In an unfortunate and shocking turn of events, three-time Pokémon World Champion Ray Rizzo has been disqualified from the 2023 Pokémon World Championships for the second time this season.
After becoming the only multi-time World Champion back in 2012, Rizzo made sure to take his competitive journey easy before essentially retiring from the scene, only to return into full swing this year.
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But it seems like all of his valiant efforts in the 2023 season have been for naught, after The Pokémon Company once again revoked Rizzo’s invitation to the Pokémon World Championships that he had rightfully earned—twice.
In a video uploaded to his YouTube channel on June 22, the veteran multi-time champion explained how a tiny, unassuming mistake cost him his Worlds invite for good this time. Rizzo—like many other players in the Japanese competitive community—was under the assumption that his Worlds qualification that he earned from the online Japanese tournaments was tied to his Nintendo account.
This was, unfortunately, not the case. Rizzo’s and every other Japanese player’s Worlds invitations were tied to their game cartridge—more specifically, their save file which they used to compete in the online tournaments to earn their invites.
Players need to use this very same file to register for further tournaments like the World Championships, and if they were to overwrite this save file for a new one to begin a new run of the game, they would subsequently lose all of their qualifications for higher-level tournaments, including Worlds.
This is exactly what Rizzo happened to do, overwriting his old save file to begin a new run of the Generation IX Pokémon games and losing his 2023 Worlds invite forever, in the process.
In his YouTube video, Rizzo explains that his original game’s save file was set to the Japanese language. This was solely to prevent other Japanese players from recognizing RIzzo in online tournaments since he would be the only player whose game would be set to English, which would then lead to his team being scouted and its information being passed on to other competitors, giving Rizzo a huge disadvantage in these tournaments.
Rizzo also explained that even though he knows basic Japanese, there were a lot of times when he didn’t understand what move an opponent was using against him. Since he was in the comfort of his home, however, he could quickly translate what the text in-game was using his phone to help him understand what was happening in the game.
Using your phone during matches would not be possible for in-person tournaments, however, such as the 2023 World Championships. Furthermore, there would be no need to do this since the tournament would be an international one, which meant that Rizzo having his save file in Japanese would make no sense anymore.
Rizzo then made the innocent choice of deleting his save file so that he could start a new file in English under the assumption that his qualifications were tied to his Nintendo account, and not his save file, like most Asian players believed to be the case as well.
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“It’s weird, right; half of me is like, totally not motivated at all to be even attempting to play this “circuit” seriously out here in Japan,” Rizzo explains towards the end of his video.
On a brighter note, he then continues, saying: “The other part of me though, is actually the opposite, where I’m super motivated and it actually makes me want to become National Champion out here in Japan, as like, kind of an ‘F you’ [to TPC].”
Dot Esports has reached out to Rizzo for comment.
