The Pokemon Travelogue: Our 1st World Championship

In the interim between the end of the regular season and gearing up for the World Championships, we’ve been going back to the beginning of how we became afflicted with the Pokemon fever. Last month, we rocked the Origin Story…which ended with Nate qualifying for the World Championship in the flukiest manner possible, but no matter - if you qualify for a World Championship, you go and compete in the World Championship ¹ .

Introduction to a third tier city

In the early 2010s, Pokemon world championships were always hosted in vacation locales in the US - usually in Hawaii, Florida, or California. Toward the end of the decade, they began to branch out a little bit more, going to some touristy if less tropical American cities as well as - for some inexplicable reason - Nashville, Tennessee.

After 2 years with no world championship due to Covid, 2022 marked the first ever World Championship outside of the US in London, England.

But I’ve covered this before - it was the same venue, we stayed at the same hotel. There’s not a lot more to say, except to call out the fact that just as the European International Championship is bigger than a regional championship, the World Championship is bigger than the European International Championship. Pokemon goes all out for their World Championship. That doesn’t really mean much with regard to the host city itself, except for the way that Pokemon integrates that city’s identity into the branding. In this case, we got Tower Guard Pikachu as the tournament’s plushy, and there was some pretty cool punk rock posters featuring Pokemon.

Oh, also this:

How we’re rolling

Back in the day before we got so serious that we’d do things like book a plane ticket at the last minute because the German rail system went on strike, the deal was “we’ll go to anything that’s within 4 hours on train.” For London, that means we got to go through the Chunnel! No matter how many times I make that same voyage, I still can’t get over what a feat of engineering it is.

London also presents an easy example for demonstrating this idea that has become increasingly common in the EU: anywhere that you can reach within 4 hours on train, you just shouldn’t fly. On the face of it, Amsterdam to London is a 1 hour flight. Adding on 3 hours seems like a huge loss for the traveler, but that’s only true if you don’t factor in all of the other transaction costs:

• In all likelihood, you don’t live right next to the airport - so there’s the first bit of transaction cost, because on the other hand if you live somewhere with a good rail service, you very likely are close to the train station. Let’s say it takes you 15 minute to get to the train versus 45 minutes to get to the airport, because airports are almost always out in the middle of nowhere.
• You have to go through a security check for a flight that is thorough enough that a line will very likely build up, so you need to build in enough time that you can get through the line. Plus, there’s the very real possibility that security will flag something in your carry-on. At that point, you’re going to be further delayed. Even on a train going out of the EU and into the UK, the security is trivial - you just walk through the metal detector. It takes 2 minutes versus like 15? The truth is that even though it probably takes you 15, you plan in some padding just in case.
• When does the travel provider advise you to be at your point of departure? If it’s a flight, they’ll say 2-3 hours. If it’s a train, they’ll say 45 minutes.
• Once you arrive, let’s hope you didn’t have to check baggage because if you did, not only did you have to get to the departing airport earlier, but now you also have to wait for your baggage to arrive. Conservatively, let’s say it takes 20 minutes. Now, you might spend some of that on an immigration line, so the amount of time actually at the conveyor belt might be shorter. It doesn’t matter: on the train you’ve kept your baggage with you the whole time and you passed immigration when you boarded.
• Finally, as mentioned - most airports are out in the middle of nowhere, so you’ve arrived but you’re probably not actually where you need to be yet so add in another 45 minutes to get into the city proper. Most central train stations got the word central in their name because they are, indeed, central - that is to say, right in the center of the city. You might need to get on another train to get to your actual final destination, but again we’re looking at maybe a matter of 15 minutes?

It doesn’t necessarily fully equalize out ², but the actual difference in time commitment between train & plane becomes negligible. The comfort level on the train though is inarguably much higher.

The real issue is cost. The train is almost always more expensive, but one of the main reasons for that is the environmental externality that airlines avoid; if they had to account for their carbon contribution through some sort of carbon tax then the calculus would tilt back towards the railways.

What we’re eating

These days, I’m a grizzled veteran of the circuit who has a routine for every tournament weekend:

• take the kids out to dinner on Friday night
• stop in the grocery store to pick up food to pack lunch & snacks for Saturday (usually to supplement the gluten free things you brought along with you because you don’t trust some cities to have gluten free options)
• stay somewhere with a breakfast buffet
• get takeout on Saturday night
• repeat on Sunday, except instead of takeout for dinner grab something at the train station/airport.

But in August of 2022, I was naive and believed that a thing that was totally feasible and made sense was to plan to meet up with my friends for dinner on Saturday night. So it was that I dragged two exhausted, irritable kids from Canary Wharf to Covent Garden at 7pm to go to one of those outdoor food truck gatherings that was an additional 15 minute walk from the train station.

I would say something like “live and learn” except, did I make the exact same mistake on an even grander scale when we were back in London 9 months later? I sure did, resulting in me showing up an hour late for a dinner I had arranged for a dozen people and leaving after only an hour as Tommy started to fall asleep at the table. So, live and live some more and then learn? Is that a thing?

What we’re playing

The only thing that really matters here is that Nate was playing the video game, and I am utterly indifferent to the video game. For that matter, so was Nate. In the 4 months between qualifying and competing, he spent a number of hours not indistinguishable from zero on training for this event.

How we did

You might remember that for the 2018 Winter Olympics, an American-born skier figured out that she could qualify for the Hungarian team despite possessing nothing even close to elite skiing prowess…and her performance was totally on brand.

This was a little bit better than that.

But let’s be honest: we were here for the vibes. So, to the question: did Nate win anything? Yes. Nate won the first game of his first best of 3 match...before losing the next 2 and also losing every subsequent match. This was an improvement over his European Championship performance. But that’s really about it.

If, on the other hand, the question is, “Were the kids’ minds blown?” The answer to that is an emphatic, definitive yes. Despite not even competing, Tommy declared the Pokemon World Championships, “Probably the best 3 days of my life.” ³ The highlight of the whole experience may have been when we popped into a grocery store to pick up some snacks and ran into none other than VGC World Champion and YouTube streaming sensation Wolfe Glick…which rendered the kids speechless.

The real “how we did” then was that by the end of this trip, Pokemon was permanently transformed from a casual interest into a hardcore hobby. And as of this writing, it seems like we’re never going back.

Next month…it’s the 2024 World Championship in Honolulu, Hawaii! So there’s at least 1 more installment in this series…