Hello Smogon users. Honestly I'm a bit surprised someone nominated me for this, as I definitely don't have the competitive resume of some of the more recent guys you've featured (BKC, Earthworm) and in general I'm a lot more open and transparent about my personal life than the majority of community members, so I think a lot of what I'll say here is stuff that's already known, but nevertheless I appreciate you guys having enough interest in me to vote for me to do this and I'll give it my best shot. Please be aware that some of the stuff I say here won't be the happiest or most wholesome, but, if you're asking about my life you're going to get the good, the bad and the ugly.
If you've ever interacted with me on Discord you already know my real name. At the time of this writing I am less than two weeks away from turning 32 and I was born all the way back in 1989 in Lowell, Massachusetts in the US. I'm an only child and my parents weren't even married a full year and divorced before I was even a year old, so for as long as I can remember my childhood was mostly spent split between both parents, with my mother having me four and a half days out of the week and my father having me on Wednesdays and then one of the weekend days overnight until the next. Without getting into too much detail in order to keep this in the realm of appropriate for Smogon, I'll simply say that my childhood was not a happy time. My father was abusive and I stopped seeing him entirely when I was 8. Right around this time my mother, who had (and still has) a plethora of behavioral issues stemming from unaddressed childhood trauma, met some loser at a bar and three weeks later we were moving an hour away to live with him. Shockingly, the guys you pick up at bars and know for three weeks aren't always the best guys to move yourself and your young son in with and indeed we soon learned that this guy was a raging cokehead who would smack both of us around. There were clearly pre-existing issues, but this put my mother completely over the edge and has taken her down the path of decades long drug and alcohol abuse. I don't feel the need to discuss any of that too much further, but, the things you go through make you who you are and if you read on you'll see how some of this stuff impacted me later in life.
Video games were a much needed escape for me back then and I've played mons since the beginning. I was in third grade when Red and Blue came out, which I sunk hundreds of hours into, and I fondly remember link cable battling other kids on the school bus. My first starter was Squirtle and I ended up naming my level 100 Blastoise DEATHWISH and I thought I was the biggest badass around. I even gave it Earthquake, Blizzard and Surf, so even back then I vaguely had the right idea (though I suspect Strength as a last move wasn't necessarily optimal). I also remember trading my Aerodactyl for a Ditto with a girl in my class because I was absolutely convinced it was the best Pokemon in the game. I guess I wasn't quite a Pokemon master back in the day... I had the cards too- First Edition, Jungle, Fossil... I had full sets of all of them! It really was a very special time to be a kid, and I adored the anime when it came out as well and watched it faithfully on Saturday mornings. Likewise, when Gold and Silver came out I was playing for hours and hours every day. In my opinion Gold and Silver are the best in-cartridge experience, but I certainly say that with bias and my nostalgia goggles very much on.
School was a mixed bag for me... Academically I was ahead of the curve and was underchallenged, but behaviorally I had some serious problems which I now know were because of how messed up my home life was. Between the fights I was frequently getting into at school and the stuff that was going on at home I took an interest in martial arts when I was 8 or 9 and, as you'll read a bit later, that's still quite prevalent in my life. The ease of the work but the difficulty with the social aspect continued throughout the entirety of my middle and high school years. I even skipped a couple grades, but it didn't change anything. Ultimately I ended up graduating when I was 16 and was set to go straight from high school to college, but alas, my life went another way...
I had started playing Magic: The Gathering right around the same time I started playing Pokemon- about 8 years old. My mother was a nail technician and didn't have anyone to babysit me so she often took me to work with her, which she was blatantly not supposed to do, and there happened to be a card shop next door. Originally I was only interested in Pokemon cards, but the cool older kids were playing Magic so of course I wanted to learn too and beat them at it. Back then, obviously, I was horrible, but by 12 or 13 I was getting good ish at a local level and by 15 or 16 I was one of the best players in New England. I won my first Pro Tour Qualifier when I was right on the cusp of 16/17 in a little town that no one has heard of called Standish, Maine (the deck I drafted in the top 8 to win the tournament) and in doing so I qualified for a Pro Tour in Geneva, Switzerland. I went to that the following February, barely 17 years old, did well for a young first timer (I started off 5-1 after my first two pods with a 3-0 and 2-1, respectively - see number 32) and ended up going all in with professional MtG. Upon returning from this Pro Tour, already with an unstable and unhappy home life and now with a taste of the kind of money I could make, I moved out of my mother's house and never looked back.
I'd spend the next half decade consumed by college, which I put minimal effort into, and playing Magic professionally. I was traveling absolutely all over the place to all the Pro Tours and Grand Prix. England, Germany, Czech Republic, France, Japan, Australia, Brazil, every major city you can name in the US... I was everywhere! My schedule sometimes would be something along the lines of California one weekend, Germany the next, back to the states to play in Florida the next weekend and then in Japan on the next. I would regularly go three, four or sometimes even five or six weeks without coming home. Initially my focus was actually playing on the Pro Tour, which you had to continuously produce results and/or maintain a really high rating in order to qualify for, but I figured out fairly early on that I could actually make just as much or more money by "money drafting"- unofficial 3v3 drafts on the side in which the teams are wagering cash (and all the cards involved in the draft) against each other- and trading. I'd regularly travel to events, including Pro Tours I was qualified for, not play and spend the weekend drafting and trading. I'd routinely make 5-7K in a weekend and on good weekends making upwards of 10K or sometimes even in the vicinity of 15K wasn't unheard of. I built up a sizeable bank account and by the time I was in my late teens/early 20s I was absolutely out of control. I had no rules or guidance, a huge ego, money to burn and childhood trauma very much fueling my anger and emotionally instability. What could go wrong? Without getting too into it I can tell you I was arrested on multiple occasions and even spent a little time in prison. Far worse though, at the time, was my mental and emotional health.
So now I'm about 20 and I'm starting to get really worn out from all the Magic travel. Don't get me wrong- I will forever be extremely appreciative from the bottom of my heart of the opportunities I was given. I got to see more places than the vast majority of us will see in a lifetime, often for free, and then make money doing it and party my butt off in whatever country I was in and find some women and get into trouble. Those are, obviously, very fond memories. However, there's a downside to everything, and the travel over time was really, really draining. Flights could sometimes be 10, 15, even 20 hours each way, and that's to say nothing of long layovers, long cab or bus rides to the hotel or the airport, airlines constantly messing up and losing your luggage or canceling your flight or having delays, hotels not having your reservation that you're certain you booked, etc. The good times- going somewhere cool for free, making 10K on the weekend, leaving with a smile and a fat pocket- were amazing. The bad times- taking a very long flight somewhere far away, not doing as well as you wanted to/getting unlucky/making little or nothing and then having to take that same long flight back, especially if you're sick or exhausted- were terrible. Ultimately I knew Magic couldn't be a "career" forever, so around this time I got an apartment and tried to settle into "normal" life, and that adjustment was very, very difficult for me.
I worked a bunch of crappy jobs that didn't last very long. I worked in the lumber department at Home Depot (and repeatedly got in trouble with my boss for winking at customers and telling them "I've got wood!"), worked as a pizza delivery driver, a nightclub bouncer and even a male "dancer". Having traveled so much and being in go go go mode for all those years, and of course being too busy doing my thing to really get to know anybody or cultivate any meaningful friendships, I found staying in one place and working ordinary jobs that I had no passion for extremely difficult. My mental and emotional health at this time was at its all time lowest point. Trying to get back to something remotely comforting, preferably something that would keep me at home and out of trouble and would keep me vaguely stimulated, one of the hobbies I decided to pick up around this time (along with Poker and this online card game none of you have ever heard of called Urban Rivals) was competitive Pokemon.
I first appeared on the competitive scene in 2011~. I had been reading the Smogon analysis of all the gen 3 mons and trying to figure out mentally, without ever having actually played a competitive game of Pokemon in my life save my childhood link cable battles, what might work. As a side note, the reason I chose gen 3 is because they're the last cartridge games I played, as I never owned any handheld systems after the Gameboy Advance. I played gen 3 a lot as a kid though, both in cartridge and in Pokemon Colosseum and whatnot. I would listen to the Nirvana Unplugged album on repeat when I was like 13 and grind out Colosseum, which I eventually beat with a Swords Dance/Endure/Flail/Shadow Ball Zangoose (with a Salac Berry, of course) that I raised myself and traded over. The first team I ever built was Metagross, Celebi, Blissey, Starmie, Swampert, Salamence. I'd been lurking and thinking about this for about six months before finally growing a pair and actually playing. I will always remember my very first competitive Pokemon battle. It was on Pokemon Online and it was a ladder battle against some random I had never heard of- his name was M Dragon! Somehow, I won! He immediately messaged me afterwards and asked me a bunch of questions, repeatedly asking me who I was/who am I an alt of, which at the time meant nothing to me and I kept insisting I'm just some new guy playing for the first time and wasn't messing with him. He made me play him six more times in a row after that initial game and he beat me in all of them. I only had that one team!
I became involved in the scene pretty quickly after that. I got involved in tournaments on Pokemon Online, became the ADV Gym Leader in their league and I was an ADV tutor for a while. I even tutored some people you may recognize back then, including Pearl and Rewer. I started out my reign as ADV Gym Leader 0-3, which made a very arrogant and hot tempered 20 year old me pretty steamy, but M Dragon gave me a team- CB Mence, Offensive SubCune, SuperBi, SuperRachi, CM OffKou, Dugtrio- that he was intending to use in SPL that week and I started spamming it in every battle and I ended up with a record of 50+ wins and 5 losses before finally losing my position. I also played that team literally every single week but one in the first POCL I played in and I went X-1 (with the 1 being an activity loss to, who else, M Dragon...) and carried my team to the championship. Needless to say my ego at this time was through the roof and I was a real jerk, even though I obviously didn't see it that way at the time, and I genuinely believed I was really, really good. I knew that Smogon existed but I thought it was just another Pokemon site, just like PO, and I had absolutely no concept of Smogon being the NBA and PO being your local high school basketball league. Obviously, I was a moron. I got my start with the whole narration thing, which is likely how many of you know me, in 2012. Pokemon Online at the time had this "Battle of the Week" thing that they uploaded onto their YouTube channel and when the ADV one came around, M Dragon vs Tamahome, they asked me to narrate it. I did, and I did a crappy job, not to mention I was doing it without a headset into my laptop's built in microphone, but nevertheless I enjoyed it so when I was asked to do it again for another ADV battle I did it once again. Soon after, I started my own YouTube channel, which I was actively uploading to, sometimes a couple dozen battles in a week, for several years.
Truly for whatever reason mons between 2014 up until 2016 ish is a real blur for me. I know I took breaks here and there, but never super long, and I don't know why I remember so little from this period. I definitely had a lot going on in my personal life, but that's nothing new. Disaster Area, the leader of Pokemon Perfect at the time, reached out to me around 2016 on YouTube and asked me to get involved with the website. I was reluctant as I hadn't heard of the site before and I was really sour about the community aspects of mons, as I felt a lot of the time it could get really heated and toxic when it simply didn't need to, but I ultimately accepted. I started helping out PP and getting back involved with the tour scene and at one point was actively playing in their tours. When I was really invested and trying to be good (even though I still wasn't) I had taken BKC to game 5 in a tournament final and then I beat him 2-0 deep in another tournament. I thought I'd stay involved in PP in this way for a long time but things unraveled pretty quickly when it became apparent that I was definitely not getting along or seeing eye to eye with Disaster Area, Lord Ninjax or GGFan who were huge voices on PP at the time. I remember quitting the site outright and stepping down from all the roles I had at the time with no intention of ever returning.
Remember that game, Urban Rivals, I mentioned earlier? I had met a female friend on there way back in 2009/10, and we'd exchanged numbers and always kept in touch and had a solid friendship, but she lived 30+ hours away in very Western Canada and we'd never actually met in person, but in November 2017 we decided it was finally time. She flew here and we spent a week together and that was that. We were in love, we wanted to get married and nothing was going to stop us. Her sister was pregnant at the time and it was important to both of them that my future wife be there for the birth of her sister's first child, so we decided she'd stay in Canada until the kid was born, which was supposed to be late February, and then on March 1st she'd come here for good and we'd get married and live happily ever after! Have you ever watched 90 Day Fiance? Immigration stuff is quick and easy! ...What a f ing joke... When she went to come here, having quit her job, given up her apartment, told her friends and family goodbye, she walked up to customs confidently with her bags packed, eager to come here and start a new life. When they asked her why she had so much stuff and why she was going to the US, she told them the truth- to get married! Friends, if you or someone you know ever find themselves in that position, I can tell you that is, in fact, not the right answer... She was denied entry into the United States, detained for hours, fingerprinted, searched and eventually sent on her way. I'd literally that day, March 1st of 2018, just moved into our new apartment in a new state that we were going to live in together. I don't have words to tell you how either of us were feeling when she called me, hysterical, and explained what had happened. We'd both given up our apartments, she'd quit her job, I'd literally spent the day moving our stuff into our new place... And then this... To say we were devastated, emotionally destroyed... There really aren't words for how awful we felt at that time. That was possibly the single worst day of my life, and it was about to get worse. We had to see each other and make this work. The way this happened was unacceptable and there had to be something we could do. So we got the brilliant idea in the heat of that moment, if she cannot fly to the US because of what happened with customs she can certainly still fly to Canada! So, she dropped 1000 dollars on a last minute flight to the airport in Canada closest to me- Montreal- and off I went at 2AM after spending the whole day moving to make the five hour drive to Montreal, pick her up and then drive her back across the border. We'd say she's just visiting and there wouldn't be any problem!
Well, there were problems. On my drive to Montreal, keeping in mind that it was super late, super cold and super dark and I was ultra exhausted, it felt like everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Huge sections of the highway were completely closed off because of construction, my GPS had no idea how to reroute me to the airport (it kept telling me to take exits that were literally barricaded off and inaccessible) and of course all the signs up there are in French, which I do not speak, so I had absolutely no clue where to go or how to find the airport. What should have been a five hour drive ended up being eight or nine, but somehow I found the airport and I still managed to get there before she did. I laid down and slept on the airport floor for an hour or two before she finally landed and you've absolutely never seen two more upset, pitiful people. We decided it was best we get a hotel for the night given how upset and exhausted we both were, so that's what we did. Of course, because it's that kind of trip, she somehow lost or dropped the ticket I'd given her to hold for my car in the parking garage so we had to turn around and pay for an entire day even though I'd only been there maybe two and a half hours. We were going to drive back to the states the next day but as we quickly found out upon getting in the car I'd apparently punctured one of my tires with a road nail because of all the construction I'd driven through on the drive up so we hunkered down for yet another night. Finally the next day we got the tire repaired and headed back to the states. Certainly the worst was behind us, right? They immediately knew upon trying to drive through the border that she'd been turned around in customs and denied entry into the states a couple days prior, and, obviously, they were ultra suspicious. We were asked to pull the car over, get out, go inside and then we were separated for hours and questioned. At one point I had to be held back by multiple border officers with how upset I was about them trying to separate us and not knowing if or when I'd see her again or what was going to happen. Ultimately we were only there for two or three hours, but it felt like an eternity, and the border officer, even though I was absolutely furious and wanted to fight him at the time, actually did us a solid- they gave her a stamp in her passport that allowed her to stay in the states for seven days, meaning we'd at very least get to spend some time together and not have to part ways immediately, with the huge caveat of she must return to Canada after those seven days or she'd be deported and barred from returning to the states for any reason for ten years! This was obviously not what we were hoping for and we were both as upset as either of us are ever going to be when we finally drove towards home, to the brand new apartment I'd rented for us that we both knew she could not stay in...
Nearing the end of that trip, on March 8th, 2018 we got married. It was a simple courthouse wedding with zero guests, but that didn't matter to us. We were husband and wife and that meant everything to us. We were going to go through this process the right way and be together, period, no matter how long it took. Needless to say, driving her to the airport to say goodbye to her just two days after I married her was the absolute worst feeling I could possibly imagine. I cried, I puked and I even got into a car accident as I was leaving the airport to head back home because why wouldn't I... The ultra abridged version of the next couple years is it ultimately took nearly two full years and 10,000 dollars to go through the immigration process and get her here, and we saw each other only twice a year for one week at a time during that time period, and it was the most miserable, hopeless, depressing time of my life. We'd talk every single night for hours. I wracked up countless noise complaints at the new apartment because it'd be late at night and I'd prop my cellphone up looking at the TV, crank the volume to some absurd number like 80 or 90 so she could actually hear it and in this way we'd watch movies or anime together. It was absolutely pathetic, but it was what we had.
Taking all this back to Pokemon I just want to note that everything I said in the previous three paragraphs was happening during the time when I infamously quit on the Tigers after a really crappy 1-4 start as a player and being benched. The way I handled that situation was absolutely not right and it's my single biggest regret of my entire Pokemon career. I've since reached out and apologized to nearly all of my teammates from back then, and I've developed legitimate friendships with several of them, and while nothing excuses my behavior then, I do want people to understand what was going on for me during that time and why I did what I did. I was absolutely not in the right headspace to play SPL at all at that time, I shouldn't have signed up at all I definitely, definitely, definitely should have handled things differently. I was a real A hole in that situation and I sincerely regret it, and I want everyone familiar with that situation to know that. With what was going on in my personal life and how miserable and emotionally gutted I was, when I got benched my ego and my emotions really couldn't handle it. I've grown leaps and bounds since then, but it's something I did and I'm not going to hide from it.
So if you've read to this point, which very few people will have, where does that leave me today, both in Pokemon and in life? In Pokemon I've been steadily involved again for two and a half years or something close to that, I've managed and won several team tours, including back to back ROAPLs the past two years and some smaller tours such as POCL, I have been actively rebuilding my YouTube channel (which I completely deleted- literally thousands of videos- when I quit mons during the Tigers incident) and my Discord community (both of which continue to grow and thrive) and, ironically, I've become the leader of Pokemon Perfect! I've been in charge over there for about two years and I've tried to refocus the site on old gens, which I feel were sorely neglected on Smogon for many years (though RoA has gotten much, much better in recent times) and our community, while certainly small and zero threat to Smogon, seems to enjoy what we do. As a player I play very few tours- as a 32 year old man I really, truly just don't have the time, and I hate hate hate scheduling because people are total jerkoffs about it and seldom show up on time- but I ladder from time to time and have something in the vicinity of 40+ 1500+ accounts. I managed Tigers in SPL last year, which I'm very proud of, and while there was certainly more drama and controversy than I would have liked, and while we didn't finish as well as I would have liked, I feel largely very positive about the whole experience and I really hope I get another chance to manage again this year as I feel I learned a lot from my first go-around and can do very well this time. We'll see if they let me... Finally, the thing I'm most proud of in over a decade of involvement in the competitive Pokemon scene is definitely my CALLOUS Invitational tournament and the various other cash-paying tours I've been involved in. CALLOUS Invitational is a tournament I started five years ago and it's exactly what it sounds like- an ADV tournament, hosted by me, invitation only, that pays real money to the top three finishers. In the first two years of this tournament the prize pools were exactly 500 dollars each time, the full amount of which came out of my own pocket. These days, the tournament has grown to something truly special. Our prize pool this year, our fifth year, is almost 2000 dollars at the time of this writing and I receive countless messages from participants and spectators alike that they believe CALLOUS Invitational is the best and their favorite tournament in all of competitive Pokemon. It's a huge spectacle, people look forward to it every year and I'm wildly proud of what it's become. I'm also wildly proud of the reputation and trust I've earned over the past few years of being involved in all these money tours, having held literally thousands of dollars of other people's money and never once not paying anybody or pulling any shady business. I'm very much a man of integrity and I hope that's known throughout the community.
In life, things are going better than they ever have. My wife and I have been happily married for three and a half years, she's physically permanently been here for almost two and we're still very much in love. If anything, our experience made us even closer and more bonded and I really, really doubt we'll ever get divorced. Professionally I now own my own business- a small martial arts instruction studio- where I teach kickboxing and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I have a huge video game and anime collection- hundreds and hundreds of each, all physical- and I thoroughly enjoy both hobbies though I certainly wish I had more time for them. I haven't played Magic remotely seriously or regularly for a long time, but I've still got the skills! I got dragged to a team tournament eight years ago after not playing for years and I went 10-0 on the first day. Hell, our team was even in one of the feature matches and the commentator still knew me and knew my reputation for going to all the tours and drafting and trading on the side. Then a year and a half ago I got dragged to another team tournament and I went 8-0 on the first day and carried our team to an $1800 finish! My life these days is mostly working, hanging out with my wife, rinse, repeat and I'm very happy with that. I'm in the best place mentally and emotionally I've ever been and I'm really proud of the mature, decent guy I've become and how far removed from the out of control, ultra arrogant, ready to brawl with the next guy who looks at me the wrong way craphead I was all those years ago. Hopefully I've contributed positively to the Pokemon community with the countless hours hosting tours, creating videos, etc I've put in- I've certainly made a very conscious effort to do that and it very much eats into my already ultra-limited free time.
If you've read this far, which no one did, I guess that's my life in a nutshell. I'm happy to answer any respectful, appropriate questions you may have (that's the whole point of this thing, right?). Thanks for reading and I guess while you're here please consider checking out my YouTube channel! ;)
Love,
CALLOUS
If you've ever interacted with me on Discord you already know my real name. At the time of this writing I am less than two weeks away from turning 32 and I was born all the way back in 1989 in Lowell, Massachusetts in the US. I'm an only child and my parents weren't even married a full year and divorced before I was even a year old, so for as long as I can remember my childhood was mostly spent split between both parents, with my mother having me four and a half days out of the week and my father having me on Wednesdays and then one of the weekend days overnight until the next. Without getting into too much detail in order to keep this in the realm of appropriate for Smogon, I'll simply say that my childhood was not a happy time. My father was abusive and I stopped seeing him entirely when I was 8. Right around this time my mother, who had (and still has) a plethora of behavioral issues stemming from unaddressed childhood trauma, met some loser at a bar and three weeks later we were moving an hour away to live with him. Shockingly, the guys you pick up at bars and know for three weeks aren't always the best guys to move yourself and your young son in with and indeed we soon learned that this guy was a raging cokehead who would smack both of us around. There were clearly pre-existing issues, but this put my mother completely over the edge and has taken her down the path of decades long drug and alcohol abuse. I don't feel the need to discuss any of that too much further, but, the things you go through make you who you are and if you read on you'll see how some of this stuff impacted me later in life.
Video games were a much needed escape for me back then and I've played mons since the beginning. I was in third grade when Red and Blue came out, which I sunk hundreds of hours into, and I fondly remember link cable battling other kids on the school bus. My first starter was Squirtle and I ended up naming my level 100 Blastoise DEATHWISH and I thought I was the biggest badass around. I even gave it Earthquake, Blizzard and Surf, so even back then I vaguely had the right idea (though I suspect Strength as a last move wasn't necessarily optimal). I also remember trading my Aerodactyl for a Ditto with a girl in my class because I was absolutely convinced it was the best Pokemon in the game. I guess I wasn't quite a Pokemon master back in the day... I had the cards too- First Edition, Jungle, Fossil... I had full sets of all of them! It really was a very special time to be a kid, and I adored the anime when it came out as well and watched it faithfully on Saturday mornings. Likewise, when Gold and Silver came out I was playing for hours and hours every day. In my opinion Gold and Silver are the best in-cartridge experience, but I certainly say that with bias and my nostalgia goggles very much on.
School was a mixed bag for me... Academically I was ahead of the curve and was underchallenged, but behaviorally I had some serious problems which I now know were because of how messed up my home life was. Between the fights I was frequently getting into at school and the stuff that was going on at home I took an interest in martial arts when I was 8 or 9 and, as you'll read a bit later, that's still quite prevalent in my life. The ease of the work but the difficulty with the social aspect continued throughout the entirety of my middle and high school years. I even skipped a couple grades, but it didn't change anything. Ultimately I ended up graduating when I was 16 and was set to go straight from high school to college, but alas, my life went another way...
I had started playing Magic: The Gathering right around the same time I started playing Pokemon- about 8 years old. My mother was a nail technician and didn't have anyone to babysit me so she often took me to work with her, which she was blatantly not supposed to do, and there happened to be a card shop next door. Originally I was only interested in Pokemon cards, but the cool older kids were playing Magic so of course I wanted to learn too and beat them at it. Back then, obviously, I was horrible, but by 12 or 13 I was getting good ish at a local level and by 15 or 16 I was one of the best players in New England. I won my first Pro Tour Qualifier when I was right on the cusp of 16/17 in a little town that no one has heard of called Standish, Maine (the deck I drafted in the top 8 to win the tournament) and in doing so I qualified for a Pro Tour in Geneva, Switzerland. I went to that the following February, barely 17 years old, did well for a young first timer (I started off 5-1 after my first two pods with a 3-0 and 2-1, respectively - see number 32) and ended up going all in with professional MtG. Upon returning from this Pro Tour, already with an unstable and unhappy home life and now with a taste of the kind of money I could make, I moved out of my mother's house and never looked back.
I'd spend the next half decade consumed by college, which I put minimal effort into, and playing Magic professionally. I was traveling absolutely all over the place to all the Pro Tours and Grand Prix. England, Germany, Czech Republic, France, Japan, Australia, Brazil, every major city you can name in the US... I was everywhere! My schedule sometimes would be something along the lines of California one weekend, Germany the next, back to the states to play in Florida the next weekend and then in Japan on the next. I would regularly go three, four or sometimes even five or six weeks without coming home. Initially my focus was actually playing on the Pro Tour, which you had to continuously produce results and/or maintain a really high rating in order to qualify for, but I figured out fairly early on that I could actually make just as much or more money by "money drafting"- unofficial 3v3 drafts on the side in which the teams are wagering cash (and all the cards involved in the draft) against each other- and trading. I'd regularly travel to events, including Pro Tours I was qualified for, not play and spend the weekend drafting and trading. I'd routinely make 5-7K in a weekend and on good weekends making upwards of 10K or sometimes even in the vicinity of 15K wasn't unheard of. I built up a sizeable bank account and by the time I was in my late teens/early 20s I was absolutely out of control. I had no rules or guidance, a huge ego, money to burn and childhood trauma very much fueling my anger and emotionally instability. What could go wrong? Without getting too into it I can tell you I was arrested on multiple occasions and even spent a little time in prison. Far worse though, at the time, was my mental and emotional health.
So now I'm about 20 and I'm starting to get really worn out from all the Magic travel. Don't get me wrong- I will forever be extremely appreciative from the bottom of my heart of the opportunities I was given. I got to see more places than the vast majority of us will see in a lifetime, often for free, and then make money doing it and party my butt off in whatever country I was in and find some women and get into trouble. Those are, obviously, very fond memories. However, there's a downside to everything, and the travel over time was really, really draining. Flights could sometimes be 10, 15, even 20 hours each way, and that's to say nothing of long layovers, long cab or bus rides to the hotel or the airport, airlines constantly messing up and losing your luggage or canceling your flight or having delays, hotels not having your reservation that you're certain you booked, etc. The good times- going somewhere cool for free, making 10K on the weekend, leaving with a smile and a fat pocket- were amazing. The bad times- taking a very long flight somewhere far away, not doing as well as you wanted to/getting unlucky/making little or nothing and then having to take that same long flight back, especially if you're sick or exhausted- were terrible. Ultimately I knew Magic couldn't be a "career" forever, so around this time I got an apartment and tried to settle into "normal" life, and that adjustment was very, very difficult for me.
I worked a bunch of crappy jobs that didn't last very long. I worked in the lumber department at Home Depot (and repeatedly got in trouble with my boss for winking at customers and telling them "I've got wood!"), worked as a pizza delivery driver, a nightclub bouncer and even a male "dancer". Having traveled so much and being in go go go mode for all those years, and of course being too busy doing my thing to really get to know anybody or cultivate any meaningful friendships, I found staying in one place and working ordinary jobs that I had no passion for extremely difficult. My mental and emotional health at this time was at its all time lowest point. Trying to get back to something remotely comforting, preferably something that would keep me at home and out of trouble and would keep me vaguely stimulated, one of the hobbies I decided to pick up around this time (along with Poker and this online card game none of you have ever heard of called Urban Rivals) was competitive Pokemon.
I first appeared on the competitive scene in 2011~. I had been reading the Smogon analysis of all the gen 3 mons and trying to figure out mentally, without ever having actually played a competitive game of Pokemon in my life save my childhood link cable battles, what might work. As a side note, the reason I chose gen 3 is because they're the last cartridge games I played, as I never owned any handheld systems after the Gameboy Advance. I played gen 3 a lot as a kid though, both in cartridge and in Pokemon Colosseum and whatnot. I would listen to the Nirvana Unplugged album on repeat when I was like 13 and grind out Colosseum, which I eventually beat with a Swords Dance/Endure/Flail/Shadow Ball Zangoose (with a Salac Berry, of course) that I raised myself and traded over. The first team I ever built was Metagross, Celebi, Blissey, Starmie, Swampert, Salamence. I'd been lurking and thinking about this for about six months before finally growing a pair and actually playing. I will always remember my very first competitive Pokemon battle. It was on Pokemon Online and it was a ladder battle against some random I had never heard of- his name was M Dragon! Somehow, I won! He immediately messaged me afterwards and asked me a bunch of questions, repeatedly asking me who I was/who am I an alt of, which at the time meant nothing to me and I kept insisting I'm just some new guy playing for the first time and wasn't messing with him. He made me play him six more times in a row after that initial game and he beat me in all of them. I only had that one team!
I became involved in the scene pretty quickly after that. I got involved in tournaments on Pokemon Online, became the ADV Gym Leader in their league and I was an ADV tutor for a while. I even tutored some people you may recognize back then, including Pearl and Rewer. I started out my reign as ADV Gym Leader 0-3, which made a very arrogant and hot tempered 20 year old me pretty steamy, but M Dragon gave me a team- CB Mence, Offensive SubCune, SuperBi, SuperRachi, CM OffKou, Dugtrio- that he was intending to use in SPL that week and I started spamming it in every battle and I ended up with a record of 50+ wins and 5 losses before finally losing my position. I also played that team literally every single week but one in the first POCL I played in and I went X-1 (with the 1 being an activity loss to, who else, M Dragon...) and carried my team to the championship. Needless to say my ego at this time was through the roof and I was a real jerk, even though I obviously didn't see it that way at the time, and I genuinely believed I was really, really good. I knew that Smogon existed but I thought it was just another Pokemon site, just like PO, and I had absolutely no concept of Smogon being the NBA and PO being your local high school basketball league. Obviously, I was a moron. I got my start with the whole narration thing, which is likely how many of you know me, in 2012. Pokemon Online at the time had this "Battle of the Week" thing that they uploaded onto their YouTube channel and when the ADV one came around, M Dragon vs Tamahome, they asked me to narrate it. I did, and I did a crappy job, not to mention I was doing it without a headset into my laptop's built in microphone, but nevertheless I enjoyed it so when I was asked to do it again for another ADV battle I did it once again. Soon after, I started my own YouTube channel, which I was actively uploading to, sometimes a couple dozen battles in a week, for several years.
Truly for whatever reason mons between 2014 up until 2016 ish is a real blur for me. I know I took breaks here and there, but never super long, and I don't know why I remember so little from this period. I definitely had a lot going on in my personal life, but that's nothing new. Disaster Area, the leader of Pokemon Perfect at the time, reached out to me around 2016 on YouTube and asked me to get involved with the website. I was reluctant as I hadn't heard of the site before and I was really sour about the community aspects of mons, as I felt a lot of the time it could get really heated and toxic when it simply didn't need to, but I ultimately accepted. I started helping out PP and getting back involved with the tour scene and at one point was actively playing in their tours. When I was really invested and trying to be good (even though I still wasn't) I had taken BKC to game 5 in a tournament final and then I beat him 2-0 deep in another tournament. I thought I'd stay involved in PP in this way for a long time but things unraveled pretty quickly when it became apparent that I was definitely not getting along or seeing eye to eye with Disaster Area, Lord Ninjax or GGFan who were huge voices on PP at the time. I remember quitting the site outright and stepping down from all the roles I had at the time with no intention of ever returning.
Remember that game, Urban Rivals, I mentioned earlier? I had met a female friend on there way back in 2009/10, and we'd exchanged numbers and always kept in touch and had a solid friendship, but she lived 30+ hours away in very Western Canada and we'd never actually met in person, but in November 2017 we decided it was finally time. She flew here and we spent a week together and that was that. We were in love, we wanted to get married and nothing was going to stop us. Her sister was pregnant at the time and it was important to both of them that my future wife be there for the birth of her sister's first child, so we decided she'd stay in Canada until the kid was born, which was supposed to be late February, and then on March 1st she'd come here for good and we'd get married and live happily ever after! Have you ever watched 90 Day Fiance? Immigration stuff is quick and easy! ...What a f ing joke... When she went to come here, having quit her job, given up her apartment, told her friends and family goodbye, she walked up to customs confidently with her bags packed, eager to come here and start a new life. When they asked her why she had so much stuff and why she was going to the US, she told them the truth- to get married! Friends, if you or someone you know ever find themselves in that position, I can tell you that is, in fact, not the right answer... She was denied entry into the United States, detained for hours, fingerprinted, searched and eventually sent on her way. I'd literally that day, March 1st of 2018, just moved into our new apartment in a new state that we were going to live in together. I don't have words to tell you how either of us were feeling when she called me, hysterical, and explained what had happened. We'd both given up our apartments, she'd quit her job, I'd literally spent the day moving our stuff into our new place... And then this... To say we were devastated, emotionally destroyed... There really aren't words for how awful we felt at that time. That was possibly the single worst day of my life, and it was about to get worse. We had to see each other and make this work. The way this happened was unacceptable and there had to be something we could do. So we got the brilliant idea in the heat of that moment, if she cannot fly to the US because of what happened with customs she can certainly still fly to Canada! So, she dropped 1000 dollars on a last minute flight to the airport in Canada closest to me- Montreal- and off I went at 2AM after spending the whole day moving to make the five hour drive to Montreal, pick her up and then drive her back across the border. We'd say she's just visiting and there wouldn't be any problem!
Well, there were problems. On my drive to Montreal, keeping in mind that it was super late, super cold and super dark and I was ultra exhausted, it felt like everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Huge sections of the highway were completely closed off because of construction, my GPS had no idea how to reroute me to the airport (it kept telling me to take exits that were literally barricaded off and inaccessible) and of course all the signs up there are in French, which I do not speak, so I had absolutely no clue where to go or how to find the airport. What should have been a five hour drive ended up being eight or nine, but somehow I found the airport and I still managed to get there before she did. I laid down and slept on the airport floor for an hour or two before she finally landed and you've absolutely never seen two more upset, pitiful people. We decided it was best we get a hotel for the night given how upset and exhausted we both were, so that's what we did. Of course, because it's that kind of trip, she somehow lost or dropped the ticket I'd given her to hold for my car in the parking garage so we had to turn around and pay for an entire day even though I'd only been there maybe two and a half hours. We were going to drive back to the states the next day but as we quickly found out upon getting in the car I'd apparently punctured one of my tires with a road nail because of all the construction I'd driven through on the drive up so we hunkered down for yet another night. Finally the next day we got the tire repaired and headed back to the states. Certainly the worst was behind us, right? They immediately knew upon trying to drive through the border that she'd been turned around in customs and denied entry into the states a couple days prior, and, obviously, they were ultra suspicious. We were asked to pull the car over, get out, go inside and then we were separated for hours and questioned. At one point I had to be held back by multiple border officers with how upset I was about them trying to separate us and not knowing if or when I'd see her again or what was going to happen. Ultimately we were only there for two or three hours, but it felt like an eternity, and the border officer, even though I was absolutely furious and wanted to fight him at the time, actually did us a solid- they gave her a stamp in her passport that allowed her to stay in the states for seven days, meaning we'd at very least get to spend some time together and not have to part ways immediately, with the huge caveat of she must return to Canada after those seven days or she'd be deported and barred from returning to the states for any reason for ten years! This was obviously not what we were hoping for and we were both as upset as either of us are ever going to be when we finally drove towards home, to the brand new apartment I'd rented for us that we both knew she could not stay in...
Nearing the end of that trip, on March 8th, 2018 we got married. It was a simple courthouse wedding with zero guests, but that didn't matter to us. We were husband and wife and that meant everything to us. We were going to go through this process the right way and be together, period, no matter how long it took. Needless to say, driving her to the airport to say goodbye to her just two days after I married her was the absolute worst feeling I could possibly imagine. I cried, I puked and I even got into a car accident as I was leaving the airport to head back home because why wouldn't I... The ultra abridged version of the next couple years is it ultimately took nearly two full years and 10,000 dollars to go through the immigration process and get her here, and we saw each other only twice a year for one week at a time during that time period, and it was the most miserable, hopeless, depressing time of my life. We'd talk every single night for hours. I wracked up countless noise complaints at the new apartment because it'd be late at night and I'd prop my cellphone up looking at the TV, crank the volume to some absurd number like 80 or 90 so she could actually hear it and in this way we'd watch movies or anime together. It was absolutely pathetic, but it was what we had.
Taking all this back to Pokemon I just want to note that everything I said in the previous three paragraphs was happening during the time when I infamously quit on the Tigers after a really crappy 1-4 start as a player and being benched. The way I handled that situation was absolutely not right and it's my single biggest regret of my entire Pokemon career. I've since reached out and apologized to nearly all of my teammates from back then, and I've developed legitimate friendships with several of them, and while nothing excuses my behavior then, I do want people to understand what was going on for me during that time and why I did what I did. I was absolutely not in the right headspace to play SPL at all at that time, I shouldn't have signed up at all I definitely, definitely, definitely should have handled things differently. I was a real A hole in that situation and I sincerely regret it, and I want everyone familiar with that situation to know that. With what was going on in my personal life and how miserable and emotionally gutted I was, when I got benched my ego and my emotions really couldn't handle it. I've grown leaps and bounds since then, but it's something I did and I'm not going to hide from it.
So if you've read to this point, which very few people will have, where does that leave me today, both in Pokemon and in life? In Pokemon I've been steadily involved again for two and a half years or something close to that, I've managed and won several team tours, including back to back ROAPLs the past two years and some smaller tours such as POCL, I have been actively rebuilding my YouTube channel (which I completely deleted- literally thousands of videos- when I quit mons during the Tigers incident) and my Discord community (both of which continue to grow and thrive) and, ironically, I've become the leader of Pokemon Perfect! I've been in charge over there for about two years and I've tried to refocus the site on old gens, which I feel were sorely neglected on Smogon for many years (though RoA has gotten much, much better in recent times) and our community, while certainly small and zero threat to Smogon, seems to enjoy what we do. As a player I play very few tours- as a 32 year old man I really, truly just don't have the time, and I hate hate hate scheduling because people are total jerkoffs about it and seldom show up on time- but I ladder from time to time and have something in the vicinity of 40+ 1500+ accounts. I managed Tigers in SPL last year, which I'm very proud of, and while there was certainly more drama and controversy than I would have liked, and while we didn't finish as well as I would have liked, I feel largely very positive about the whole experience and I really hope I get another chance to manage again this year as I feel I learned a lot from my first go-around and can do very well this time. We'll see if they let me... Finally, the thing I'm most proud of in over a decade of involvement in the competitive Pokemon scene is definitely my CALLOUS Invitational tournament and the various other cash-paying tours I've been involved in. CALLOUS Invitational is a tournament I started five years ago and it's exactly what it sounds like- an ADV tournament, hosted by me, invitation only, that pays real money to the top three finishers. In the first two years of this tournament the prize pools were exactly 500 dollars each time, the full amount of which came out of my own pocket. These days, the tournament has grown to something truly special. Our prize pool this year, our fifth year, is almost 2000 dollars at the time of this writing and I receive countless messages from participants and spectators alike that they believe CALLOUS Invitational is the best and their favorite tournament in all of competitive Pokemon. It's a huge spectacle, people look forward to it every year and I'm wildly proud of what it's become. I'm also wildly proud of the reputation and trust I've earned over the past few years of being involved in all these money tours, having held literally thousands of dollars of other people's money and never once not paying anybody or pulling any shady business. I'm very much a man of integrity and I hope that's known throughout the community.
In life, things are going better than they ever have. My wife and I have been happily married for three and a half years, she's physically permanently been here for almost two and we're still very much in love. If anything, our experience made us even closer and more bonded and I really, really doubt we'll ever get divorced. Professionally I now own my own business- a small martial arts instruction studio- where I teach kickboxing and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I have a huge video game and anime collection- hundreds and hundreds of each, all physical- and I thoroughly enjoy both hobbies though I certainly wish I had more time for them. I haven't played Magic remotely seriously or regularly for a long time, but I've still got the skills! I got dragged to a team tournament eight years ago after not playing for years and I went 10-0 on the first day. Hell, our team was even in one of the feature matches and the commentator still knew me and knew my reputation for going to all the tours and drafting and trading on the side. Then a year and a half ago I got dragged to another team tournament and I went 8-0 on the first day and carried our team to an $1800 finish! My life these days is mostly working, hanging out with my wife, rinse, repeat and I'm very happy with that. I'm in the best place mentally and emotionally I've ever been and I'm really proud of the mature, decent guy I've become and how far removed from the out of control, ultra arrogant, ready to brawl with the next guy who looks at me the wrong way craphead I was all those years ago. Hopefully I've contributed positively to the Pokemon community with the countless hours hosting tours, creating videos, etc I've put in- I've certainly made a very conscious effort to do that and it very much eats into my already ultra-limited free time.
If you've read this far, which no one did, I guess that's my life in a nutshell. I'm happy to answer any respectful, appropriate questions you may have (that's the whole point of this thing, right?). Thanks for reading and I guess while you're here please consider checking out my YouTube channel! ;)
Love,
CALLOUS