Finals Official Smogon Tournament XXI - Finals [Won by Fusien]

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Merritt

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Welcome to the finals of this year's Official Smogon Tournament! The OST is one of Smogon's longest standing traditions in tournaments and has crowned many great Pokémon players as its champions across five generations. Over the past few months, over a thousand (!) players competed to the best of their ability as they attempted to join the exclusive ranks of the OST trophy holders. Now, two remain. Only one of those players will succeed in their journey and earn the recognition that comes with their victory, along with the iconic OST trophy.

The tournament will have a best of three format. This means that players will play until one of them wins two games. Players are allowed to switch teams in between games, or use the same team throughout the set; it is completely up to the player. If players only partially complete a series before the deadline, it will be considered an uncompleted match and action will be taken accordingly (either an activity win or a coin flip).

Just like last year, there will be a cash prize for this tournament! The winner of this year's Official Smogon Tournament will receive 200 USD and the runner up will win 95 USD!

If there are any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me or a tournament director!

  • REPLAYS WILL BE REQUIRED IN YOUR WINPOST STARTING IN ROUND 2
OST Specific Rules
  • This is a standard SV OU tournament.
  • The tournament will be single elimination.
  • Players will play a best of three series of games each round
  • Matches are to be played on Pokemon Showdown!. If you can't agree on which server to play on, the Smogtours server is the default option.
  • Liking this post increases the accuracy of your Focus Blasts.
Standard Rules and Clauses
  • Species Clause: A player cannot have two of the same Pokémon on their team. For example, a player cannot have two Koffing on his or her team.
  • Sleep Moves Clause: A player cannot use moves that induce Sleep status on the opponent in their Pokemon's movesets.
  • Evasion Clause: A player cannot use the moves Double Team or Minimize in their Pokémon's movesets.
  • OHKO Clause: Players cannot use Horn Drill, Guillotine, Sheer Cold, or Fissure in any of their Pokémon's movesets.
  • Team Preview: Players must turn on the Team Preview feature where players can view the opposing team's Pokémon and choose their lead Pokémon.
  • Timer Clause: If a player exhausts the timer, he/she loses.
  • Endless Battle Clause: Any moveset on any Pokémon that is capable of intentionally causing an endless battle is banned from competitive play. Check this thread for more information.
  • Baton Pass Clause: The move Baton Pass is banned outright.
  • Uber Clause: Players may not use any items, moves, abilities, or Pokemon that appear on Smogon's OU Ban List. If the tiers change or new items, abilities, moves, or Pokemon become available in the middle of a round, the changes will take effect in the following round. There will be an announcement in the relevant round if this occurs.
About Activity Decisions

Activity Decisions / Coin Flips: In the event that there is an uncompleted match at the deadline, it will be coin flipped unless one or both of the players involved in the match specifically request an activity win and explain sufficiently why they deserve to win over their opponent. Attempting to schedule a battle is required in order to receive the win by activity. To make it clear that you are requesting an activity win when you post, you must open your post with "Activity Win Request" in bold.

For example, if you believe your opponent is making an unfair request and that they don't deserve the activity win over you, you can either make your own request or quote their post and explain why they don't deserve it. You should try to make your activity win request posts at least 24 hours before the deadline to give your opponent a reasonable opportunity to contest it with their own activity win request.


In case of disconnections, if you played in the SmogTours server, call a Tournament Director as soon as possible and we'll see about the possibility of having a rematch.

General Tournament Rules

Substitutions

Substitutes will only be allowed into the tournament during round 1.

Please read this guide if you're unsure how to schedule with your opponent! Alternatively, watch this video made by teal6:

Now then, without further ado..

FINALS

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Fusien vs oldspicemike


Finals scheduled for <t:1743879600:f>

REPLAYS MUST BE POSTED FOR YOUR WIN TO COUNT!! SEE THE ANNOUNCEMENTS THREAD FOR INFO​
 
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It’s Mike’s time. He’s been great most of the generation and peaked very high in team tournaments. Of all the people who could win an SV OU individual, Mike’s up there with the best. Pulling for you bro

Great run by Fusien and he’s very capable of taking it, too. Less experienced of the two, but I think his attention to detail/end games keep improving with more reps and his team picks have always been strong.

Excited to see the set regardless of outcome, hf and great job both
 
Congrats to Fusien, the 4th person to lose in this tournament and still go on to make finals somehow. His win also marks the 100th individual tournament*, coming in almost exactly 20 years after Cholena won OST 1. I realized these 2 things would coincide some time last year and started writing an article that was gonna be a history of every Individual tournament but I got demoralized when I was told the section about the Style OST might need to be censored for dealing with a banned user (lol), so i stopped writing at that point but before that I did a lot of digging into OST history and it would be a shame to let that all go to waste so i'll just be posting a very abridged version of the OST section here.

OST 1
This was a 64 person tournament held just 4 months after Smogon was founded. It was won by Cholena, so far the only woman to ever win an individual tournament.

OST 2
This was a 128 person tournament with the concept that it would prove Smogon was the best site for competitive battling: 64 spots would be reserved for Smogon users and 64 slots for members coming to represent other popular sites at the time like GameFAQs and Pokerealm, and you had to specify which forum you'd represent in your signup. Top 8 was 7 Smogon users and 1 guy that ended up liking Smogon so much he ended up making over 3600 posts and becoming an admin of the site. The runnerup of the tournament was Hipmonlee, who was already being called old in that thread. This was 2006.

OST 3
This one had a bizarre system of 3 conferences, each with 64 people. After only one player remained in each conference they'd play each other in a Round Robin finals. Loki won the Ruby conference and then beat both the Saphire and Emerald champions on the day finals were posted. He used the exact same team in every single battle of the tournament since counterteaming hadn't been invented yet.

OST 5
hype was so high for this tournament that they limited signups at 256 people, and required that you had 100 high quality posts on Smogon, as judged by the host, to be allowed to sign up. Despite this stringent requirement, which if we implemented today would spell the end of the tournament scene for lack of players, somehow August who was at the time too young to drive or have good opinions managed to meet this criteria and go on to win the whole thing, remaining the youngest person to ever win an individual tournament to this day. His opponent in finals was Locopoke, who lost in r3, but because the guy that beat him would be on vacation to Italy with his family for r4, Locopoke was advanced instead, marking the first time someone would lose in OST and make finals anyway.

OST 7
The champion of this tournament, permabanned user Imperfectluck first played OST in its second edition, when he didn't yet own a computer. This is 7 years before the first simulator that allowed playing on a phone would come out, so how did he accomplish this? He had a friend that did all the scheduling for him and whom he would text message the moves he wanted to make in game. He (they?) made it to round 4 like this.

OST 9
Back in the day OST used to have another tournament running parallel to it, the prediction tournament. Everyone would post who they thought would win each game with the winner getting a shirt at the end. The prediction deadline was 2 days after the round was posted, and people were encouraged to not play before this. In round 2 of this tournament, Double01 beat Gr8astard on tuesday, but waited to post the result until after the predictions deadline closed, but for some reason the host decided that didn't count and they should rematch. This host also decided that Tornadus-T was allowed for round 4 despite being banned before the round started, then banned it again midround after a few battles had been played with it. Tournament directing was more of an art than a science back then. In any case, Gr8astard won the rematch and went on to win the entire tournament and invent several metagame defining sets in the process. People that lost in OST and somehow still made finals are now 1-1 for winning the entire thing.

To further add to the controversy, his opponent in finals suffered from a PO glitch that caused him to load an NU team in the finals. He got predictably assblasted. You can watch that battle and others mentioned in this post in the Chubbins Replay Archive.

OST 10
OST's reputation suffered a lot from everything that happened in the last one. They even wrote an article on the official Smogon webzine about how fraudulent it was lol. Top 4 of this tournament had 3 members of IDM, the clan Gr8astard belonged to, and that all the old farts of Smogon at the time hated, and Atticus, a celebrated veteran. Atticus ended up winning, which you'd think would be the palette cleanser Smogon needed, but it turns out Atticus was playing finals in a Skype call with several people, including members of IDM and even a tournament director.

OST 11
Won by Whitequeen and yet no one calls this the Whitequeen OST. It's early 2015, the main character of Smogon is a "man" named Bloo. They are considered the best player in the site alongside McMeghan, having just set the points record in Smogon Tour season 18 AND the price record in SPL 5. They are the head TD and Tier Leader of OU, and despite the inherent hatred that comes with those positions (just ask Finchinator) everyone loved them. After failing to win the aforementioned ST 18 they decided to take a break from playing and just host OST 11.

This is where Style comes in. Style is a random user that made their account right before OST and got noticed for beating strong players like CBB, Bluwing and BKC in the early rounds. And she didn't just beat them, she destroyed them with highly innovative sets like Cotton Guard/Dragon Dance Mega Altaria. She would go on to defeat more strong names, including Blunder, and make it to finals. Exactly how we would see with MRP in this edition of OST, many people thought Style was an alt, while others defended her as a very gifted noob. Adding to the mystery of it, OST 9 winner Gr8astard had seemingly befriended this complete noob and was helping her prep. It is fair to say the tournaments community was split in half on the "Style Question", with her detractors, which called themselves the "Scooby Gang" going as far as to send someone in person to Stony Brook, the school she claimed to attend to look for her. Friendships ended over whether you believed in her or not. The thread for these finals was 45 pages long with all the deleted posts counted, which is longer than every OST finals in the last 8 years combined.

The TDs were firmly in the something fishy camp and while investigating found many inconsistencies in her story, leading to their decision to suspend the finals until they could investigate more, and upon concluding that investigation, disqualify but not ban her. Some of the things that lead to this decision are inconsistencies about her relationship with Gr8astard, the date she joined IRC, the fact that Bloo had a relationship with most of the people Style played against and helped them prep/play, and perhaps most damningly, her teams.

When she played people that weren't friends with Bloo, she used solid, standard teams. When she played people that were friends with Bloo she had absurd sets, like 267 Speed Charizard X, which outspeeds her opponent's Mew by exactly 1 point, Gengar with 347 Speed, which outsped a Keldeo by 1 point, and a Mega Ampharos that outspeeds 16 speed Clefable by 1 point in an Agility Pass team, but didn't have enough speed to outspeed Keldeo at +2, even though that would only take a few more EVs. You would never run spreads like these unless you knew exactly what the opponent was bringing. Style had shared a googledocs where she did her prep with the TDs to clear her name, but must have realized these sets looked very suspicious as she edited the aforementioned teams to standard spreads a few seconds after sharing the document, but the TDs had access to the edit history, so the damage had already been done.

Blunder would go on to make it out of the bracket reset where he would then lose to Whitequeen Baton Pass team in the finals (score of people that lost in OST but made finals: 1-2). Meanwhile, Style at first accepted this and tried to exit the situation with some dignity, still mantaining her innocence and claiming to be happy to be done with it all. About 1 month after the Bracket reset, the investigation around Bloo was closing in and she finally admits to helping Style cheat, but not being her, and posts this. Later the same day, she'd post this and finally come clean about the whole thing.

To summarize, she had been a woman all along but felt like she couldn't reveal that because of how women are treated online (especially at the time), and so had pretended to be a man all along, but that was becoming grating and she felt she couldn't reveal it as Bloo without losing her friends so she made a new account, this time a woman from the start, and rebuild her reputation and connections. To get a headstart on that rebuilding she'd win OST as a brand new user. The actual cheating itself is very simple. There was nothing in place at the time to prevent cheating at the bracketmaking stage, so Bloo would pair up Style with either other brand new players that she could easily beat, or with her friends. Then she'd help the friends prep so she'd have perfect counterteams for them, and talk to them as Bloo while they played against Style, which was common at the time, so if the counterteam wasn't enough, she also knew what moves her opponents would click.

*This is actually the 108th tournament, but it's the 100th to give out a trophy, as 8 tournaments ended with no winner.
 
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