Charles Randall Larenas-Leach

Yesterday, in response to Joe's tweet, I wrote this:  According to Joe, I have Zero Integrity and Don't Deserve Respect as a Competitor . Here is the gist of my post summed up in a few bullet points: 1) Special Events are unfair (compared to Regionals) in terms of Championship Points, but Regionals' cash prizes even things out 2) We need Special Events 3) I like Special Events 4) The Day Two system is flawed, not the SPEs I like what I wrote. I feel like I described the issue at hand pretty well, and proposed a useful solution. Here was Joe's response: What Joe is saying is that he is not  addressing flaws in our system. He is specifically addressing players who take advantage of that system. Applying this to League Cups This goes deeper than just SPEs, as these type of flaws (albeit in a much less exaggerated form) exist all over Pokemon because of the nature of the CP system. For example, here is the Championship Points breakdown for League Cups: The way these tournam

My name is Charles Larenas-Leach, and I attended three SPEs during the 2019-2020 season. I traveled to Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. I had flights booked to Ecuador, El Salvador, and Bolivia before the season was canceled. I earned 160 CP from getting 2nd place in Guatemala. I have competitive integrity. The top four competitors at the 2020 Guatemala SPE; that's me, third from the left! Special Events are Unfair CP-wise, but not overall Let me explain where Joe is coming from, because I see what he is saying. If you win a Regionals, you earn 200 CP. If you win an SPE, you win 200 CP. Winning a Regionals is significantly harder than winning a Special Event. I don’t believe that I have the skill in order to make Top Eight at a Regionals. In terms of CP, Special Events are severely over-weighted. However, Regionals come with cash prizes. This means that it is possible to earn back money spent traveling to Regionals while it is difficult to do the same with SPEs (outside of s

Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. -- Galvantula is for Losers On September 9th, 2011, an article called Galvantula is for Losers was released on SixPrizes.com. For over ten years, SixPrizes has been an article site with Pokemon articles that are generally worth reading. However, Galvantula is for Losers was not a very good article. It was an article which satirically proposed that Joltik BLW was a strong card. In reality, Joltik was very weak. Who wrote this article? Why was this article written? Why was this article released? I wrote this article. I wrote it in a bid to earn a free one-month subscription to the paid service SixPrizes: Underground . Adam chose to publish it. The comments section hated it. Those comments made me feel bad, but I did end up getting my free month of Underground in the end! I am going to walk through my inspiration for this art

Last year, I created maps showing the attendance for each Tier Two event held during the year. This year I did it again, but we can compare the maps from year to year. I have some thoughts to add in addition to the images, so I made a blog post about each one. Latin America: A Reflection Attendance and Day Two in Oceania and APAC Why the Dubai SPE is bad for Europe

Attendance When I look at these maps comparing attendance in Europe from this year to last year, my first impression is not to note how attendance has gone up. My first impression isn’t to say that no SPE in the region had over 100 Masters, and that the smallest Regionals had over 200 Masters. These are all true, but my first impression is to say that many tournaments are gone. Not including Russia, which was a special case, I count eight SPEs in Europe last season. In contrast, there were four this season. In my opinion, this is fine and it is a step forward. Here is why:  1) SPEs are worth more Last year, there were 8 SPEs. The winners of each tournament received 145 points. This year, there were four SPES, and the winners of each tournament received 200 points. This means that there was a 50 percent drop in number of tournaments, but only a 31 percent reduction in points given to the winners of those four tournaments compared to the points given to the eight previous wi

APAC attendance Overall, attendance is up in the APAC region. The same number of tournaments were run, with the addition of one Special Event. This means that it’s especially easy to compare attendance from last year to this year. Let’s start in Australia and New Zealand. Last year, the region had the International Championships and two Regionals in Australia, and a third Regionals in New Zealand. This year, New Zealand exchanged its Regionals for a Special Event, and Australia received a third Regionals. This change means that Australia is still the only country in the entire rating zone with more than one Tier Two event. However, once we see how the Day Two race is going, we will see that it isn’t a huge advantage. It’s always disappointing when events are taken away or when someone loses something. The only loser in the region is New Zealand, who lost the cash from their event. However, their attendance dropped from 49 to 36, which means that cutting $4250 in cash prizing o