Hey there Hat Lovers,

Round 3 of the National Collegiate Pokemon Association (NCPA) is starting next week! If you’ve missed out on the action so far, check out Mark’s Round 3 preview highlighting every team and their members. Here’s a sample to pique your interest:

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University of Victoria (UVIC)
2-0

UVic started off with a close 3-2 win over Oklahoma State, and followed it up with a victory over CSULB, 4-1. The team changed things up a bit between rounds one and two, swapping out John Westwood and Robert Call for Jason Wynja and Wesley Anderson. That move seems to have worked well for UVic as both subbed players took their sets in round two, and Wesley currently tops the NCPA in KO ratio (8.00).

The ACEs for rounds one and two have been vgcwithhats.com writers Mark Hanson (142 Championship Points) and Max Douglas (266 Championship Points), with Jason Wynja (176 Championship Points) and John Westwood (122 Championship Points) in non-ACE slots. While Wesley may lead the team in W% (100%) and KO ratio, it’s hard to ignore Max Douglas who is coming off a 2nd place Regionals finish.

Fun fact: UVic also has a Premier event-studded team; every member has at least 20 CP from this 2015 VGC season.

Captain’s Call: “Max, please don’t use Beedrill.”

Next opponents: UC Berkeley proved their worth in round one, sweeping TAMU 5-0. They emerged 3-2 after taking on Oklahoma State. As UVic took a close 3-2 series against OSU themselves, this should make for an interesting butting of heads in the western conference.

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Feel free to check out the NCPA 2015 Season Player Statistics as well! You can also follow the NCPA on Twitter!

Cheers,

Crawdaunt out

Hey there Hat Lovers,

Today’s article is going to be a further discussion on Speed in the ORAS metagame. There are many things that aren’t 100% in Pokemon; you have inaccurate moves, flinch chances, critical hits and more. The best players look for ways to either give themselves consistently favourable RNG rolls, or avoid random chance altogether. The former is a discussion I briefly brought up a long while back in my article “The Blame Game.” Today I’m going to focus on an aspect of the latter: ways to avoid random chance altogether. And possibly the most predictable thing in Pokemon is not move accuracy, not flinches, not crits, not random burns or freezes, but Speed.

Why you should think about Speed

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