Wolfe Glick (WolfeyGlick), a legend of competitive Pokémon, lives in search of order. Can he find it in a game defined by its chaos? An interview, a long-read, by ChrisTapsell
It's mid-morning on 18th August, less than a day before the 2022 World Championships, Pokémon's most prestigious tournament, begins its first round - and Wolfe Glick is looking for a pot. We're talking in person now, sitting outside a solitary Starbucks on the noisy footbridge that takes you to the Excel Arena from Custom House DLR.
Hours before the tournament now, he speaks in solid bursts of explanation. Between them he'll pause, pushing his glasses up his nose when he corrects himself or reworks an answer, tilting his head to the side when thinking of the right word like he's searching for solutions again, reaching for more precision than before. Even then, he'll regularly find himself on a roll, running through rapid details and fresh discoveries. Occasionally his leg bounces while he talks.
"Basically, I wake up, and then I typically do my best thinking in the morning, and so I'll think of all the problems that I faced the day before, and I will try to come up with solutions. And I'll theorise about that and do a lot of thinking and writing about where I think things need to go." After some reassurance that nothing would be made public before the tournament, Glick agreed to show me a small section of his notes for the World Championships. He is, if anything, eager to share them with someone, pulling them up on his phone and passing it to me with the kind of attempted subtlety of a teenager showing you something illicit in public.
"Then I also memorised this 16-page document of just calx," he says, flicking through page after page of bullet-pointed calculations, typed up into sentences on exactly how much certain moves will do for and against his Pokémon, and a variety of others .+3 252 Atk Zacian-Crowned Sacred Sword vs. 12 HP / 4 Def Dynamax Kartana: 248-292 - 43.8% chance to OHKO"This is about half. So it's probably about 32 pages," he says.
"I have gone to every World Championships trying to win. I have only succeeded one time, but the goal for me has always been to win. But the secondary goal this year is I would love to make it to the second day of competition. The ultimate goal is to win, but I really hope that I can at least get this far as I would love to make day two, as it's called. Because I think it'd be really difficult to put hundreds of hours of work in and then not be able to play in the main event.
"To be honest," he says, cutting in, but politely,"I don't really feel like I can blame luck for my performance. I think that my preparation was good, and my team was good, so - I think my headspace, the day of, wasn't where it needed to be." This is what Glick is yet to fully comprehend."I'm not sure if it was pressure, or nerves, or just, something? But when I was playing my games, I felt like I was watching somebody else play.
From here he was on the back foot, freezing up and making uncharacteristic mistakes."It's one thing to have a bad matchup but to [still] be familiar with the kind of crucial points in the matchup - but I had to figure all that out round one, and the opponent just had way more tools than me. But even with that, I still had pretty clear opportunities to win that I just missed in the moment."The second opponent was, again, a team that I never expected...
Then he thought about his wider strategy, his approach to preparation as a whole. Remember how Japan and South Korea have different rules for qualifying than the rest of the world?"This year had a tonne of Japanese players, like far more than any year in the past, and that actually really significantly altered the playing field," he suggests.
He cuts himself off again."That might not be true. That's not true. I take that back. But I'm capable of winning games, at least. The result doesn't always match the performance being below par, basically. So variables apart, that, to me, is the concerning part, so I need to figure out why that happened. And then figure out if I can do anything.
"It'd be easy to feel like: I put in all this work - hundreds of hours, if not more - and in the end, I couldn't even access any of the prep that I did. My brain turned off and then I got eliminated. But the truth of the matter is I've been doing this for a long time, since 2011, and to me, the crux of Pokémon, the way that I play at least, is improvement. It's an incredibly difficult game.
After getting knocked out, Glick stayed on at Worlds to work with friends who are also competing, with the group sharing ideas in their down time and support one another through preparations before the tournament and the event itself. Competitive Pokémon players often take a collegiate approach, maintaining friendships with others in the scene - a sign of the game at its best. Photograph: Gabe Mendoza.
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