TRAINER'S EYE #9 - "In The Name of Charizard, Alolan Grimer, & The Holy Spirit" ft. EastsidePastor

TRAINER'S EYE #9 - "In The Name of Arceus, Alolan Grimer, & The Holy Spirit" ft. EastsidePastor
===

David: [00:00:00] My name is David Hernandez and you're listening to As The Pokeball Turns!

Hello everyone! And welcome to another episode of As the Pokeball Turns! A Pokemon GO podcast where we discuss news, events, and other topics around Pokemon GO. Today we have episode nine of trainers, eyes. A segment where we get to hear from you, the community, on how your Pokemon GO journey [00:01:00] started, where it has been, and where it is currently going. There are two things you aren't supposed to talk about: religion and politics. Today I plan on breaking one of those rules and if someone knows a politician who plays Pokemon GO, Please send them my way so I can break the other as well. When Pokemon was first introduced in the nineties, there were outspoken religious groups, most notably Christians, who claim Pokemon was from the devil and condition children into accepting occult and evolutionary principles. Things like psychic energy, ghost Pokemon putting people to sleep and eating dreams, And even Pokemon Battling promoting violence was seen as demonic and something to stay away from. Fast forward to 2016 with the introduction of Pokemon GO and some of these concerns were again brought up, but to a much lesser degree. That's because over time people realized that Pokemon was anything but demonic, but that it taught friendship, courage, relationships between people and animals, and exploration. But what happens when the saints, more specifically a church pastor, goes marching into Pallet Town? Well, you have my [00:02:00] guest for today. From Austin, Texas, he is the Pastor of the Eastside Community Church and a member of the TEAM OMEGALUL faction. My friends, allow me to introduce to you Holland aka EastSidePastor!



David: We are now live with the next episode of Trainer's Eyes. A segment of the podcast where we get to hear from various people around the community on how their Pokemon GO journey started, where it has been, and where it is currently going. Today I am joined by Pastor Holland Greg, but many in the Pokemon GO community may know him as EastSidePastor. Now, I gotta ask you this one question. It's been burning on my mind since you agreed to come onto this show. So whenever you do a sermon, do you like have the Go Plus or Gotcha going by chance?

Holland: I do not, I do not. Uh, we do have a, uh, a gym at our church now and in our, we got a basketball court in our parking lot, and so we got a Pokestop and a gym here, so I could do that actually but I've never done it before. , 

David: Have you ever thought about it or is it just kind of like you try to keep church in Pokemon GO separate? 

Holland: I haven't thought about it, but I have, like when [00:03:00] I, I'm up at my church right now and so like, when, I've been up here working before and have had it going in the background, but just never on a Sunday morning.

David: The reason why I brought that up, cause some, I don't know if you're a pastor who likes to be behind the pulpit or if you like to move around, but I figure if you're one of the ones who like to move around, that'd be perfect times to get your distance and eggs and all that stuff. 

Holland: I do move around quite a bit and, uh, yeah, rack up some steps on Sundays.

David: Definitely. Definitely. Now that we started, how about you talk about how your journey in Pokemon GO started? 

Holland: I was playing the Game Boy games when they first came out, so like as a kid, I remember when Pokemon Red and Blue first came out, loved them, I got 'em on like release day, right? And so I was playing with my friends from the beginning, have always loved the game. I played through like gold, silver and around that time, I think, I think that was like the last main series game that I played. Maybe gold, silver, yellow, something like that. And then I just stopped for a while, high school, college. I don't know, I guess took a break from it. I played some SMASH Brothers in college, but uh, that was about it in terms of games. I wasn't like a big gamer. That was like pretty much the only game I played, [00:04:00] every once in a while like a Zelda game, a Final Fantasy game, something like that. I moved to Dallas for a little while, lived in Dallas for a little while, working for a ministry and I met my wife and we both moved to Austin actually to be a part of a church here, we got married, we had kids. So I've got four kids now and my oldest kid is eight And it was back, I think in 2019, so about three years ago that he started getting into Pokemon. So at this time I pretty much hadn't played video games at all since I got married and then my son starts getting into Pokemon and watching it on Netflix and stuff like that. I had a week where my wife was at this youth camp or something and it was just like me and my son hanging out. And so I was like, Hey", let's download the Pokemon GO game and play together." Thought it would be fun, like father son bonding and I was like, "Oh it'll be nostalgic, playing Pokemon again" And we download it and we played together that week and had a blast. But I also was like, Saying this game's like super fun and it brought back all of the nostalgic memories. Then I saw that there was like a battle feature where you [00:05:00] could battle other people and I started learning about that, learned about Silph, and I tried a Silph tournament. This is like December, 2019, and I got last place dead last. I didn't win a single battle. But I loved it. I thought it was awesome and, I was like, "Man, I wanna learn more about this." And I think that was right before GBL came out. So anyway, once GBL came out, I was like, "Oh my gosh, I can just battle people from my house," and I just fell in love with it. 

David: So thinking back on your first time you did the Silph Tournament, do you know why you kind of lost, Have you ever looked back on it? 

Holland: Oh, it was, it was terr-, I mean, I didn't really know a whole lot. I didn't know anything about like strategy, show six, pick three. I remember someone mentioned counting moves and I was like, "Are you serious?" You count? Like you'd know how many, I was just tapping screen and pressing buttons, like I was clueless and I thought you're a psychopath if you count moves and you know that. You know, like, who does that? And so, yeah, I had Pokemon that weren't fully powered up. None of them were double moved. I was just, that was really bad, but I thought it was really fun.

David: I guess [00:06:00] GBL was more of the catalyst of what got you into Pokemon GO, right? 

Holland: Yeah, exactly. 

David: That must have been the steep learning curve, especially cuz you only are familiar with the first two generations like how did you learn all the new Pokemon? 

Holland: Just kinda learning as I went. Part of it, like my kids watching Pokemon on Netflix, I would sit down and watch it with them and so I was able to see some of it then, but yeah, I was unfamiliar with a lot of it and it just took me a while to even just get used to the game and the mechanics of battling and stuff like that. I didn't, I wasn't on Twitter at that point. Had no idea people were making like YouTube and Twitch content for this, so I was just completely going in blind, making it up as I was going.

David: With your experience so far in Pokemon GO, like, do you have any favorites at all? 

Holland: From the beginning, like Pokemon Red was the first game I ever played when I was a kid. Charizard has just been O G favorite, classic Pokemon. I've always loved Charizard as well as, I think one of the new ones, I didn't know what this was until GBL, but Alolan Marowak became a very quick favorite of mine, both just like in general and in the game. Those are probably top two. Always love fire [00:07:00] types, I guess. 

David: And what about the ones that you like to use in pvp? 

Holland: Yeah, in pvp, I think I first saw 2OButters using an Alolan Grimer in Great League one time and I thought it was like, really interesting and I ended up, I was like, "Oh, man, I can power one of those up and try it" and then it just became one of my favorite Pokemon to use, it was like a big core breaker in the Great League for Azumarill, Trevenant, cores. Beats fairies, has good matchups versus a lot of just like core meta Pokemon and so like, fell in love with that and it became a signature Pokemon for me. It's on my little like logo icon on Twitch. Have a lot of Great League teams based on it, I hit number two in the world in like the leaderboards, with an Alolan Grimer team in Great League. So that's definitely been a top favorite of mine. 

David: I gotta ask you, so whenever you try to build up a team, do you like try to build up around certain Pokemon, or how does your philosophy work when it comes to that?

Holland: Depends. I don't typically build a straight meta team. I'm usually, if anything, more of an anti meta [00:08:00] team, just building something that can handle the top common picks with maybe like a unique core breaker that people don't anticipate.

David: I think they call that a spicy picks, right? 

Holland: Yeah , yeah, yeah, exactly. So something like, I feel like just a good strategy in GBL is like most people are building teams that can handle the meta. They're not building a team that has like a good answer for Alolan Grimer, right? For other people it's like, "okay, well if I do see an Alolan Grimer, I'll just lose that and it's fine cuz I can win." People just aren't building teams against it and sometimes you can just go on a hot streak with kind of a niche, uncommon pick, that breaks some common core, So that's usually what I'll do is I'll try to find a unique Pokemon like that, it's a core breaker and build a team around it.

David: You talked about how in Silph Road, you got your butt kicked, let's just be honest. But then once GBL , once GBL came around, you started getting the hang of pvp, do you remember what kind of resources you used to help learn the process of PVP and how to get better at it?

Holland: I think like pre-season and season one and two. I think I got to like rank nine. That was like the highest I [00:09:00] got, I never quite made it to 3000 or 3,500 or whatever it was at that time to hit like the highest rank. But some of the resources that I was using, again, I wasn't on Twitter back then and so I wasn't like aware of the Pokemon GO Twitter community, had no idea that content creators were making videos on good teams and stuff like that, and I was using Gamepress and looking at tier lists and that's basically what I was working with, just that. And so I try to- I knew nothing about IVs and I remember mentioning to me the first time that you went like, Zero attack for Great League or Ultra League IVs and I was like, That makes no sense whatsoever. Like, y'all are crazy. 

David: It's, it's one of the upside down parts about PVP as you've come to realize it.

Holland: Yeah. And so, someone was like, "Okay, you need to download Pokegenie app, learn about IVs, you need to look at this website, PVPoke. And then someone sent me a ZyoniK video and so the only content creator I was aware of for like a year was ZyoniK. And so man, props to ZyoniK, I watched so many of his [00:10:00] videos back in the, that was like 2020. That was the first intro I had into like learning about actual technique, and team building, and that kind of stuff, so 

David: And with your experience in GBL, like how high have you gone in ranked whenever you do GBL now? 

Holland: So since season three, I guess, have hit the highest rank every season, so rank 10 or legend, have been consistently on leaderboards. I've been number two, number three, number five, number six, number eight. I've done GBLA two times, it's something that like organized by SpeediestChief, Will Dunphey, that's like the top eight players in the leaderboard are taken every Friday or something like that and get to battle each other in a tournament where you can win 50 bucks or a hundred bucks or something like that. So I made it onto that twice, didn't win the tournament, but it was fun to be able to make it on that.

David: Since you've grown through GBL, I gotta ask you this question. What separates somebody who like continuously makes expert to somebody who consistently makes legend?

Holland: I think there's a number of different variables, but like up at the top of those I would say [00:11:00] understanding the meta and either being able to skillfully use meta Pokemon or build teams that are essentially anti meta teams that can handle the meta, so being able to understand the meta and team building and then game mechanics wise, I think being able to count, which is funny that I'm saying count moves now because, my first Silph Tournament I was like, psychopaths do that like Who in their right mind would devote that much time to like memorizing this and blah, blah, blah, you know, It just sounded hilarious to me. Now I'm like, that's what you have to do, right? ? So you have to be able to have memorized, move counts and keep track of energy like that to know when your opponents are gonna throw certain charge moves, knowing if they're baiting or not, or being able to like swap to another Pokemon and catch a move. Those are the kind of like high skill plays that I think you have to know, move counts and keep track of energy. As well as, knowing when to throw your moves, especially with the recent update you have to be able to throw your charge moves at the right time or else you're gonna give your opponent like a massive energy lead. [00:12:00] 

David: One thing that impresses me is how they can count the moves and they know, it seems like you'll know each moves or is it just like select charge moves, y'all know? 

Holland: Kind of depends on who you are and I think the more that you know, the better chances you have of being able to have success in GBL or Silph or whatever kind of PVP thing you're doing. I think like the first level of like memorizing move stuff is just like knowing how many fast moves to a charge move. It's not perfectly accurate because, let's say like Swampert with Mudshot and Hydro Cannon and Earthquake. It's gonna be five Mudshots to your first Hydro Cannon and then four Mud Shots to your next Hydro Cannon. And because of residual energy, like energy that kind of carries over, you're gonna have to know like these cycles of five moves and then four moves or so, like a more efficient way of memorizing it isn't just like how many fast moves to a charge move, but how much energy each fast move generates and actually being able to be aware of how much energy your opponent has instead of just like knowing the move counts, I would say that's like the next level, a [00:13:00] more robust and accurate way of counting that's just a little bit harder, but way more helpful. 

David: You know, with all the glitches that do happen like what keeps you motivated to continue to play pvp? Like do you ever feel demotivated to play? 

Holland: I think this might sound like backwards, but what keeps me motivated to play is how little stock I actually put in this game and whatever achievements I have in this game. For me it is, a fun thing to do. It is not like I have to, be successful at this, I have to, win this or win that or achieve this kind of thing like, I think it's great to do those and I enjoy playing competitively, but if I stop playing this today, I will thoroughly enjoy the rest of my life, you know, , like, when it's a bad day and when there's glitches and lag. But like I play it cuz you know, it's fun. If I have a bad day, keep it moving , you know, and go on with the rest of my day.

David: That's something I've had to learn because back, probably 20 17, 20 18, I used to be very heavily invested to this game to where it would affect my mood. [00:14:00] If something wasn't going right, I had a bad day that day. But eventually I had to grow out of it a little bit to where like, You know, this game is a game for entertainment. This isn't my livelihood, thank goodness, but it's ultimately just a game to where it gives me a time to escape the real world a little bit, have a little bit fun with some imaginary Pokemon, go out and explore my neighborhood and stuff like that. 

Holland: Exactly! And I think if it was like, Hey, this is what I do, like I travel around, I do these tournaments, or I'm trying to really make a living off of YouTube and Twitch and winning tournaments or casting tournaments and stuff like that, I think I would be way more frustrated because I'm like, depending on the stability or success of this, game and it's mechanics, you know, to like, Me for my lively, I would be, I think I would be way more frustrated, but because I'm just like, " eh, I play this for fun." I stream sometimes and earn some revenue from that that I give away to others anyway, like, it's purely like a fun thing for me. To be honest, if I lag out and lose a bunch of sets and drop a bunch of points, drop some ELO because of [00:15:00] it, I'll be frustrated for a good five minutes, but then I'm moving on with my day

David: We're not all perfect, right? Well, speaking of traveling now, you have traveled for Pokemon event before, I believe you traveled to the Pokemon Championship, right? 

Holland: Yeah, the, N A I C, over the summer, I did travel for that one, and it's kind of funny, initially, the reason like I was going to that one was because it was near where my in-laws live. And so I was going to, actually fly there with my older two children and stay with them and just kind of make a whole, week out of it and, have my kids get to have time with their grandparents, I would do the tournament. While I was there, some stuff came up with us and with our kids, flight cost went up dramatically, and my in-laws ended up having some other plans. But I had already committed and had a couple other people from our faction that were going and so I ended up shifting plans and just flying by myself and staying in Airbnb with, a couple guys from our faction. It was still a super fun trip, [00:16:00] but I'm probably not gonna do a whole lot of traveling just solely for Pokemon stuff.

David: What was it like when you were in the tournament? 

Holland: It felt like every single person signed up for that tournament was like legit, really good and you know, which is super fun like you, don't really wanna go to a tournament, I mean, it'd be nice to get easy wins, but you wanna go and have a real competitive environment and play against the best of the best While I was there, I think I lost my first match, immediately knocked into the loser's bracket, which is like, " Okay, that sucks" but, uh, then I won my next match, won my next match after that, and then maybe won one more and then got knocked outta the loser's bracket. I had a good number of matches, felt like I was kind of making progress, working my way out of the loser's bracket, but then got knocked out, but I don't feel bad. I felt like I played really well. It was all close losses and, yeah, really good competition. 

David: You're actually part of a faction known as Team OmegaLul, I believe y'all's faction is Diamond Tier. Right?

Holland: Mm-hmm yeah, that's right. 

David: So how was the team Omega faction formed? 

Holland: So I was, I'm not an original member of it. So like Mystic Sparkle is a battler and [00:17:00] streamer, who does GBL and Silph and I think it was originally through like her discord or her community or something that a couple streamers and battlers got together and formed the faction in the first place. But I came in later. I think they had a couple people that were transitioning out and a few more spots opened up or something. And one of the members, KimleyHorn is his name, he and I went to college together actually and had recently reconnected over Facebook. I was on like the leaderboards in Pokemon and he saw it and was like, " Oh dude, I play this game too" and we hadn't spoken in years and it was just really funny.

David: Small world. 

Holland: Just kinda re- yeah, for real . And so we, we reconnected over that and then he invited me to join their faction. I was playing with another faction at the time, but I thought it was really neat opportunity to play with an old college friend and they were in Diamond Tiered so I was like, "Hey, I wanna be able to try some competition at that level" and I wanted to get better at the show six, pick three kind of format in case I ended up doing any [00:18:00] regionals or anything like that. 

David: Right and they must have, I mean, they clearly saw something in you for you to be in that kind of high level, like that's pretty impressive.

Holland: At that point I had been, that was like after I had placed number two and number six and stuff on leaderboard and been in GBLA and so I think they had seen some of that. I didn't have a whole lot of Silph or factions experience. The Silph experience that I did have was really bad, right?

David: I gotta say this, like you have such a humble attitude being number two, because I feel like if I was number two, I'd be like " yes, I was number two" and I'd be repeating it all over the place. But you just kind of treated like, " Oh yeah, I got to number two." Like you treated like, it's almost like regular conversation here. I'm pretty impressed by that. 

Holland: It was kind of funny, like especially it was with an Alolan Grimer team, it honestly just felt kind of funny to me that I was like, How am I? Like I got my ELO was like 37. 37. Uh, I got into the 37 hundreds within Alolan Grimer and I was just like, "How is this happening right now?" It was just one of those I think I had the right match ups on the right day and went on a big hot streak and gained a ton [00:19:00] of points.

David: So real quick, I have one last question about factions before we continue. Do you believe factions can make that push to the main scene with VGC, TCG, alongside Pokemon GO?

Holland: Man, I would love it if it did. So I haven't done any kinda like competitive vgc stuff, but even just kinda watching some of it, there was a shift from the, just like one Pokemon versus one Pokemon to doing two on two. Right? So you'll have one person playing another person, but even just the idea of having a team dynamic increases the strategy, increases the interest, and It just makes it more fun to watch more entertaining and stuff when you have a different level of strategy with teams that the one on one doesn't with the Trading Card Game, the VGC, so yeah, I don't know what the timeline would be like for that, but it's definitely a possibility and I would love to see it happen.

David: When did you start going from somebody trying to figure out PVP to becoming a regular streamer on Twitch?

Holland: That I will give credit and thanks to Holesome_ so if you're familiar with Holesome_ he's a really [00:20:00] popular and awesome streamer as well as casted a bunch of play Pokemon stuff now and he's casted GBLA stuff. Just great, entertaining guy, humble guy and he's a Austin local here, so I knew him just from our local Austin Discord and remember when he first started streaming. Which you know now he's got thousands of followers. He's top tier level of streamer, but like I remember when his first streams, there'd be like six of us in there and watching him with a crappy stream overlay and watching him play GBL battles. He kind of pioneered that here in Austin, at least in terms of the guys I knew. Holesome_ was kind of the first guy that I started ever watching on Twitch and seeing how fun it was to be able to going into like the team or community aspect of it. Not just playing your battles, but watching others and communicating together and being a part of the battles together. I think the community aspect was just really fun and kinda watching his channel grow and then learning from him, like, " Oh, you make money from if you make money from doing this?" Like I knew nothing about Twitch. Right? And, so just learning like you can actually bring [00:21:00] in revenue, that's when my thoughts turned toward, " okay, hey, maybe this will be a cool charity benevolence type thing where I could do what I think is fun. I could play Pokemon and do it in community as well as make some money from it and use that money to bless other people here in my community, like our church is located in a low income community on the east side of Austin, where that's like kind of our, our focus in terms of ministry as well. There's 3000 plus families in these low income apartments right near our church. Our ministry focus is serving and caring for these families and individuals who live around here, so we do a lot of stuff for, we got like a pregnancy center that we partner with here, do camps for kids, homeless outreach, a lot of stuff like that and so we're consistently meeting people who are in need and have financial or material needs that, as a church, be able to help and meet those needs and care for those families. And that's how my stream was born. 

David: I find it very noble all your earnings you earn from Twitch don't go to you at all. They go to the people in [00:22:00] Austin, right?

Holland: Yeah, exactly, yeah, I love it, man, it's, fun and I think people like to get behind good causes and stuff too, so, you know, it offers just something a little bit different on Twitch where it's like, " hey, we're gonna see some, hopefully, high skill battling and good, GBL content. You know learn some things about the game and teams to try and all that, but also like, " hey We're also gonna be supporting families in need, single moms and people who are in need of a little extra help." And so usually, like, whenever that money goes through, like whenever I get a Twitch payout, it'll either go to like HEB gift cards, you know, $150 gift card able to give a family just to bless them with some groceries or it'll go toward helping pay someone's bills or rent that month. I'm not getting like these massive payouts and stuff, but a hundred, hundred 50 bucks here and there that I'm able to use to help others and yeah, I think people love being a part of something like that as well.

David: obviously you're a pastor and you play Pokemon GO, and when I first heard about that, I'm like, "Dude, blew my mind!" like there's a pastor who plays Pokemon GO? Does your congregation know that you play Pokemon GO PVP on the side by chance or something like that?[00:23:00] 

Holland: I'm a open, transparent person, so I don't, have aspects of my life that I hide or anything like that. I'm just being myself. I'm fair in the sermon illustration stuff about my life. Like, it comes up, you know, So everyone knows, you know, I've talked about it before and the only people who really care, like the teenagers in our church who , you know, like might also, They got some points. Yeah. others are just like, "Okay, that's funny, but, whatever." There's no one else really in our church who plays this game, people are aware, but it doesn't play a big part in my role as a pastor in the church. 

David: Earlier you spoke about how your church has both a Pokestop and a Gym and churches are gyms because they meet the criteria for Niantic to be a Wayspot. People do go to churches to raid, especially during the off hours. As a pastor, do you see that kind of something unsettling or do you see something that's potentially good for people to kind of just drive up to a church randomly to do a raid? 

Holland: Personally, I think it's great. I've connected with people from Pokemon stuff, I've invited them to church and have seen some folks that I met, because they were doing a raid at my church in the parking lot and I connected with them, talk to 'em, invited them to church, and [00:24:00] I've seen people come to church through this and so have met a lot of people in the Austin community who either are interested in spiritual things and wanting to explore a relationship with God or wanna learn more about spirituality or the Bible or something like that or people who have had practical needs and families going through a hard time and just needing someone to be there for them and our church has been able to, either me personally or others in our church, been able to connect with them and step in and help me to need or support 'em through a hard time and so, I think it's great and you know, whenever I meet up with locals to do lucky Trades, we usually meet here at my church. Like our church here in East Austin, we are located on a corner that used to be the worst corner of Austin, like just known for drug trafficking, prostitution, crime. There still a lot of rough parts and things around the east side to where like a bunch of people showing up to play Pokemon in the parking lot doesn't even show up on the radar of like, something to be concerned about, you know? And especially with me being the pastor, like I see that I come out, I'm like, "Yo, what's your friend code?" and let me join the raid And, you know, if it gets people, you know, to know [00:25:00] that there's a church here, where they know somebody in case one day they're ever going through a time in their life and they're like, "Man, I wanna check out a church." They know which one that they can go to and they're gonna have a familiar face. You know what I mean? 

David: So when Pokemon first debut and even back when Pokemon GO came out in 2016, there's always been a bit of controversy between Pokemon and the Christian community, and mainly because like some of the Christian community believes that Pokemon either promotes evolution or promotes demonic possession or whatever, What are your thoughts as a pastor on Christians playing Pokemon? 

Holland: I chuckled a little bit, even as you're asking the question cuz that's not really like the circles of the Christian community that I tend to be connected to or run in like the highly, super conservative kind of right wing, where we view anything outside of Christian culture as the devil, that kind of thing. Not gonna be judgemental toward you if you do have those views, but I don't share those views. You know, when I see something like Pokemon, I'm like, it's a cartoon, it's fantasy. It's funny to me that there are many Christians who are very pro like Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the [00:26:00] Rings cuz those are written by Christian authors even though they have magic, they have, fantasy magical type things in them. But because there's Christian themes or written by Christian authors, you know, that's okay, those pass. But to me, I'm like, it's all fantasy and in any kind of fantasy, there are elements of things that are true or noble or good and things that are redemptive, even in something like, Pokemon or, a video game or a Disney movie or whatever it might be there, there's always going to be some type of good to be drawn out of something and so I'm typically more in that kind of viewpoint to where, I don't see Pokemon as being threatening or demonic or anything like that. I think it's a fun, a fantasy thing, and as a game, it's a way to actually engage with others, build community, have fun. 

David: Since you've played Pokemon GO and you've done all the PVP stuff, you even went somewhere to go play, PVP out in Ohio. In your opinion, what has been your biggest accomplishment when it comes to Pokemon GO? 

Holland: I think it would probably be, placing high enough on the, leaderboards to make a page one, top 10 spot, on the leaderboards and [00:27:00] play in the GBLA tournament. It takes a lot of a good mixture of luck and skill . There's always some element of luck in this game, no matter how skilled you are. You know, when those things align, you're playing well, you're playing skillfully, you have some luck on your side and being able to compete against the best of the best in the world. This feels like a good accomplishment. you know, there is another, uh, there's a regional coming here in, Texas, in Arlington in December. I think I'm gonna try to make it out there with my son. I would love to win a regional, be able to compete in the world tournament or something like that at some point. We'll see how it goes, my kids are all hooked on Pokemon. We'll probably be playing this game for years, upon years, you know? And So I, I'd love to, you know, just looking ahead, it'd be awesome to win a regional, play in Worlds, something along those lines could be really fun. Fulfill, the desires of my inner six year old from when Pokemon first came out. 

David: Before we do go, I do want to ask, you know, had people wanna get in contact with you, whether it be your Twitch, Twitter, or maybe even your church, how can people find you? Please, By all means, plug away. 

Holland: Yeah, for sure, man. Find me [00:28:00] on Twitter. East side pastor, I think my Twitter handle is actually my name Holland Greg, so h o l l a n d, like the country and then G R E I G. Feel free, connect with me on Twitter, follow me on Twitch. twitch.tv/eastsidepastor. I've been streaming Friday mornings around 6:00 AM or so. So yeah, jump on Twitch or Twitter, connect with me there. 

David: Definitely, and for anybody who's listening who wants to connect with him, I'll make sure to include links to both his Twitch and Twitter into the description of today's episode.

Thank you all for joining me for another episode of As the Pokeball Turns! As a reminder, you can subscribe to this podcast on apple, Spotify, or your podcast streamer of choice. If you want to support the show, consider becoming a Patreon by going to patreon.com/asthepokeballturns or by sharing the podcast with your friends and family. Feel free to follow me on all my socials by clicking the link in the description of today's episode. And i'll see you next time!

On the next episode of Trainer's Eyes.[00:29:00]