Hey there Hat Lovers,

Today’s article will be a discussion of one kind of “misplay.” Probably the most common, easiest mistake to make is to go for a hard read and have it backfire on you. These misplays are often called things like “overextending” or “missed predictions.” But at the end of the day, what’s often happened is that someone has gone against the safest path to victory in favour of a more rocky one.

Sometimes, that’s what you need to do, absolutely! Not all paths to victory are going to be laid down for you. But if you’re too eager to sail off course, you’re going to hit stormy seas. Playing safe is almost always a more guaranteed path to victory. To play safe, you need to select moves that allow you to come out on par or on top at the end of every turn. Indeed, to win, you need to select the best moves to use every turn. In most instances, selecting safe moves will get you there, but I don’t deny that a hard read may be necessary from time to time.

For the record, I’m going to define “hard read” as an umbrella term here. That means there are different kinds of hard reads you can make, but they’re all still hard read scenarios. Meanwhile, I’ll define a “coin flip decision” as a subset of hard reads. Keep this in mind as you read through!

So what is a hard read?

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Third and final weekend of winter regionals! I swear this isn’t a dare for Florida to have problems with their tournament, but given time zones and whatnot, Oregon will be the regional that caps off an exciting month of our new format.

Difficulty Rating:  / 5
(Three extreme weathers the Pacific Northwest sees everyday)

Location: “Not Portland but at least it’s also not Salem” Clackamas, Oregon (Monarch Hotel & Conference Center – 12566 SE 93rd Ave)

Registration Time: 8 AM on Sunday, February 28th (There will be a Premier Challenge on Saturday, with registration starting at 10:30 AM)

Last Year’s Winner: Conan Thompson (conan)

Residing on what is unequivocally the best coast, Oregon is the home of Voodoo Donuts and will be visited by three former world champions and half of US Nationals top cut. Clackamas will also be invaded by a fleet of beaver loving moose riders known as “Canadians” who will go to battle against the more local competitors of Washington, Oregon, California, Utah, and one ambitious visitor from North Carolina.

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Hey there Hat Lovers,

Today’s article is going to take a good hard look at the current upset about Smeargle. I have a hypothesis that I will state outright, here and now: Smeargle is not the problem, Xerneas is. I’m going to look back over the years, back to VGC 2010 and up to VGC 2016. We’ll look at the status of Dark Void bans, and frequency of Smeargle usage. I wasn’t playing in 2010, and 2011 didn’t have Smeargle in the format, so my experience with Smeargle starts around VGC 2012/2013.

My hypothesis is that Xerneas is the problem with this format, not Smeargle, and not Dark Void. How can I test this hypothesis? Well, luckily many previous formats did not ban Dark Void, including VGC 2010. So if Dark Void itself is a major issue, we’d expect Dark Void to have posed problems and annoyances in VGC 2010; again, VGC 2010 was fairly similar to this format, with highly notable exceptions like Sand (and Hail) being viable, and in-between games in a Best-of-3 you could switch your team’s items around. This meant you could put Lum Berry or even Chesto Berry where it needed to be for the matchup.

VGC through the years

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Hey there Hat Lovers,

With the advent of VGC 2016 and Xerneas’ Geomancy shenanigans, both Crobat and Talonflame have risen in popularity to the point that they are now metagame mainstays. The two serve very similar purposes, often running both Tailwind and Quick Guard, and also potentially running Taunt (more common on Crobat than on Talonflame). However, each has a unique and useful ability, and also unique and useful tech moves to run. Today will be a quick summary and discussion of the merits of both, and what teams might find them more effective (spoiler alert, they’re both good).

Talonflame

I’ve played a lot more with Talonflame than with Crobat this generation, so just recognize my perspective might be a bit biased. Here is your cookie-cutter Talonflame set for clarity (taken from 3ds.pokemon-gl.com): (more…)

Hey there Hat Lovers,

Today’s post is something special. This is VGC with Hats’ 100th post on the site. And for this 100th post, we’ll be reporting some usage statistics from the Battle Spot Special Ladder so far. Nuggetbridge user Ferretsroq has made some more detailed Battle Spot information available, and being the stats junkie that I am, how could I not take a look?

The data are currently not super digestable and while I could look through and pull out Top 20 used moves etc… I think the Top 10 Items, Moves, Abilities, and Natures are fine to get a sense of most Pokemon’s preferences. These data are presented in a far more digestable fashion directly on the Pokemon website’s Battle Spot usage page, so I’d advise using the following list and that page together to get a more complete sense of the metagame.

What I’ll be presenting for everyone today is a list of the most used Pokemon in the format, extending down to Pokemon that appear on more than 1% of teams. These data come from ~39,000 teams entering games on Battlespot and so 1% usage means the Pokemon was used a minimum of ~390 times. These data also come only from Pokemon used in a battle, and not from Pokemon that were simply on a team but never chosen (awaiting 100% confirmation). There were 37 Pokemon used on >1% of teams in this dataset, 18 Pokemon used on >5% of teams, and 11 Pokemon used on >10% of teams.

So without further ado, here are the Top Pokemon used on Battlespot Special in January 2016: (more…)