Introduction to the Italian Room

Major Tournaments

The Italian room has a long tradition of major events focused on competitive play among our users in order to see who really is the best like no one ever was. Here is a recap of what has been going on since the first years of our room!

Tourtellin

The Tourtellin (a play on "tournament" and "tortellini", a traditional Italian stuffed pasta) was probably the longest-running event in our room's history. The first edition took place in 2015, and the Tourtellin went on for three more editions, ending in 2018. This was the very first big event that inspired all those that came later. Each event had an initial phase of four to six weeks; every week would feature a different tier, for which three tournaments would be hosted. For example, the first edition had ORAS OU, UU, and Ubers; the second edition had the same tiers with the addition of then brand new Battle Factory; the third edition had SM OU, VGC 2017, ORAS OU, and Random Battle; while the fourth and final edition was played in USUM OU, USUM Ubers, USUM UU, and Battle Factory. This weekly stage was then followed by a playoff phase, where the eight highest-ranking players would battle each other to compete for the first prize. The winners were empoleonlove (now Empo) in 2015, furoredeimicetti in 2016, V0lca in 2017, and Kebab Mlml in 2018.

IML (Italian Master League)

In late 2020, the first and only edition of the Italian Master League took place in our room. It began with a first phase where, after being divided into groups of four, participants would battle each other in a best-of-three round-robin fashion; the first match would always be SS OU, the second match would be either SS Ubers or SS LC as chosen by the loser, and the potential third match would always be in the remaining tier. Points were given or taken away for each win and loss, and the best two players in every group would move on to the next phase. This second phase consisted of an elimination bracket with the same best-of-three scheme, which turned into a best-of-five one starting from the semifinals. Here, the first tier would always be SS OU, while the other tiers to choose from were SS Ubers, SS LC, VGC 2021, and Doubles OU. The winner of the Italian Master League was Mihowk.

Seasonals

In both 2020 and 2021, we had a Spring Seasonal and a Summer Seasonal. Each seasonal had an initial four-week phase, and each week there would be two tournaments of a specific tier; some of the tiers that were played in the seasonals were SS OU, SS LC, Random Battle, VGC 2020, VGC 2021, and Monotype. Each tournament awarded points to the top four users, and the eight users with the most points would be eligible to move on to the following phase. This phase involved an elimination bracket with best-of-three challenges in the three non-random tiers of that edition, and the order of the tiers would be chosen by the user with the highest ranking in the initial phase. All of the seasonals were live-streamed on Twitch, and we launched our very own Twitch channel to stream the 2021 Summer Seasonal. This was a very fun way to interact with our users! The winners of the 2020 Spring and Summer Seasonals were, respectively, old magic wand and Marco210297, while the 2021 winners were Niko and LoSconosciuto.

As you can see, our room has a core competitive aspect that we are very proud of. Later in the article, you will find out how we intend to bring even more focus to competition among our users!

Fun Events

While the Italiano room puts importance on the competitive aspect of the game, be it by participating in the Smogon Tour or creating our own tournaments, we have also always cared about making the time spent here by the user as original and creative as possible. Thus, we also held some events that focused on just having fun on the simulator.

Lega Pokémon

This event was inspired by a feature from the official games: the Pokémon League. The very first Italian Elite Four were chosen through AG, Monotype, NFE, and 1v1 tournaments before the show could begin. Every first and third Saturday and Sunday of the month, there would be official tours in those tiers, and the winner would be able to face the Elite Four. In case of victory, the winner would take the place of one of the members of the previous Elite Four and become the person to beat in the next tour. Obviously, there was also a chance to become the Champion of the room: just like in the official games, a challenger had to face and beat all the Elite Four without losing and then challenge the previous Champion, if there was one. A good mix between competitive games and storytelling, this was one of our most original events ever and, who knows, might even be proposed again in the future!

SIBB (Super Italian Bros Brawl)

For this event, the Italiano room took inspiration from the Spanish and Portuguese rooms, which already had their own tournaments inspired by Super Staff Bros Brawl on Pokémon Showdown. Like in that tier, every user could choose the Pokémon they wanted, create a custom set, and submit it to the quality approval council. If the Pokémon was accepted, it would be added to the official list, with which every user had to build a team of six Pokémon. With more than forty Pokémon available, this was the user-favorite event of 2020 thanks to the creativity involved in making both the sets and teams and, you can imagine, the charm and pride of people using your very own Pokémon in the final rounds of the tour. The first Italian edition took place in 2020, and it quickly became a staple in the annual event schedule. If you want to play with your own Pokémon and your friends' ones, you should visit us and join the Super Italian Bros Brawl!

Games

In the past few years, the room has offered a variety of events that didn't necessarily take inspiration from the Pokémon world. The most important were Re dei Giochi, the Winter Championship, and chess. "Re dei Giochi" means "King of Games" and consisted of several mini-games like Mafia or Pokémon-themed Hangman. The Winter Championship was a mix of Trivia quizzes and 1v1 battles where only those who guessed the answers correctly were able to use attacking moves in each turn. The game of chess doesn't need any explanation, but the chess tournament was so popular that we decided to propose it again in 2022.

There are countless other events that the Italian room has offered its users over the years, from simple Catch and Evolve events to more original Halloween and Advent Calendar events. If you are looking for funny and new ways to play Pokémon, this is the place for you!

Collaboration with Other Rooms

Since the beginning of time, playing a game has been a matter of competition and cooperation. In our room, we care deeply about both aspects and, while we spoke about competition in the previous sections, we will now focus on cooperation. We will showcase the best events that we organized with other rooms or that we participated in together with other communities!

Futbolito

Futbolito is an exclusive game of the room Eventos that mimics a football game mixing instinct, mind games, Challenge Cup 1v1 battles, and a good dose of luck. The Eventos room has its own Futbolito league and tournaments, but in February 2019, the Italiano, Español, Português, and Deutsche rooms, under the careful watch of the Eventos room, united their efforts to create the first Futbolito World Loud Cup, with eight national teams playing against each other, sharing funny and unbelievable moments and battles and building a solid bond between the rooms. For a month, Eventos transformed itself into a real football field twice a week, with hundreds of people from all over the world cheering in their own language for their team, creating a unique atmosphere that still gives thrills. Our room concluded this adventure in third place, just behind the two veteran teams of Brazil and Venezuela. We from Italy really couldn't avoid a football event...

Language Tournaments

The first tournament since the creation of the Italiano room, the Languages Tour, was organized in 2013 and was played by six language rooms (Nederlands, Deutsche, Français, Español, Português, and Italiano). All the matches were in XY and BW OU, and after an intense month of battles, the French room came up victorious. The 2014 edition saw the same teams playing the same tiers, and the room Français won once again. This was the last edition of The Languages Tour.

The collaboration between the language rooms was brought back to life thanks to Mitsuki and Natan with The Language Showdown, an unofficial, for-fun, random-formats-only tour that has been taking place since 2020. The formats were chosen by the participating rooms, and the tour format is split into a round-robin phase and a playoff phase. The first edition saw the rooms Italiano, Português, Español, Deutsche, Nederlands, Français, Hindi, and Chinese competing for the win, with the last team emerging victorious. With the exception of the room Français, every team returned for the second edition, where team Indonesia (a private language room) made its debut, and the Hindi room conquered victory.

Chinese New Year Celebration Festival

Born on a cold and rainy February afternoon from an idea of Aryaa and Megagr, with the support of Bobochan and Kiwiko, this is the biggest event the Italian room has ever been involved in. Together with seventeen other rooms, we made our contribution to this celebration event across all of Showdown! Here, every room could decide on an event that would award points to users, who could then climb a common leaderboard in the hopes of winning a custom avatar. We decided to offer a randpoke tour, a classic of our room, with a pool of Pokémon representing the Chinese Zodiac signs. With three tours split between two weeks and 48 points awarded, our contribution was a complete success. Even if the winner wasn't from our community, we had a memorable experience and a lot of fun exploring different rooms with different themes and showcasing what our room was capable of, and we rocked it.

The Italian room truly enjoys attending and organizing events with rooms all over Showdown, as we think that collaborating and sharing are some of the core aspects of the big Pokémon Showdown community!

Team Italy

Since the beginning, some of the most talented users of our room have always competed in the higher-level official Smogon and PS! tournaments. Just the year after the foundation of the room, Italy managed to score the victory in the second edition of PSPL in 2014, defeating the WiFi room in the finals. You can read more about it in this thread or this article from Issue 5 of The Player, the old webzine of Pokémon Showdown. Most notably, though, in 2020, the team achieved first place in the World Cup of Pokémon after defeating team Europe in the finals, earning a well-deserved place in Smogon's Hall of Fame! You can learn more about the WCoP win by reading this thread or this article from last year's The Flying Press. Italiano is very proud of the team, and we always enjoy following the games and discussing them in chat; so if that's your cup of tea, we will wait for you around the time of the next official tournament!

Translations

The Translations project was born in 2016, and the very first language that The Flying Press articles were translated to was French. The Italian language followed just a few months after, led by then-Room Owner Haund, who, thanks to his work and dedication, quickly became the leader of the whole project. In the beginning, the project translated articles that were already released, but soon moved to quickly translating new articles so that articles could be simultaneously released in all languages. The project later moved to translating Smogon analyses as well. In the years to come, several users tied to the Italian room followed in Haund's footsteps to lead the Italian project as well as the entire Translations project. Alpha, who was also a Room Owner at the time, took over as the leader of the entire project in 2020, and during his time as co-leader, he introduced, among other things, the translation of social media spotlights. In 2021, the project published 33 articles and 109 analyses translated into Italian, as well as all 365 Facebook daily spotlights.

If you are fluent in Italian and would like to get involved, check out this thread which explains all the information you need to know. You can also have a look at the index of Italian translations for The Flying Press articles!

Room Bot

The room bot is cerbottana (Italian for "blowgun"), and it was born in 2014 from an idea of Parnassius (who later became Room Owner) and oizys, who originally forked the infamous boTTT. As such, the first version of cerbottana was written in JavaScript and sported the same features and functionalities as its predecessor. The very first command that was implemented in cerbottana was the .trad command (short for "traduzione", Italian for "translation"), which allowed users to translate items, moves, and abilities from Italian to English and vice versa, something the bot's creators thought would help people used to playing Pokémon games in Italian adapt to an American website such as Pokémon Showdown!. Several other useful commands were implemented but later removed once they became native commands of the server. The development of cerbottana came to a halt in late 2015, though, and the room staff turned to other bots to help with auto-moderation.

After a failed rewrite attempt in 2018, still based on JavaScript, cerbottana was revived in 2019 by Parnassius and plat0 with a full Python rewrite. Parnassius is still the maintainer of our beloved bot, and several room users have contributed to its development since then. The bot has grown out of its auto-moderation phase, and it now provides a plethora of cool functions and games, some of which were implemented by users of the room, namely, .gtm ("Guess The 'Mon"), which takes advantage of PS's hangman feature to randomly output a Pokédex entry for users to guess, and .randtour, which creates a random tournament in a random tier with random rules. .trad is still there with its new alias .translation; it now works with all supported languages and helps out translators dealing with Facebook Spotlights, and it is now accompanied by a series of cool commands aiming to help our main series aficionados, like .learnset, .locations or .encounters (try them out yourselves if you want to know more!).

If you'd like to fork or contribute to the development of cerbottana, check out its repository on Github.