A local seventh grader’s journey to the Pokémon World Championships

Less than two years ago, Robert Rosal’s relationship with Pokémon resembled that of most 10-year-olds. He owned a few cards and had a passing knowledge of the game, and that was about it. Then he signed up for the after-school Pokémon Club at Rainbow Community School, where he’s a rising seventh grader, and everything changed. 

Matt Layton, the club’s organizer and the Pokémon professor at Morgan’s Comics, taught Robert the basics of the trading-card version of Pokémon. Robert didn’t immediately master the game, but he worked hard at it, playing as often as he could. Sometimes that required challenging his parents to battle. “In the very beginning, he taught me how to play with my cards open and him telling me what to do,” says his mother, Andrea, who moved to Asheville with her husband, Peter, in 2007. “I was like, ‘I love you, but I don’t have time for this.’”

Robert turned to his father for help and, with his assistance, rapidly improved. “He and his dad started building tournament-level decks [any combination of 60 cards],” says Layton, “and Robert started getting very knowledgeable about the decks he used and about each different deck he might end up playing against. That’s what it takes to get really good at Pokémon — knowing every possible option that might get thrown at you.”

As important as building a great tournament deck is, players (and their parents!) appreciate that it doesn’t require a large financial investment. “In lots of other card games, you’re going to have a great deck if you can spend the money to get a great deck,” says Layton. “One of the things I like most about Pokémon is that you can have a great deck that doesn’t cost an extravagant amount. Anybody can build a really good tournament-level deck.”

Peter Rosal, a radiologist at Mission Hospital, was happy to help Robert find the cards he needed to build a great deck. He also shuttled his son to all the Pokémon Leagues in the area: Morgan’s Comics on Haywood Street, The Deck Box in Fletcher and Tokyo Toybox in Hendersonville. At these venues, players can battle each other in small, beginner-level events, earn packs of Pokémon cards and accrue points (as many as 15 for league play and 50 for cups) that allow them to enter larger events, including Pokémon’s annual World Championships.

Robert enjoyed playing on the local Pokémon circuit, where it’s common to see familiar faces anywhere within a two-hour radius of Asheville. But his enthusiasm for the game jumped to a whole new level when he discovered that the bigger Pokémon events not only award their winners significantly more points but cash prizes as well.

The journey to Japan

There were 12 Pokémon Regional Championships in the U.S. in 2023, and one of them took place just two hours away in Knoxville, Tenn. The plan was for both Robert and his dad to play — Robert in the Juniors division and Peter in Masters.

Playing in a large Pokémon tournament is not unlike playing in a large poker tournament. They are held in enormous convention centers packed with hundreds of tables and thousands of players, and the ratio of play time to down time skews dramatically in the direction of the former. Featuring Swiss rounds, the early stages of most Pokémon tournaments require players to square off in best-of-three series. The player who earns the most points (you get three points for a win, one for a tie and none for a loss) advances. Players have only 10 minutes between rounds to go to the bathroom, eat food and collect their thoughts.

In Knoxville, Peter lasted just three rounds and was toast afterward. “It’s constant thought,” he says. “I was like, ‘This is beyond casual.’ It was fun but also exhausting.”

After getting eliminated, he turned his attention to his son’s needs, making sure Robert was relaxed, hydrated and well fed. “If there’s too many people, they don’t give you a lunch break,” says Robert. “You have to use the time in between rounds to get food.”

Playing in the Knoxville Regionals was a learning experience for Robert and at times a difficult one. During his third match, a judge informed him that he had to forfeit the third game as a penalty for dropping one of his cards on the floor during his second match. Pokémon tournaments are guided by a long list of rules, and needing to play with a 60-card deck is one of them. Most kids would have gotten really upset, and Peter admits he wouldn’t have been surprised if Robert had reacted that way. “It was certainly in the realm of possibility that he could just be like, ‘Screw this, this is stupid, I’m done.’”

But Robert was remarkably even-keeled. It didn’t take him long to move past his mistake and focus on the task at hand. “I’ve just got to win the rest of my matches,” he told his father.

Robert survived three more rounds, finishing 29th out of the 65 kids in his division and just barely missing out on earning some championship points. It was an encouraging start to his tournament career. He gained even more confidence while playing in the Charlotte Regional Championships the following month. After winning one of his matches early in the day, he said to Peter in the understated way some kids do, “I think that kid I just played was really good or something. Like, he’s won stuff before.”

“That kid” was Remi Lorenz, the Pokémon trading card game’s No.1-ranked Junior in 2023, and by “stuff,” Robert meant the Oceania International Championships in Melbourne, Australia, one of the biggest events of the year.

More importantly, Robert earned 80 championship points for finishing in 12th place. Two months later, he not only earned points but also a cash prize when he finished 15th at the Hartford Regional Championships.

Seeing how rapidly Robert was improving and how much he enjoyed playing, Peter made a deal with his son: If Robert earned enough points to qualify for the World Championships in August 2023 in Yokohama, Japan, Peter would take him.

Robert surpassed the 450-point threshold needed to qualify for the World Championships at the North American International Championships in Columbus, Ohio, in late June, when he finished 15th out of 185 players in his division.

Less than two years after starting to play Pokémon competitively, Robert had clinched a seat in the game’s largest and most important event, where the winner of each division would take home as much as $25,000.

The jump to Seniors

To get over their jet lag and see as much of the country as they could, Robert and Peter arrived in Japan two weeks early. As invigorating as being in a foreign country was for Robert, the actual gameplay was just the opposite. Very few Americans in the Juniors division progressed very deep into the event, and he was no exception, getting eliminated on the first day of the multiday tournament.

Peter suggested to his son that he continue playing — gasp — just for fun. “We’re in Japan, and you’re playing Pokémon against some of the best players in the world,” he said. “Why don’t you play them and learn from it?”

Robert played two more rounds and took from the experience a burning desire to return the next year. Thanks to his December birthday, however, accomplishing that feat would be much harder than it had been before. He would be moving up to the Seniors division. 

“There’s a big jump from Juniors to Seniors,” says Peter. “His first-round opponent when he played his first Regional this season was at least as tall as me and had a voice deeper than mine.”

The quality of play also goes up. If Robert was going to have any chance of succeeding, Peter recognized that his son needed to start honing his skills against stiffer competition. “You get better by playing against people who are better than you,” he says. “He only gains so much playing me.”

To help Robert improve his game, Peter enlisted the services of Andrew Estrada, a Pokémon coach from Toronto who won the Masters division title at the 2014 World Championships. Estrada’s coaching helped Robert accumulate championship points in bunches, as did a packed travel schedule. Robert played in Regionals in Toronto, San Antonio, Charlotte, Knoxville, Orlando, Fla., and Los Angeles. With a strong outing at the Charlotte Convention Center, he earned enough points to qualify for this year’s World Championships, which was Aug. 16-18 in Honolulu.

At the World Championships, Robert started off hot, beating a player from China and a player from Japan to earn six tournament points. To make it to the event’s second day, when the prize money gets awarded and the champion crowned, he needed to earn 12 more points, but consecutive losses to players from Czechia, South Korea, and Germany eliminated him from the competition. According to Andrea, Robert’s South Korean opponent was “about a head taller than him,” which underscored how difficult it is to win when you are one of the youngest kids in your division. But, as they say, there’s always next year. 

Can Robert make it to his third World Championships in a row in 2025? That’s the plan, although the path there could be more difficult than it’s been in the past. “They changed the points structure and how you qualify,” says Peter, who shares his son’s easygoing demeanor. “We’ll see how the season goes. He’s definitely capable of qualifying again. He could be in the top 100 if he wants to be. If he wants to try to get there, I’m here to help him. If he doesn’t, that’s fine, too.”