I'm not sure how many of you know me; I've been more or less absent from the Pokemon community since JAA 2006, I never really got into fourth gen for a number of reasons. For those who might have seen me at the event, I was wearing khaki shorts and a maroon shirt with team number 42 on the back.
My classes ended last week, and six days ago, my friend Metabou told me that he was going to SF for a Pokemon tournament on Saturday. It sounded like a fun way to spend a Saturday, so I decided to tag along with Metabou and Deagle (both friends of mine who also happen to be brothers). With the help of Amazon's 2-day shipping, my sister's stylish pink DS, a loaner team kindly provided by Metabou, and around 20 practice battles on Netbattle, I was able to prep for the event and reach a level that was evidently somewhat competitive.
Metabou ended up getting knocked out in the third round (I think) by a series of unfortunate events, which included Fissure taking out half of his team, and an untimely missed Draco Meteor. I ended up playing the same guy next round. One of his leads was a Blissey that basically sat around doing nothing while I worked my way through the rest of his team. He was using Minimize and spamming Counter but I managed to take him out in a reasonable amount of time (in the end he only got one Softboiled off).
29 people made it to the lounge and I was one of the lucky three people who got a bye (and automatic seed to the top 16), though I did win my next match which made me feel better about cheesing my way to the top 16. However, I didn't make it past the top 8; I lost to a kid named Eric who was eliminated by the guy who lost to Duy in the final round.
The two semi-final matches were: Deagle vs Duy, Eric (guy who beat me) vs Guy who lost to Duy. Deagle vs Duy was the one shown on the screen.
Even though I got an invite, I won't be attending the nationals in Indianapolis both due to the cost involved and a number of academic responsibilities I have during that week. Had I made top 4, I probably would have found a way to attend, but not making top 4 made the decision to not attend a fairly easy one.
I didn't really get to meet up with a lot of Smogoners (it seems like there are a lot of new faces who I probably wouldn't know anyway), though I did speak briefly with Batpig (who also made the top 16). I did get to meet a lot of really cool people from outside the Smogon community and the four hours I spent waiting in line was one of the best parts of the day. Today I learned that the PokeWalker accessory can interface with other PokeWalkers for a mystery-gift type thing, and after a certain point, interfacing starts giving you watts instead of items. There were several people who walked up and down the entire line of 400+ people who racked up an insane number of watts.
By calculations, there were ~464 participants (the lounge was 29 people and there were 4 elimination rounds leading up to that point), which isn't that close to capacity (which I believe was over 700).
Based on what I had been told by Metabou and Deagle, I had expected to see a lot of Hitmontop/Kyogre copycat leads, but surprisingly I saw Hitmontop only once the entire tournament. I did see a lot of Kyogre, which started on the bench at least as often as it appeared as a lead. Palkia was also somewhat common, and seen as a lead more often than Kyogre. Most of the teams that I saw using Abomasnow also used Kyogre. I think the single most-common Pokemon I saw was Giratina. Giratina has has great typing and it's quite splashable as well, it seems to be the go-to slot filler for teams that have a vacant spot.