Wolfe Glick, a legend of competitive Pokémon, lives in search of order. Can he find it in a game defined by its chaos?
A little while back, during one of the UK’s many mid-pandemic lockdowns, I turned to the most unremarkable of comforts: watching playthroughs of old Pokémon games on YouTube. These were, however, playthroughs with a twist. Like speedrunning attempts or non-lethal clears of stealth games, they involved more challenging, entirely self-imposed rules. In the world of Pokémon, this particular variety is called a Nuzlocke, a kind of bond-strengthening challenge mode where knocked-out Pokémon are considered ‘dead’ and must be released or permanently locked away, where you can only catch the first Pokémon you find in each area, where having your whole party be defeated means a complete game over and where, crucially, each precious new addition to your team must be given a nickname. But this was just the beginning.
In addition to Nuzlocke rules, some particularly die-hard Pokémon fans like to use ‘hardcore’ versions, where you have to stick to certain level caps, like never going above the highest level Pokémon of the next Gym Leader, and where most items are banned, with only those held and triggered in-battle by your own Pokémon allowed. Beyond that: one further stage of excessive challenge. Some fans have created mods for older Pokémon games to increase their difficulty. Most notorious of all is Emerald Kaizo, a total reworking of that legendary 2004 game that turns every short-wearing, barely-out-of-preschool trainer into a competitive-tier opponent. Think top stats, higher levels, tournament-quality movesets and a totally reworked, systematic AI, tuned to maximum efficiency and aggression.
Defeating Emerald Kaizo is a genuine achievement with a standard playthrough, requiring a working knowledge of how competitive Pokémon operates, from EVs and IVs (effort and individual values, respectively) to team building and in-game strategy. Defeating it with Nuzlocke rules, meanwhile, is extraordinarily hard, an often months-long grind for a select few players. Defeating Emerald Kaizo with these particular hardcore Nuzlocke rules had, at the time of this series, been done by exactly one player.
Enter Wolfe Glick, 2016 World Champion and one of, if not the, best competitive Pokémon players in the world. In his own words.
Glick had attempted exactly one standard Nuzlocke before, on the base version of Emerald, before jumping to the hardcore Kaizo version straight away. And while he’s been very well-known in competitive Pokémon circles for a while – he started competing over a decade ago, in 2011 – back in early 2021 the world of ‘content creation’ was relatively new to him still. You realise, as you follow the melodrama of his run, mourning fallen comrades and cursing recurring enemies, that you’re also watching a relatively young entertainer come into their prime.
Alongside the knack he quickly finds for the challenge itself, you can see him honing a personal style. Affable, goofy, overtly intelligent. A little arrogant. But arrogant in the way the most popular sportspeople often quietly are, but are rarely begrudged for – because it’s only occasional that you see it, and because it’s earned. In the live streams, which last for hours before being cut down into new episodes of the run, you see more of his actual personality. He’s more scientific, more circumspect about conclusions, and has a habit of self-correcting, saying one thing and then taking it back to be replaced with something more precise.
You also see the kind of wizardry that goes into beating this kind of challenge. By the end, he’s the third person in the world to have ever completed it. Second was another streamer known as Pokémon Challenges, or simply Jan, a friend of Glick’s and veritable expert of the subgenre, who’s spent over 4,000 hours playing Nuzlockes for a living, and who both devised these particular rules and gave Glick a few tips for a running start.
Glick would be the first to admit he would’ve taken longer without the initial help, and yet: Jan of Pokémon Challenges took a hugely admirable (and appropriate) 151 attempts to beat this thing. Glick, having attempted just the one, standard Nuzlocke before, did it in less than half the time. To navigate it all he took those starting notes from Jan and the bespoke calculators assembled by the community, and constructed a monumentally detailed, battle-by-battle, Pokémon-by-Pokémon, move-by-move plan of what to do and when. Everything from which Pokémon needed to be caught and where (including an endless run of bad luck searching for a Lanturn with the right nature) and which opponents he’d need to keep which counters alive for was mapped out, his thinking often revealed as sudden bursts of detail, multiple paragraphs of theory for a single enemy Pokémon flashed quickly on screen. It is, you realise, typical for Glick.
Talking to Glick, however, something else becomes clear. The Pokémon Company had cancelled all official, in-person events for two years through the height of the pandemic. It meant Wolfe Glick was trying to make the most of his time, to keep busy, make a go of YouTube while keeping his competitive mind sharp. Glick completing the hardest single-player challenge in Pokémon is like an elite footballer running half-marathons in the off season. Undoubtedly tough, if you’re the majority of people, but ultimately for him just a jog in the park. Glick’s real goal, as he often tells me – and often talks about in public – is far more ambitious: to master the art of competitive Pokémon, and become the undisputed greatest player of all time.
His obstacle is the game itself. Wolfe Glick is determined to master a game that does not want to be mastered.
The first time I speak with Wolfe Glick, it’s via Zoom. This first conversation feels as much a planning meeting as an interview, as though he’s scoping out a new project or challenge before him, sizing up a potential task. But behind a professional-sounding microphone, in front of a green screen, Glick is also perhaps at his most comfortable. Here, he’s as you see him on his live streams and in his earlier, unscripted videos. Talkative, immediately eager to explain the joys and the complexities of Pokémon – he would argue they’re one and the same – and immediately, obsessively animated when you give him the chance.
“The reason that Pokémon is not more popular as a competitive game is not because the game itself has any issues,” Glick tells me mid-way into the conversation, at once revealing a problem I didn’t know existed and positing the solution he’s since found. “I mean, it has issues, but that’s not the reason. It’s because people don’t know about it, they don’t understand it, right? It’s an incredible game.
“And as someone who is pretty much as deep into it as anyone so far, it is truly, like, a remarkable, beautiful thing. And people just don’t know it. And they don’t know how to find out about that. And so my goal is to break down those barriers and say, you know, ‘Hey! You. This thing is cool. You might like it. Let me pull back the curtain a little bit. Let me show you what’s going on here. Because I think it’s really cool. And I think that other people can think that too.'”
Glick talks about this obligation often. It is arguably his ultimate quest. Or maybe one that sits alongside his other ultimate quest to be the best of all time – we talk about both in just the first hour. For Glick there’s an air of responsibility to all this, as though it’s only right that he take on the job that arguably the Pokémon Company – which barely funds competitive play and stays largely removed from it – should be taking on itself. For Glick it’s a void that he ought to fill, for no reason other than there’s simply nobody else who could do it better.
“My goal is to make competitive Pokémon as big as it can be, and I think I have the tools to do that,” he says. “And so my content is geared towards that – I make content that’s really general right now. I’m not I’m not making content for hardcore, super intense, you know, ‘serious’ VGC players, because that’s like, a couple thousand people. My goal is to make content that anyone who knows about Pokémon can watch and enjoy, and then as they watch more content, eventually, they’ll be exposed to the VGC stuff, and then learn about it that way. That’s the goal.”
The tools Glick’s talking about are in part his skills – Glick has a reputation for more inventive team compositions and surprise moves – and that natural charisma in front of a camera. But it’s also down to something arguably even rarer in competitive Pokémon. Glick, compared to any other competitor, benefits from an unparalleled longevity.
Pokémon VGC players have a strangely short shelf-life, even by other esports’ notoriously fleeting standards, and it’s his ability to outlast the competition that Glick feels makes him one of, if not the best players to grace the game. He’s been playing competitive Pokémon since 2011, and many of his records – two wins at the US Nationals, a win at the US and Canada Internationals in 2019, a Players Cup, the most qualifications for Worlds, the most “top cuts” at Worlds (the final rounds of 24 players), six top-six finishes, and his record as the only player to have won every level of tournament in the professional game – come directly from his ability to stick at it longer than the competition.
By contrast, only one person, Ray Rizzo of the USA, has ever won the VGC Masters World Championship more than once, winning back-to-back finals in 2010, 2011, and 2012. But then the drop-off was sharp. In 2013 he was knocked out in the first round of Worlds, in 2015 he failed to qualify at all, and he’s since retired from professional play. Wolfe Glick is the only other to have appeared in two finals, including his 2016 win. He lost the other final to Rizzo in 2012.
“I don’t think that Pokémon is a game you should be playing every single weekend,” Glick says, setting up to explain another solution to another as yet unexplained problem: This short shelf-life of Pokémon’s top players primarily comes from burnout.
With such low financial incentives beyond travel awards to more tournaments – the prize for winning Worlds in 2022 was $10,000, scaling down to $1,500 for those in 9th-16th and nothing for any finishes below that – people who play Pokémon competitively “overwhelmingly do it because they like the game,” he says. Most competitive players, often in their late teens or early 20s, treat it as a hobby they can enjoy alongside things like university or early career jobs. The flipside to this: if a player starts to lose their passion for the game, there’s little outside incentive to keep at it.
The risk of burnout to Glick is a risk to everything he’s tried to build so far, and managing that has become an active part of his preparation for major tournaments as anything else – but doing so comes with one crucial tradeoff. Qualifying for the World Championships, Pokémon’s singular, tentpole tournament, is much easier to do if you play the game more often.
Worlds is built on an awkward qualification system. For those outside of Japan and South Korea, which have their tournaments run by a different organisation, getting to Worlds means earning a certain number of Championship Points, or CP. Competing in different sized tournaments earns you different amounts of points, according to your finish, but there are lots of caveats here – limits to how many times you can compete in tournaments of a certain kind and have your points count; how many competitors there are in the tournament itself, and so on.
This combines with the structure of the Worlds tournament itself. The first day is the easiest to qualify for, requiring 400 points for players in Glick’s US and Canada Masters division, which can be earned by winning a single international tournament, or a combination of a few decent finishes. But by grinding out the games to earn even more points, some players can earn a bye to day two, by which point the field of competitors has already been thinned down dramatically.
This year, in the US, you’ll have needed to finish in the top 12 points-earners in the region to earn a bye. In the simplest terms: competing in more tournaments increases your chances of earning enough points to qualify for Worlds; competing in even more tournaments helps your chance of winning it. “It’s a quantity over quality kind of thing,” Glick explains. There are some limits to how many tournaments you can attend to grind for points, but the limits are so high that, in his words, “almost nobody hits them.” The people who travel every single weekend – often flying across North America to do so – end up as the majority of those in the top point-earning spots. “You can qualify for the World Championships [by] never going to an event bigger than eight people.”
All this means that for Glick to maintain that longevity, he’s had to set boundaries – even if it means a tougher run at the World Championships themselves. He goes by a rule where, if at least one friend of his isn’t attending a tournament, he just won’t go. “I don’t know if I’d be able to still enjoy the game if I didn’t have good friends also playing, to see at events and to work [with] on the tournaments. That’s a really big thing for me personally.”
“Yes,” he says, “you can play all the time and you can qualify for Worlds by grinding and you can get there. If your goal is to get to Worlds, that’s fine. But for someone like me whose goal is to, like, be the best player of all time, playing more weekends isn’t gonna make me better – at a certain point it’s just gonna burn me out and make me not as good.”
As our conversation progresses, Glick turns to the topic of Pokémon itself. He talks about it like a physicist might talk of some newly discovered, as yet unexplained natural law, speaking with a kind of infatuation with its untamed complexity, as if it were a phenomenon as much as a game.
