Wolfe Glick, a legend of competitive Pokemon, lives in search of order.
Can he find it in a game defined by its chaos?
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.
But this was just the beginning.
Beyond that: one further stage of excessive challenge.
Some fans have created mods for older Pokemon games to increase their difficulty.
In his own words.
Affable, goofy, overtly intelligent.
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.
It is, you realise, typical for Glick.
Talking to Glick, however, something else becomes clear.
The Pokemon Company had cancelled all official, in-person events for two years through the height of the pandemic.
Glick completing the hardest single-player challenge in Pokemon is like an elite footballer running half-marathons in the off season.
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.
Here, he’s as you see him on his live streams and in his earlier, unscripted videos.
“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 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!
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.
“And so my content is geared towards that - I make content that’s really general right now.
That’s the goal.”
But it’s also down to something arguably even rarer in competitive Pokemon.
Glick, compared to any other competitor, benefits from an unparalleled longevity.
But then the drop-off was sharp.
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.
Worlds is built on an awkward qualification system.
This combines with the structure of the Worlds tournament itself.
“It’s a quantity over quality kind of thing,” Glick explains.
That’s a really big thing for me personally."
If your goal is to get to Worlds, that’s fine.
As our conversation progresses, Glick turns to the topic of Pokemon itself.
Pokemon is still a series aimed at seven-year-olds, after all.
In large part that’s down to scale.
Each of those Pokemon has its own combination of one or two out of 18 types, for instance.
Through all of this, Glick is really explaining another hypothesis, another problem in need of working out.
But to Glick, the solution is clear.
“Long story short, experience is really important,” he says.
6 World Champions waiting for a new one to be crowned in London.
A little excitable, as he talks rapidly but deliberately, through the pre-tournament nerves.
I feel really good about my preparation".
But before that, details.
“But,” he concedes, “we don’t have any pots.”
And he planned all his meals for the week.
Hours before the tournament now, he speaks in solid bursts of explanation.
Even then, he’ll regularly find himself on a roll, running through rapid details and fresh discoveries.
Occasionally his leg bounces while he talks.
It’s not close to comparison.
And that’s what is within my control.
I built a team that I’m happy with.
I feel really good about the prep work that I’ve done.
But the stuff that’s in my control I feel really good about."
But I think that I’ve gotten to a point where I really do feel comfortable."
And then he knuckled down.
In our first chat he described a typical day.
Then he’ll “take a step back, watch the replays back, reflect on that.”
Then, something important.
Because you might think that something doesn’t work when actually it does work, for example.
“I gave myself a long runway, basically.”
In addition, a whole deck of flash cards.
“Basically, going through and breaking down, like every tendency that they have that’s exploitable.”
The opposition analysis he estimated at around 60 hours of work.
“This is about half.
So it’s probably about 32 pages,” he says.
All of this is committed to memory?
“I mean, more or less.
I make mistakes occasionally, but yeah.
I have a very good idea now of how much damage my team is going to do.”
“There’s not a clear way, or right way to prepare,” he says.
We can’t say for sure if this is a good idea.
There’s not a template for, ‘Oh, this is how to prepare for Worlds.'"
Early in the conversation, he hedges expectations.
“There’s a real chance I get knocked out on the first day of the competition.
There’s always that chance,” and the same topic comes up again as we wind down.
“I have gone to every World Championships trying to win.
I have only succeeded one time, but the goal for me has always been to win.
But the secondary goal this year is I would love to make it to the second day of competition.
The next day, Wolfe Glick needs to win six of his eight matches to progress.
It’s his worst ever finish at the World Championships.
A few days later, Wolfe Glick is transformed and yet utterly the same.
What remains the same is Glick’s perspective.
His relentlessly searching eye for strategic imperfection.
We talked about luck before in Pokemon, I said.
This is what Glick is yet to fully comprehend.
“I’m not sure if it was pressure, or nerves, or just, something?
But when I was playing my games, I felt like I was watching somebody else play.
I don’t really think I can blame luck for this one.
“I was kind of pinned in both directions.”
From here he was on the back foot, freezing up and making uncharacteristic mistakes.
“The second opponent was, again, a team that I never expected… Then he thought about his wider strategy, his approach to preparation as a whole.
Remember how Japan and South Korea have different rules for qualifying than the rest of the world?
In other words, the field was “especially volatile” as a result.
“No,” he says.
“It’s a small thing to take away - it’s not the main thing.
I don’t have a main takeaway yet.
“I need to reflect, I need to figure out-” he cuts himself off.
This, surely, is the actual takeaway for Glick.
The way his mentality shifted, how the games slipped away from him.
“This was a very, very, very, very bad performance.
Not the result, but in how I literally performed.
I could have won.
“That might not be true.
That’s not true.
I take that back.
But I’m capable of winning games, at least.
The result doesn’t always match the performance being below par, basically.
And then figure out if I can do anything.
I felt very present, and very, like, aware of my decision-making at all of my tournaments.
“It just randomly flared up again,” he says - and then immediately corrects himself once again.
It flared up again,unexpectedly.
Or re-centre myself.”
Either way, clearly he is still raw from the surprise of going out so soon.
“I worked really hard for this.
And it was my worst Worlds ever, by a pretty large margin.”
And yet, each time he gets somewhere close to self-pity, he self-corrects.
My brain turned off and then I got eliminated.
It’s an incredibly difficult game.
So one of the nice things about that is that it’s possible for you to always get better.
There’s always another Worlds.
“So yeah, I’m really disappointed.
So that was bad.
“But it’s not random, right?
There’s a reason why I wasn’t able to play well.
There’s a reason why.
Where was I lacking?
What caused this to happen?
So that next time I don’t lose for the same reason.
“It’s good data, but it’s a very challenging problem.
But to say, ‘Oh, your brain basically turned off, figure that one out?’
It’s gonna be difficult, but I’ll do my best.”
But throughout our final conversation, including the many self-corrections and verbal footnotes, Glick’s confidence remains unwavering.
“Maybe it should, but it’s also…” he stops again, finding his words.
And then a return to certainty.
“Here’s what it is: I might be the greatest Pokemon player of all time.
I’m up there, at least.
And having a bad tournament doesn’t take that away from me.
Maybe I’ll do it next year.
So I don’t believe that a single bad result defines anybody long, let alone me.
So no - it could only help [winning Worlds] but it’s not gonna hurt.
It doesn’t take away my accomplishments.
In my opinion.”
There’s an irrefutable irony in the air as we talk.
“Maybe I played too many games, and made it hard to snap out of autopilot.”
Above all, though, there’s irony to his choice of game.
A mix of “chess meets poker,” as he put it to me in our first conversation.
Pokemon, of all games, is the one where certainty is impossible to find.
Wolfe Glick remains determined to find it.
