Ever since Pokémon GO trainer battles were released in December 2018, our group from our local Pokémon GO Helsinki community has been passionately organizing battle tournaments. We started off with some 20 people in the first tournaments and have slowly been growing closer to 30 regular competitors in Helsinki region’s tournaments. It has been absolutely thrilling to see this scene grow and gain popularity all over Finland as well!
We currently have regular monthly tournaments in eight cities around Finland: Helsinki, Vantaa, Espoo, Turku, Hämeenlinna, Tampere, Pori and most recently Jyväskylä. Tournament organizers from all around Finland have connected and joined forces under the brand of ”PVP Suomi”. What’s even more impressive is that we have a rolling online tournament system, which has over 70 participants from all over Finland.
Along with the monthly Silph Arena themed cups we have been trying to come up with new exciting ideas and approaches to Pokémon trainer battles. During November and December we are running a program called ”Mentor Cup”: eight battlers from Finland’s Top10 have each taken a rookie player as their apprentice. These eight masters and their students have some six weeks of training period together before the students battle each other in the final tournament in December (mark Saturday 7.12.2019 into your calendars already folks, we’ll be streaming the tournament on our Twitch channel). All the mentors will post sneak peaks throughout the training period in their Twitter accounts. All the mentors’ Twitter feeds are combined in Mentor Cup’s own web page.
To promote our Mentor Cup, we also arranged another small event called ”Elite Four Challenge” together with Ulti Esports in the shopping mall of Sello in Espoo. We had four of our mentors representing the Elite Four with their themed teams. During a two-hour time window in the evening anyone could drop by and challenge our masters. There were naturally prizes for those brave challengers who could beat all the masters to complete the challenge. There were approximately a hundred people participating either battling or watching, which was absolutely delightful. We organizers had super fun and hope to be able to put up something similar in the future as well.
Credit must go where credit is due: to be honest, we didn’t come up with the original ideas ourselves. Both Mentor Cup and Elite Four Challenge ideas aroused from small posts on Reddit. We loved the original ideas so much we wanted to develop them even further. In my opinion, this is one of the aspects I most love about Pokemon GO PVP: the global community is filled with genuinely enthusiastic people coming up with amazing ideas and initiatives. Some of the best known Pokémon GO celebrities and content creators are a great example of this: Kieng is working towards organizing a worldwide team championships and Zyonik hosted/shoutcasted an amazing team draft tournament with Europe’s top players.
We at PVP Suomi are eagerly looking forward for next steps and things to come, now that we have successfully organized events with affiliates like Elisa and Ulti Esports. Pokémon GO battles are such thrilling, tactical and complex format it totally deserves to be recognized as an eSport! We hope to see many new people. associates and sponsors get involved in Pokémon GO battle tournaments in 2020.
This article was written by Marstonlad, a dedicated battler and content creator in PVP Suomi and Pokémon GO Helsinki communities.
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