SHE WAS THE VERY BEST
Concord girl, 10, wins the Pokemon Regional Championship, a varied tournament where players pit their ‘pocket monsters’ in heated video or card game battle
SAN JOSE » Over a white dress and tulle skirt, the little girl from Concord draped a plush white cape and a hood with fluffy blue-trimmed ears — an “Alolan Vulpix” costume, in Pokemon parlance.
Faith Bacigalupi, just 10, had come to the San Jose Convention Center on Sunday to do battle at the Pokemon Regional Championships — and won.
Her intimidation technique? “To look adorable,” said the 5th-grader, who attends Sequoia Elementary in Pleasant Hill.
As one of a handful of girls and women on Pokemon’s competitive card game and video game circuit, Faith knows the challenges in competing against a field made up of 90 percent boys and men.
“A lot of the boys underestimate me,” she said. “They think I’m a girl and I’m just starting. And when I beat them, they’re surprised.”
And beat them she has. With her mother and 13-year-old brother, Brian, in tow — and her Nintendo DS in hand — Faith has won four regional championships in the video game junior division so far, in Oregon, Utah, Anaheim and, on Sunday, in San Jose. She is expecting an invitation (for the third consecutive year) to the Pokemon World Championships in the Nashville in August. Winnings can total in the hundreds to thousands of dollars.
Like many parents who travel the country with their children in competitive sports, Faith’s mother, Tammy, is spending thousands of dollars each year in airfare and motel rooms for her daughter’s Pokemon
obsession.
“Grades come first,” said Tammy, a registered nurse.
But unlike athletic competitions, Tammy says she is pleased her daughter is exercising her mind for the game that is part strategy and part luck, whether playing with cards or a handheld DS.
“I want to foster what they are good at — the critical thinking, the strategies,” she said of her two children.
Pokemon — a name short for “pocket monsters” created in Japan in 1995 — are fictionalized creatures that possess strengths that can propel them to victory or weaknesses that can doom them, depending on how they are played and which characters they are up against. Players collect them, train them and do battle with them.
Using her Nintendo DS on Sunday, Faith used “Mudsdale,” a horse-like Pokemon to take out her opponent’s Pokemon that were protecting the creature “Oranguru.”
Doug Morisoli, an accountant
from Philadelphia, brought his 15-yearold daughter, Sydney, to the San Jose tournament. She recently won the European Challenge Cup in Amsterdam and has moved from the junior division to
the senior division and is now in the master’s division for players ages 15 and older. She is facing players well into their 20s, who became addicted to the game when it was launched in 1995.
Early on, when she wasn’t even 10, she endured ridicule from male counterparts, including from one boy who said, “I just got beat by a stupid twit of a girl!”
Sydney, who also plays the flute and piccolo in her high school marching band, shrugged it off and has kept racking up wins and earning respect and friendships along the way.
“It teaches resilience, sportsmanship, how to interact with people and how to solve problems,” Doug Moisoli said.
As part of Faith’s winnings on Sunday, she took home 72 packs of Pokemon cards and an etched glass trophy. While her costume might throw off her opponents initially, she said, she also uses a more sophisticated strategy:
“I let them think I don’t know what I’m doing, by doing unpredictable moves,” she said.
Being a girl has its advantages, Faith’s mother said.
“Women think differently, so the strategy is different,” Tammy said. “Guys think one way, that it has to be this way. Girls think ‘what can I do to throw them off their game?’ ”