Featured Tutor #11 - Tokyo Tom

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Alkov

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Welcome to the Featured Tutor project! This is a series of interview where I will ask Official Tutors several questions about them, B101 forum and their experience with it. Through this project, I hope that it will bring about entertainment and an insight on how they tutor. The project will be hosted by me. This week, we're honored to have a C&C Moderator and awesome tutor, Tokyo Tom as our interviewee!



✨Vintage Tokyo Swag✨

Can you tell us a little more about your life outside of Smogon/PS?

I am currently a second year university student from Canada. I swim competitively for my school's Varsity Swim Team, and I like to play tennis recreationally on the side, after playing for my high school team. I follow the ATP tour heavy, and I started watching a lot of baseball as well due to the Blue Jays having this amazing season. I am a huge music fan, primarily listening to hip hop and electronic, but I'd like to think I'm somewhat versatile in my tastes. I also like watching TV - big Game of Thrones fan, among other things, and I'm currently going through a show called Scandal with my housemates (although we maintain that it's a downright terrible show).

Where did you get your name from?

My name comes from a Nintendo DS game I played as a kid called Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime. There is a trio of "ninja" characters in the game - Goosashi, Gooshido, and Tokyo Tom. While the former two speak in stereotypical japanese ninja lingo, Tokyo Tom speaks in western slang, so he always stuck out to me as a chill-ass dude. Coming up blank for a name to use online when I decided to create a Smogon account, I settled on Tokyo Tom, hoping to emulate the character's laid-back swagger.


Can you share with us how and when did you get into competitive battling?

I loved Pokemon as a kid, but my time w/ the games was pretty short-lived for your typical Pokemon fan - I started with Ruby and my last game was Diamond.

I was introduced to PO by a classmate, Richard, in Grade 9, where we started hanging out on a small server named Quantum, owned by another kid at our school in the grade above, usernamed Striker. PO got somewhat big at my school, and even the cool kids were duking it out with the nerds in class. For the better part of the year, Quantum grew, and we spent a solid amount of time hanging out with members of PO's small-server community. We didn't actually play very much, mainly using the server as a chat room, but I met a bunch of users, one of which was a guy called 49.

Striker left Quantum late that spring, and Richard and I moved on from competitive Pokemons. 49 transitioned to Smogon to pick up the competitive aspects of the game, but he and a handful of other users remained somewhat active on the Quantum forums, so we kept in touch. I didn't pick up Pokemons again until the beginning of Grade 12, when a buddy of mine, Dave, told me about this new sim called Pokemon Showdown and that they had the unreleased XY Pokemon to play with. At around the same time, I was part of a Nuzlocke group on Facebook with a group of classmates, including Dave, where we'd play through various randomizers together on emulator. At some point in the fall someone linked a let's play video by Shofu, and I discovered that people were making Pokemon videos on Youtube, which I thought was cool. Watching Wifi battles from Shofu and PokeaimMD, and seeing 49 posting teams from various tiers on the Quantum forums made me start to get into competitive battling.

Through Shofu and Pokeaim, and after getting directed to Smogon by 49, I discovered a PO clan called IDM, which Shofu and Pokeaim were both a part of. The extent of my thought process was that if I could get into IDM, I could potentially feature on a Youtube video and show my Nuzlocke friends, which would be jokes. I took a BW2 OU team from 49 and peaked the ladder on PO, talked to CTC, and he let me play some tryout matches. After getting into IDM I was introduced to a whole new side of the competitive Pokemon community, tournaments, and Smogon forum politics, which was pretty overwhelming. I definitely didn't make a good first impression, but I started meeting new people, contributing, and battling, and the rest is history.

When and why did you join the B101 program?

I joined the program on a whim in Spring 2014 because I thought it would be cool to help people out, and I wanted to feel somewhat relevant on the forum. Valentine, who you could say was my mentor at the time, had just started tutoring and encouraged me to join. I had two very awesome tutees, but in all honesty, I personally didn't know enough about the game to be tutoring yet. I stopped tutoring for about a year and returned to B101 once I had some significant experience under my belt, both on the forum and in playing.

What are the tiers you tutor and does the difference in tier affect how you tutor?

I used to tutor in both XY/ORAS OU and BW OU, but now I only tutor in BW OU, because I consider to be more fun than Gen 6, and I want to break the stereotype where many users think that it's a stale, linear, and boring tier. I'd say that my tutoring style is relatively the same between the two generations, although I'd like to think my team building is much better in BW.

As an inspiring tutor, which aspect of the game do you think is the most important and it should be tutored by every other tutor?

This sounds tacky, but I think a player's mindset about Pokemon in general needs to be stressed the most. At the end of the day, we originally picked up this game to have fun, and too many people forget this and let results and winning cloud their vision, which leads to repeated complaints of hax, matchup, tilt, "bad" opponents, Pokemon generally being a shitty game, etc. If you decide to play, make sure your goal first and foremost is to have a good time, because something like Pokemon, where luck is such an integral part of the game, will always be an objectively poor game in terms of consistency and results.

A positive approach to this game will lead to higher satisfaction, less overall time spent on this game, less "bad press"/outbursts, and all that good ish. It'll make your time here more enjoyable, which is always important, because no one wants to look back on their "downtime" and see it wasted (i.e you didn't even use your downtime to have fun).

As a tutor, do you think the issue on "match up" is a huge factor to the game or is it just an easy way out for a battle lost?

The matchup issue in ORAS is more in the grey area than in BW. In ORAS, it definitely exists due to the sheer number of available Pokemon, which makes team building a hassle. At the same time, I do think people are somewhat quick to pin the blame on matchup for losses. I think matchup in BW is much, much less of an issue than many people make it out to be, even when Sun was around. There is a big difference between "bad matchup" and "bad team building", and although I don't mean to sound like some team building deity, in BW, many cases tend to be the latter. When people lose they will naturally look for excuses, but I've seen sarcastic remarks of "BW is a good tier lol" used as an excuse one too many times, especially from players coming from ORAS. Fed up with this ish, man.

Is there any particular style you follow when tutoring?

Uh, I like to introduce myself first and give my tutee my competitive background, and then have them give me theirs. This establishes a foundation you can build upon, and introduces you as a person rather than someone in a computer screen. From there I'll play a few matches with the tutee to get a sense for his or her skill level. Next is going over the viability rankings, going over the roles and common sets of each Pokemon, giving the tutee a better feel for the meta. After that usually comes more games, where I can talk about battling in general, risk vs. reward, calcing, deducing information about the opponent's team, reading the opponent based on his or her optimal plays, etc. This also gives the tutee a more active approach to learning the different roles of Pokemons in the meta. Once a good base of meta knowledge is established, then we can get into team building. Throughout the whole process, I try to talk about forum integration and my idea of a good user, the mindset that Pokemon players should take, and general ish like that.

Can you briefly describe a concept you always go through with regards to the game? It can be either team-building or battling.

Something I like to talk about is putting yourself in the shoes of your opponent. This typically starts by deducing the roles of each of his or her team members from the beginning, by seeing what has hazards, what the win condition is, and the various ways the opponent has to arrive at that win condition. Of course, you have to think about your own general game plan at the beginning of the match, but also try to think about what your opponent might do, what he or she needs to preserve, what he or she doesn't need, what might be a lure, how aggressive they need to play, etc. assuming a similar level of skill or higher from your opponent, this will greatly help decision making throughout the match and hopefully give you a better idea of what you're dealing with as well.

For example, here's a replay of a fun match I had a while back (sorry to PDC, don't mean to stunt, just thought that this was a good example): http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen5ou-74765

Of course the critical thinking was toned down a bit my the nature of the game and the offensive nature of my team, but I still played this game from my opponent's perspective. For example, I had safer switch options on Turn 4, but I expected him to U-Turn to minimize potential hazards on his side of the field, so I decided to get some extra chip damage on Landorus-T for multiple Physical attackers with Rough Skin. Going to Scizor on the Hydreigon the second since it wasn't ridiculously useful to me in that matchup, but also because without Fire coverage his safest play would be to use Draco Meteor, the highest accuracy move that could KO my Skarmory at that range. Bluffing a Choice Scarf on Salamence allowed me to lure him into a false sense of security, and I Dragon Danced on the Skarmory to Heatran switch thinking that he'd need Skarmory to prevent my Garchomp and Alakazam from getting too out of hand (he'd expect Choice Scarf Garchomp since my Salamence wasn't Choice Scarfed, and I knew it was Specially Defensive Skarmory from the Outrage damage, meaning it could check Alakazam) and keeping Intimidate games open with Landorus-T. Some general stuff all in all, and perhaps more applicable in balance match ups, but definitely something to keep in mind.

Is there any advice that you would like to give to aspiring tutors?

Just make sure you're confident and experienced. It's best to spend a large chunk of time on Smogon itself to get a feel for becoming a respected, well-rounded user, while improving your battling skills with some tournament play. I believe that being an established user comes first and foremost, so you can be a role model to the people you tutor and guide them to becoming good users themselves.

Lastly, if you can change one thing about B101, what will it be?

This is more about the system itself, but I just want to be paired up with someone from my timezone for once, it'd make things a lot easier. I feel like timezones are just skipped over when pairings are made, because on multiple occasions I've gotten European tutees while my European counterparts have gotten American ones.

One other small thing is perhaps the rounds could be longer. They are pretty long as it stands, but for tutors that don't have time to spend every single week, longer rounds would definitely help. Even for the less busy tutors, in general, practice makes perfect, rite?

Wanted to give a big thanks to Lunistrius, Agito-desu, darkrai147, LightningLuxray, davidTheMaster, Mambo, and Mimolette for being amazing tutees! I'm blessed to have gotten great people every round and while I was never the most active person, it's honestly been fun tutoring you guys (and DTM, I still owe you major, don't let me forget that!), thanks for making my time with B101 awesome so far.

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There we have it! Thank you Tokyo Tom for such an insightful interview! Feel free to leave any questions you have for him below.



 
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Hey Tokyo Tom

  • How do you go about preparing for important tour games? Do you aim to potentially CT your opponent, or do you aim to win by bringing something that is out of your comfort zone but will surprise your opponent?
  • I've done pretty well in BW STours, R4/R5/R4 was my record. I did this using others' teams though, how do I go about building teams now that I have a solid grasp of the metagame?
 
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