledgeable in the game and helps to pass/teach this knowledge to others. They must pass a very hard test that includes game play rules, tournament policies and judging policies. As a professor, you can earn points by helping in the pokemon community by judging events and being a league leader at a local league. The points earn you professor items such as unique sleeves, deck boxes, t shirts, binders, promo cards and much more. To qualify to play in the Professor Cup, one must be a professor in good standing and have earned 75 or more points for that tournament season. The professors in Team Invasion who played in The Cup this year were Ali Weichler, Lianne Styron, Barbara Vaughan, Chris Silver and myself. The format was Solomon draft, meaning you draft cards with one other person and build decks from your card pool. I knew what kind of deck I wanted to play because I had done a practice draft with Chris a few days before we left for St Louis and it did pretty good. Alas, I did not draw the cards I wanted so I was stuck with something that did not do that great. In the end, Chris did the best of us by winning his way into the top 16 winning a Nintendo DS game system, but he was knocked out at that point. But all is well because we each got a unique set of Pokemon Professor card sleeves and we all had a great time!
Now on to the Pokemon National Championships!! The Nationals is an open tournament meaning anyone can play. One must have a modified legal deck in order to play. The prizes are awarded in three age groups. The groups are Masters Division (born in 1993 or earlier), Senior Division (born in 1994, 1995, 1996, or 1997) and Junior Division (born in 1993 or earlier). The prizes on the line include a $5,000, a $3,000 and two $1,500 scholarships plus lots of neat Pokemon stuff. And this is in all 3 divisions for approximately $33,000 in scholarship money!!!!! Needless to say, the players had to do their best for a chance at those prizes!!
This years Nationals was the biggest ever Pokemon Tournament in the world with just over 1,200 players!! Almost 700 of them were in the masters division. The Team Invasion members that came to play were Ali Weichler(MA),
Lianne Styron(MA), Chris Silver(MA), Reed W.(MA, former 2nd place world champion), Kyle S.(MA), Daniel C.(MA, former national champion), He Who Shall Not Be Named(MA, former 3rd place national champion), Murat G.(MA, multiple Regionals winner), Eric W.(SNR) and Jason C,(SNR). This is the first time that Team Invasion has not had a Junior in the tournament. Christine V.(SNR) came to play in the video game championships and so could not play the TCG tournament. Barbara Vaughan came to volunteer staff at the video tournament and so could not play in the tournament and I went to staff at the TCG tournament so I could not play either. The Nationals is a 2 day tournament with day one going well into the night. All of our players did well but only 2 of them made it into the Top 64 cut and that was Jason C(SNR) and Eric W(SNR). A couple of our other players just missed the cut off. With Jason and Eric making top cut, they had to return to play day 2 but the rest of the crew got to hang around and cheer them on!! Unfortunately Jason got knocked out in Top 32 and Eric made it to Top 16 before getting cut. They both did really well.
All in all, we had a great time and look forward to doing it again this August in San Diego for the Pokemon World Championships!! Watch for the report!!
~~Susan aka GK PokeMom