Sunday saw the long-awaited Pokemon tournament hosted at my house by Dorje for a few of his school friends.

Forget Cities, bigger than Nationals, more exciting even than the World Championships – this was Dorje’s Pokemon party. He had the idea for his birthday, and it finally happened this weekend.

Since my house is normally quiet and monastic, and I’m usually an exhausted wreck after Dorje alone comes to stay for the weekend, people asked me, repeatedly, (before, during and after!), how I was coping with seven children running riot in my slightly more ragged and dusty version of a zen monastery. In preparation, I’d channelled Dorje’s excitement into cleaning, and parts of tables and floors which hadn’t seen daylight in months, if not years, were cleared to make space, and the house was, if not sparkling, at least less dusty than usual now that I could actually get to some of the corners.

To prepare me, one of the moms showed me pictures of a relative’s child rolling in the corn flour causing total havoc after mere minutes unattended in the kitchen. Although she assured me hers were trained, when the tournament began her children were coincidentally seated at the furthest table from the kitchen.

It turned out everyone was well-trained, and I didn’t have to use as much zen training as expected. Perhaps just earplugs next time.

Even more exciting, since there were 7 children in total, I got to enter my first tournament as contestant eight to make sure no-one had to sit out a round.

Pokemon, for those who don’t know, is a game of some luck, a lot of skill, but also requires a good deck of cards to be competitive (which is how Nintendo make a lot of money from Pokemon). There were three people with good decks; Dorje, Reilly and Nadir, and Reilly arrived with 25 of his 60 cards missing, so his tournament deck after a quick borrow-round to fill in the gaps wasn’t quite as fine-tuned as it could have been.

Jordan had only learnt how to play two days before, and borrowed a spare deck from Dorje, as did I.

And so, the mayhem began with with lots of shouted advice as everyone kept on eye on everyone else’s games, especially as their games finished. My round one clash with Jordan, the last to finish, saw 7 children sitting on the other side screaming for Jordan, but I managed to defend against the onslaught, while Thaakir managed to impressively take one of three games from his older brother and Dhamier got an upset win against Reilly and his makeshift deck.

Round two, saw me pitted against Dorje. I couldn’t even claim the draw was rigged, since I did it, and duly lined up for the slaughter. While trying at the same time to help Jordan against Noah before Jordan’s beginner credits ran out and Noah, finally having enough of being ganged up on, told me to stop.

Round three, the final round, saw Dorje versus Nadir on the top table, a hotly contested match finally won by Dorje, although I was too busy trying to deflect Reilly’s slippery Blastoise-EX to pay much attention to anything else.

Dorje managed to nullify my egalitarian instincts, which would have seen the best prizes go to those finishing on the least points (since those coming at the bottom obviously need the most improvements to their decks), although thanks to Father Christmas going a bit crazy with the credit card in the Pokemon shop, there were lots of prizes for everyone. And I managed to use the prizes as an excuse to photograph Noah, who’d ducked out of the group photo.

Since Wikipedia would probably have unjustly rejected the article for this monumental event, I’ve added the scores here instead…

The final positions, in tiebreak order:

Round 1:

Round 2:

Round 3: