The 2024 Pokémon World Championships are currently taking place in Honolulu, Hawaii. In the semifinals of the TCG (Trading Card Game), a player made a foolish mistake that ruined all his good chances.
What kind of event is this? The Pokémon World Championships are the highlight of every season. For a whole year, trainers can prove themselves at various championships. Those who collect enough points have the opportunity to compete at the World Championships for prize money of up to $50,000.
The game is played in four categories:
Here you can see the trailer for the event:
Wrongly disqualified?
Coming to the top at a huge event like the Pokémon World Championships is anything but easy. This year, over 3,000 Pokémon trainers battled it out to be the very best.
This makes it all the more unpleasant to lose a possible victory because of an inappropriate obscenity.
What happened? Ian Robb, a successful TCG player, was disqualified during a match at the World Championship on Saturday due to an allegedly obscene gesture he made towards his opponent.
Here you can see the misdeed in the video:
This was particularly annoying for Robb as he was already in the top 8 players in his age group. Without the disqualification he could have made it to the final and maybe even won.
Instead, he was immediately eliminated from the tournament and the current match was not played to the end. What is particularly ironic is that his opponent, Fernando Cifuentes, who went straight into the final because of the incident, actually won in the end.
Was that justified? On X, the community is discussing whether the immediate disqualification was justified.
No matter how you look at it, Ian Robb received a “match loss due to unsportsmanlike conduct,” as one moderator explained after the incident.
A day earlier, a similarly unpleasant incident occurred. Here, the opponent was not only treated with gestures. There was even an attempt to cheat them to gain an unfair advantage. But that did not end well for the culprit: A Pokémon player wanted to cheat at the World Championship, but it only became embarrassing for him.