 My name is Lee Provist, I'm from the UK and I've been playing VGC for 14 years. It's funny because my parents used to get me a Nintendo subscription for Christmas every year and it was in one of those magazines that there was a tiniest little article in the corner saying about the Pokemon World Championships and testing yourself against the best trainers in the UK. So I decided to dig out my DS at the time and my Pokemon copy of Pearl, which actually had the cellophane still on it. And with two weeks preparation I tried to hecticly prepare for the tournament, learn the new metagame, new format, new Pokemon and went in attended. And as you can imagine with that much preparation I didn't do too well but that really was the starting point of my VG career and pushing me on and kind of lighting that fire to strive to do better in something that I really loved doing. I think the event that really sticks out to me is the World Championships in 2013. That year was the first year that I'd actually won a paid-in invite to the World Championships and my preparation that year was good running up to the event. I tested a bunch of teams, they all did really well in online tournaments but getting to the event itself I really backtracked on all of my preparation and went back to my nationals team that I did so well with and I really regret doing that because it was almost a little bit fearless for me to go forward with something that should have maybe done a lot better in that tournament and it really sticks to my mind as a big regret and I always approach events now looking back at that event and remembering that and trying to be a bit braver going in with my decisions rather than kind of falling back onto something that I maybe might be a bit more comfortable with. It gets tougher every single year to stay relevant and kind of keep your skills up to a point where you can compete with other players. New player base coming in all the time makes it more difficult and like I say the ceiling on the players kind of skill level gets higher and higher so it is really difficult to stay relevant and finding the time as well when you're kind of getting older you're getting jobs, you've got family and things like that to actually put into honing your skills and trying to get good is really difficult but you do make do. If you've got the passion there to do it there's resources online like we've never had before when I first started out you never had the amount of resources to help you as a player kind of stay up to date with new meta trends and what Pokemon is being played more than others and things like that so you've got that as a really good base and obviously talking to and counting on friends is a massive help and something I would always advise players of all kind of calibres to do when trying to stay relevant and honing those skills for future tournaments position or just clenching their spot, this is a really important match well I mean like we've seen how well Lee played today Alejandro obviously is a dedicated poker player I think one of the best things I can advise new players coming in is taking advantage of all the great resources we have online now you know you've got articles, you've got websites, you've got content creators that are providing a great bunch of information for you to get up to speed with what trends are happening in the format and what to expect when you go to tournaments, just utilize those and then also try and get in contact with other players if you're new to the scene, you don't know other players, make friends and then you can bounce ideas off each other, don't do it alone it's something I did for a long time and it didn't help me and it wasn't until I started kind of communicating and speaking and making friends that really kind of elevated my play to the next level and that's something I advise all new players to do Welcome, thank you so much Aaron and welcome trainers to the Pokemon 2022 World Championships here in London Casting Worlds in London was an incredible opportunity I feel super privileged to have been even asked to be part of that production we had a great crew that made the event and doing it extremely easy as tiring as it was but it was just one of the most amazing experiences that I've ever had and honestly the peak of probably my casting career and I don't think it'll ever be topped again doing it in my kind of hometown as well was just amazing and seeing new players coming in and having great runs as well as some other players that have known for a long time have an amazing time in the world so it was a real highlight and you can see even without the Iron Defence we're not taking too much damage from that initial acrobat Pokemons give me so many opportunities which is weird to say really thinking just playing competitively and how many opportunities I've had and how many countries I've visited and casting that I've done and it also gives me the opportunity to become a content creator really in 2017 when I started creating content I had the idea of just helping new players get into competitive Pokemon and give them a little kind of helping hand and hopefully that's what the channel did it's evolved so much from there and although since Sword and Shield I took a little bit of a step back from primarily doing competitive content it's been the best thing for me because now I've got an idea of where I want to take competitive content and also what we've got planned for the future as well which is really exciting so I can't wait to get into what we'll be doing going forward with Scarlet and Violet