It's "the curious case of... the Pokémon Go pro who celebrated too hard," reports the gaming news site Aftermath. It all started on the first weekend in April...
Firestar73, a competitive Pokémon Go player who placed seventh at last year's world championships, managed to narrowly cinch a game-five finals win at the 2026 Pokémon Orlando Regional Championships after battling his way out of the dreaded losers' bracket. As stress and adrenaline gave way to relief, Firestar73 stood up from his chair, threw off his headphones, raised his arms in a sort of victorious flexing motion, and then fist pumped for good measure. Immediately afterward, he politely shook his opponent's hand... [T]he tournament's staff went on to deem Firestar73's conduct "unsportsmanlike" and stripped him of his win.
"After weeks of fans flooding The Pokémon Company's social channels to demand a repeal of the ruling, the company has finally issued a statement," reports Kotaku. "Spoilers: It will not be reverting its decision." Their official statement?
"[D]uring game one of the bracket reset series, a player was issued a Warning for the action of hitting and shaking the table during gameplay. Actions such as these can have a negative impact on the experience of participants and disturb the match in progress. Then, during game five, this same player's behavior continued to be disruptive, including shaking the table to the point that there was a disruption to the broadcast experience. These repeated infractions resulted in a penalty that was escalated to Game Loss. "
Meanwhile, Aftermath now reports, Firestar73 "has disputed Play! Pokémon's account of events entirely
"The 'incident' you are now, for the first time, claiming was the basis of the decision did not affect the gameplay at all, yet decided the whole tournament," he wrote on Twitter. "Section 2.1 requires a 'clear explanation of any infraction and its penalty,' and I was never given this as the basis at all."
NiteTimeClasher, who won the tournament by disqualification, doesn't seem pleased either. "Was not my decision," he appears to have written in a Pokémon Discord. "Firestar is the Orlando regional champion. Hope you all understand." Others have attempted to divine what the company meant by a "disruption to the broadcast experience," and what they've found doesn't look all that severe.
Not long after Play! Pokémon handed down its edict, one judge who was not involved in this particular match, Professor Rex, publicly voiced his outrage. "As a judge I'm not supposed to discuss ruling[s] publicly," he wrote. "However, I also believe that as a judge my job is to give players a fair space to compete. If a player in a high stakes battle can lose out on thousands of dollars for shaking the table, what kind of space have we built? If the table can't handle the intensity of the competition, that's not the players' fault. I've judged multiple Go regionals, [and] I just can't support how this was handled."
After posting internal correspondence meant for judges and asking "some questions they didn't like" in the Discord for those who judge and otherwise help out at Pokémon events, Rex was banned from the Discord. That's when, to the extent they had not already, things spun out of control. Rex went on to share judges' personal information in a perhaps-misguided attempt at forcing transparency, which caused other judges — some of whom mostly agreed with him — to call him out and take issue with his conduct. As of now, almost no one is happy.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
