One of the best competitive Pokémon players in the world lives in D.C.

Like many kids born in the 90s, Wolfe Glick grew up obsessed with Pokémon. He collected the trading cards and played the video games before he could even read.

“I felt for so long that competitive Pokemon was so cool and people just didn't realize it,” Glick told the 51st at Sabeh Café in the Columbia Heights neighborhood he calls home. “I wanted to help people understand it, then it grew into this thing that I would never have expected.”

In 2011, that hobby took a turn that would eventually turn Pokémon into his full-time career.

As a freshman at McLean High School, Glick decided to enter a tournament at the Dulles Expo Center in Chantilly, Virginia. He had experimented with the video game’s player-vs-player mode with friends, but was a newcomer to the burgeoning competitive Pokémon circuit. 

The tournaments, known collectively as the Video Game Championships (VGC), drew some pretty big crowds — Glick remembers close to 300 people competing. But despite his lack of experience and an unforgiving format where losing even one match would send you home, Glick won the whole thing.

His prize was a free trip to the national championships, so a couple months later Glick made the drive to Indianapolis – and won that tournament, too. That qualified him for his first world championships, where he came in sixth. 

Glick’s competitive career went from strength to strength over the next few seasons, as he racked up a record-breaking number of regional-level tournament wins on the way to a 2016 World Championships victory. (A Reddit post with hundreds of replies debates what else Glick might have to do to be considered the greatest player of all time – if he isn’t already.)

Although he hasn’t won the game’s premier tournament since, Glick tells me that he’s now playing the best Pokémon of his life.

He became the first player to win ten regional-level events this January after edging out 735 players to win the Toronto regional. The very next month, he won the European International Championships (players from any region can enter), which was the largest competitive Pokémon tournament of all time by entries.

“1,400 players trained their Pokemon, traveled to London, practiced with a friend, worked on their team,” Glick told the audience after winning the tournament’s final match. “1,400 people showed up to this tournament hoping and dreaming to win this entire thing… but it wasn’t enough!”

One of the reasons for the tournaments’ growth in popularity is Glick himself.

In 2016, he started posting unedited clips of battles to YouTube from his dorm room at Virginia Tech. Known as Wolfey to his followers, Glick gained a few thousand viewers quickly, but it felt like there was a ceiling for his audience while Pokémon — and especially competitive battling — remained a niche topic. Then, that same summer, Pokémon GO mania swept the country.

While at an internship in North Carolina, “I showed up to work and all the other interns and both my bosses were playing Pokémon GO,” Glick recalls. “It was this really surreal moment where I was like, ‘This is my thing, what are you guys doing playing Pokémon?’”

The renewed interest in Pokémon, combined with the release of a new game, brought him tens of thousands of new followers.

For the next few years, he worked as a government consultant in D.C. while competing and sporadically uploading gameplay footage.

Like for many of us, 2020 was a pivotal year in Glick’s life. In February, finding himself unfulfilled at his job, he decided to make a leap.

“I said, ‘You know what? I'm gonna quit my job. I'm gonna do six months with YouTube, and then I'm gonna go back. Surely, surely I can take six months off and won’t have any trouble finding another job, right?’” Glick recalls. “It was, uh, interesting figuring out how to navigate both being self-employed and living in a global pandemic at the same time.” 

For the first year, he posted videos daily. And while his channel did grow substantially, Glick wasn’t proud of the material he was releasing. After taking a few weeks off to think and consult with friends, he decided to hire editors and build out a new content strategy. His first two videos after the switch gained over a million views each. 

He now works with a team of editors and designers, uploads videos nearly every week, and has released multiple feature-length videos recapping his tournament performances and commenting on the competitive landscape. Before coming to this interview, Glick had been recording pages 75 to 85 of a script for a video that is likely to be over five hours long.

The shift has been a success: he has nearly 1.9 million YouTube subscribers, and his videos consistently pull in over a million views. Beyond the ad revenue from YouTube, Glick also makes income via his Patreon channel, where over 3,000 members pay at least $5 a month for extra videos and access to his notes on tournaments. (He also launched a merchandise line, selling apparel with the slogan “World Champ Difference.”)  

Unlike most online content creators who have congregated in Los Angeles and New York, Glick has no plans to leave D.C., where he is glad to talk about things other than Pokémon and YouTube with friends that have more “normal” jobs. He also loves the access to green spaces like Rock Creek, is a sucker for Mount Desert Island Ice Cream, and is glad to be near his parents in McLean.

“Whenever I go to another city, I'm like, ‘where's the nice part?’ Everywhere in D.C. is just so pretty. I love the marble buildings, the National Mall is incredible,” Glick says. 

Meanwhile, the exposure Glick has brought to competitive Pokémon has helped grow the D.C.-area scene, according to local tournament organizer Kyle Littleton. At least five stores around the region host about a dozen events for players to convene and face off each year.  

“His contribution has been invaluable to not just the state of VGC, but to Pokémon in general,” says Littleton, who has been organizing competitions for a decade. “I don't know if I can think of an exclusively Pokémon content creator that has contributed more to Pokémon as it pertains to organized play.”

Having reached the pinnacle of competitive Pokémon nearly a decade ago, it’s natural to wonder what keeps Glick competing. While Glick says he needs a better answer to the question, he seems to have found a balance.

“My goal was to win the World Championships, and I’ve done that,” he says. “Probably some people expect me to set some kind of crazy follow-up goal, but the truth is winning once was enough for me. I just really love playing.” The game has brought him lifelong friends, and “the thing that would get me to stop playing is probably if my friends stopped playing. That's probably what would tank my enjoyment the fastest.”