Featured Tutor #3 - IronBullet93

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Welcome to the first edition of our new project, Featured Tutor Interviews! We will interview tutors about Battling101 and their experiences with the program. This project will be hosted by Leftiez and me, Steve Angello. Today we will be interviewing IronBullet93, Battling101 moderator and one of the tutors we have .​

  • Can you tell us a bit about your life outside Smogon?
I'm currently a masters student studying Finance in London. When I'm not studying (which is a lot of the time) I like playing tennis, reading thrillers/fantasy novels, playing guitar, and browsing the million forums I mod on here hehe. I'm also a really big fan of classic rock music, particularly the Beatles as you can probably tell from my profile.

  • When did you join the Battling 101 program?
I joined last September.

  • Why did you join Battling101?
Before I went on hiatus in 2012 my involvement in the community was mostly limited to RMT and tournaments. When I returned though I felt a strong inclination to contribute more. I was always interested in getting involved in B101 but just never got around to signing up. As there were spots open for my strongest tiers (UU & DPP) I decided to try my hand at tutoring and use the knowledge I'd gained during my time here to try and help newer players.

  • Did you sign up as a tutee initially?
No, because I actually wasn't aware B101 existed at the time lol. The first tier I ever played was DPP UU and I picked it up solely through chatting with fellow players on Shoddy and browsing the strategy dex. By the time I actually joined the forums I was quite adept at it, and didn't really have a need for tutoring.

  • What's your preferred style of battling?
My preferred style, no matter the gen, has always been bulky offense. I feel that it it provides the best balance between covering as many threats as I can defensively while still allowing me to go on the offensive and put my opponent under pressure at any time. It's very important to have a defensive core to fall back on when things go wrong, and at the same time to have a way to break down my opponent's own core. And I feel balance provides the best of both worlds in this sense. It is also very hard for my opponents to know what to expect when you're running balance as there are so many possible options to consider when you're building a balanced team, while other playstyles like hyper offense and stall are very one-dimensional and your opponent will usually know what is coming.

  • What style do you encourage your tutees to follow and why?
That depends on my tutee's preferred playstyle. I usually concentrate on the one they are most comfortable with first in order to develop their ability and confidence and then make sure I branch out to other playstyles and give them an idea of how to play those too.

  • Are there any patterns in your tutoring style?
I always start off with test battles so I can assess my tutee's ability. I then question him regarding his thought processes and why he made the moves he did. In this way I can judge what are the main areas I need to focus on, whether it be teambuilding, prediction, or long-term thinking. So if he needed to develop his prediction skills, eg. if he unnecessarily overpredicts sometimes, then I would try to teach him how to balance the risk and reward of each move, and decide his move based on the best possible move the opponent could make. I then try to develop his skills for each playstyle separately.

  • How do you feel while tutoring ?
It's time consuming and can definitely be frustrating at times when your tutee does not pick up on a point that seems very obvious to you, but that is completely outweighed by how rewarding it is. It's just an incredible feeling when you see your tutee gradually improving, making more intelligent plays, and just becoming a better battler in general based on what you've taught them.

  • Do you follow a process while tutoring?
I always start off with test battles so I can assess my tutee's ability. I then question him regarding his thought processes and why he made the moves he did. In this way I can judge what are the main areas I need to focus on, and then depending on his preferred playstyle I try to improve his skills in these areas. I then aim to create a team with him based on what we discussed, and test it afterwards. I then branch out to other playstyles and repeat the process.

  • What's your favorite strategy that you've run? This can be from any metagame or time period.
My favorite strategy ever was when I used Taunt + Dragon Dance Tyranitar in DPP for OST 7. DD TTar's most common check, Skarmory, depends on phazing it out to check it. However with Taunt Skarmory was essentially rendered setup bait and meant at least a free +2/+2 for me. In general it helps to shut down Pokemon that depend on status/phazing to stop a TTar sweep. I remember it working wonders in the last few rounds, sweeping in the quarters and semis before ipl paralyzed it with a Rotom Thunderbolt in the finals which lost the game for me ;_;

  • Do you wish to get specific feedback from your tutee, and not just receive a grade?
I try to be very clear with the tutees on what they specifically want from each round, and at the end I always ask if there's anything else they would like to go over, if they enjoyed the experience or not, and if there's any area I could improve on for future reference. If they are satisfied, then I can be confident that I did a good job, and this will be reflected in the grade I receive.

  • If you could improve B101, what would you change?
More OU and Past Gen tutors please! We appear to have a shortage in every round lol. In all seriousness though it would be good if more knowledgeable players would sign up to tutor, the number of people who sign up wanting to be tutees is enormous and some of these guys honestly have real potential which I can tell from experience. It's such a rewarding programme and sharing your knowledge and experience with the new generation of players is nothing less than a duty in my opinion.

Other than that I really like the direction the forum is taking right now with the new projects set up by Plus and my lovely interviewers ;)​



Thanks IB93 for spending his time doing our interview, and feel free to ask him questions.
~Leftiez and Steve Angello​
 
beatles n_n great band, fun songs

  1. rather controversial with many differing opinions, but what do you think about ORAS tiering as a whole across tiers?
  2. is there a possibility of shifting timing or having sessions in two batches, the current timings are a bit inconvenient and especially with school starting, hard to meet for certain timezones in asia (i'm in india and the signups were at about 4 am for me o_o). i know it's probably difficult to organize/set up but it seems like an interesting idea to me o_o
 
This thread is amazing, love seeing its weekly developments! As per usual I have have some questions I would like to ask:

  1. Who is your most successful or well known tutee?
  2. Which player brought you the most joy whilst tutoring?
  3. You said that B101 lacked old gen tutors, how do you believe this could be fixed?
  4. Who would you like to see join the B101 program as a tutor?
  5. Whats your opinion on ORAS?
  6. Who has inspired you the most as both a player and a tutor?
Sorry for the wall of questions, but there is a lot I wish to know from you, considering your high status in the community and the many insights you could potentially offer!
 
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IronBullet

Astronomy Domine
is a Top Tutor Alumnusis a Site Content Manager Alumnusis a Top Team Rater Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Admin Alumnusis a Top Social Media Contributor Alumnusis a Community Contributor Alumnusis a Tiering Contributor Alumnusis a Contributor Alumnusis a Smogon Media Contributor Alumnusis an Administrator Alumnus
Kingler12345 I think you mean greatest band, greatest songs* n_n

1. Regarding our tiering system as a whole, I think we have definitely made good progress in recent years in changing our definition of a "banned" Pokemon. It's gradually changed from something that is clearly broken to something that, once removed, simply makes the game more fun to play. However it is this definition that has led to the dilemma that's currently being faced in Ubers with Mega Groudon, who has seen such widespread use and become extremely centralizing. I don't play Ubers at all but from what I've seen, a lot of players find the metagame stale and not fun to play. But then again, Mega Groudon is far from being considered an unstoppable Pokemon and is not broken in the traditional sense. So this is essentially a question of whether or not we are willing to make large scale changes in favour of a better, but potentially unbalanced, metagame. However this is not necessarily a bad thing, as we can see from previous metagames like DPP Ubers.

OU is a different story, where the sheer number of "great but not broken" Pokemon have led to an extremely matchup based metagame, a fact thats becoming stronger by the day. With the cap of each player being able to use only 6 Pokemon, it is becoming more and more difficult to attempt to cover every single threat and in OU there are simply too many of these. It's really reached a tipping point and something must be done to try and fix the issue before gen 7. UU for me has the best system, where all potentially broken threats are initially removed from the tier and then introduced one by one. Something like this could potentially be used for OU too. The only problem is that it is very time-consuming; it takes a while to introduce Pokemon one by one into the metagame and carry out decisions for each. But some form of this system might be the best way to go for OU too.

2. Yeah this is a pretty big problem haha, the signup times are simply too inconvenient for certain users. Unfortunately this is an issue that really can't be helped, but something I had in mind was changing the signup time each round to make it convenient for certain timezones while less convenient for others, in order to balance it out.

HeiDoe

1. I'd probably have to say Real (you'll always be praj to me though :P) who has come leaps and bounds in the past few months, even outplaying McMeghan in their OST match before losing to a WoW miss ;_;

2. I really can't pick, honestly all my tutees have been amazing and a pleasure to work with!

3. I don't know, I mean it's really not something you can advertise as people are well aware of the programme as it is. Actually screw it I'll just make a thread here and tag every single veteran player telling them to sign up to tutor :P

4. Really too many to list here, there are a huge amount of capable players out there who know their stuff and would make excellent tutors.

5. UU is cool and balanced atm and I've enjoyed it so far. DPP UU > all though.

6. Oh that's a hard one. My biggest inspiration as a player, hmm. The first tier I ever played was DPP UU, and the player I looked up to the most when I joined the UU community was Legacy Raider. Along with being an extremely skilled battler, he was also an excellent writer (seriously he wrote the best RMTs and warstories), a great rater, a very respectful and sporting person (which I feel is so important with Pokemon being the luckfest it is), and just an amazing member of the community, which are all attributes that I've strived to achieve in my time here.

As a tutor, I was not tutored myself and haven't really seen other tutors in action so no one really inspired me to be a tutor or to be a specific kind of tutor as such. Although I was part of an RMT workshop once and Setsuna was my mentor for that, and he was in general a very patient, knowledgeable and friendly person which are qualities I look to incorporate in my tutoring and which I believe are very important for any tutor.

Thanks for the questions guys!
 
nice man, i'm also a student in london (undergrad studying maths) and a big fan of classic rock music

could you name some of your fav beatles songs? ik they have so many good ones so it's a tough choice haha. maybe name some other bands/artists you like?
 

IronBullet

Astronomy Domine
is a Top Tutor Alumnusis a Site Content Manager Alumnusis a Top Team Rater Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Admin Alumnusis a Top Social Media Contributor Alumnusis a Community Contributor Alumnusis a Tiering Contributor Alumnusis a Contributor Alumnusis a Smogon Media Contributor Alumnusis an Administrator Alumnus
Void

Hey man! I did maths at uni too :O I went to warwick, where are you studying?

Haha ikr, seriously I love all their songs but I do have a select few I've listened to a lot more than I have others. Top 10 would probably have to be: in my life, and i love her, norwegian wood, across the universe, for no one, ive just seen a face, blackbird, im looking through you, all my loving, real love.

My other fav rock bands are oasis, floyd, iron maiden, dire straits, and green day. I also love folk music, particularly angus & julia stone, bon iver and ed sheeran.


Plus

lucy in the sky with diamonds: its abbreviation is literally LSD, what more do you need. Apparently though john said in interviews that it was simply based off of a picture his son painted in school about his friend lucy. Man I'd love to see what a painting of rocking horse people eating marshmallow pies and plasticine porters wearing looking glass ties looks like though.


yellow submarine:

"We all live in a Yellow Submarine,

Yellow Submarine, Yellow Submarine"

With its hauntingly melodic uplift and its weighty emotional downspiral this verse is possibly the most inspirational and certainly the most beautiful single piece of music written by man. It is said that, upon hearing this most wonderful of aural wonders that the Dalai Lama was able to transcend the layers of our imposed dreamworld and reach out, hesitantly and, in truth, flatulently to the ultimate reality, and establish a rapport with the eternal creator.

It's not a silly song for children gdi.


i am the walrus:

lyrics from glass onion:

I told you 'bout the walrus and me, man
You know that we're as close as can be, man
Well, here's another clue for you all
The walrus was Paul

Mind blown


Smurf.

Sup bro n_n I must've made millions and I can barely remember any :( I did remember one of my favs quite accurately though which I used in SPL 2, remade it recently to use in the DPP tour. Uses cool stuff like bulky SD Drapion and the Lord Poliwrath himself. Lead Ambipom too who needs more love :( use him in uupl dude!

Ambipom @ Silk Scarf
Ability: Technician
EVs: 252 Atk / 4 SpD / 252 Spe
Jolly Nature
- Fake Out
- Return
- Pursuit
- U-turn

Drapion @ Leftovers
Ability: Battle Armor
EVs: 252 HP / 120 SpD / 136 Spe
Jolly Nature
- Taunt
- Crunch
- Swords Dance
- Earthquake

Kabutops @ Leftovers
Ability: Swift Swim
EVs: 132 HP / 252 Atk / 124 Spe
Adamant Nature
- Stone Edge
- Aqua Jet
- Swords Dance
- Rapid Spin

Torterra @ Leftovers
Ability: Overgrow
EVs: 252 HP / 4 Def / 252 SpD
Careful Nature
- Wood Hammer
- Stealth Rock
- Earthquake
- Synthesis

Moltres @ Life Orb
Ability: Pressure
EVs: 252 SpA / 4 SpD / 252 Spe
Timid Nature
- Fire Blast
- Air Slash
- Hidden Power [Grass]
- Roost

Poliwrath @ Leftovers
Ability: Water Absorb
EVs: 152 HP / 252 Atk / 104 Spe
Adamant Nature
- Waterfall
- Focus Punch
- Substitute
- Encore
 
what's your favourite beatles album (fingers crossed)

what was your strat to get to ost finals few years back, any tips (teambuilding, prepping for specific opponents etc)?

please tell me you like the who

what do you like more out of pokemon, teambuilding or actual playing?

what's your favorite tier and why is it dpp uu

want to abandon uk this wcop and play for europe?

do you still have a pic of the avatar you used a while back? like with that guy drinking from a football or something
 
It's pretty noticeable that a lot of old players lost interest in mons lately and quit playing, so I'd like to know what makes you still attached to competitive battling, as you've been playing mons for a while.
 
Void

Hey man! I did maths at uni too :O I went to warwick, where are you studying?

Haha ikr, seriously I love all their songs but I do have a select few I've listened to a lot more than I have others. Top 10 would probably have to be: in my life, and i love her, norwegian wood, across the universe, for no one, ive just seen a face, blackbird, im looking through you, all my loving, real love.

My other fav rock bands are oasis, floyd, u2, coldplay, and dire straits. I also love folk music, particularly angus & julia stone, bon iver and ed sheeran.
ahhh nice, i've visited warwick once and really liked the place, great uni for maths as well. I'm studying at imperial right now. you said you're doing a masters in finance, what kind of career options are you looking at once you graduate?
 

IronBullet

Astronomy Domine
is a Top Tutor Alumnusis a Site Content Manager Alumnusis a Top Team Rater Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Admin Alumnusis a Top Social Media Contributor Alumnusis a Community Contributor Alumnusis a Tiering Contributor Alumnusis a Contributor Alumnusis a Smogon Media Contributor Alumnusis an Administrator Alumnus
Tomahawk

Man this is one of the hardest questions ever :P it's so hard to pick, my favourite songs are spread across all their albums. But if I absolutely HAD to pick, it would have to be Rubber Soul. That folk rock sound is my absolute favourite genre and that album is basically the epitome of it. Revolver comes an extremely close second though! Minimal difference between my love for the two.

I wish I could say something more useful here, but I honestly can't remember much at all :( the DD + Taunt Tar is pretty much the extent of it. The only other thing I remember is using Scarf Scizor a lot, it was a very new thing at the time and definitely very anti-metagame. I guess the advice I can give based on the Taunt Tar is to look for ways to get around a Pokemon's common counters using unconventional strategies, even if they're not popular. Also the most popular set is not necessarily the one you should always use, CB Scizor was by far the most popular at the time but Scarf Scizor was a real ace in the hole for me as its speed removed those prediction wars vs Gengar, made dealing with Starmie a lot easier and revenge-killed key threats like Lucario and DD Tar.

Who's The Who? :O jk I love them lol. Who's Next is incredible and my favourite album of theirs. baba o'riley, the song is over, bargain, going mobile, behind blue eyes and wont get fooled again are masterpieces. The going mobile and behind blue eyes intro riffs and the baba o riley chorus are three of the catchiest pieces of music I've ever heard.

Playing for sure. Pulling off ballsy predictions is the ultimate high n_n

Hahaha. I guess DPP UU has always just been a wonderful metagame, and with the suspects that kept dropping and going up it was always fresh and exciting (except when Cress and P-Z dropped down, that was ridiculous) unlike OU. There are so many possible ways to go about making teams, even Pokemon from the depths of NU ccan do a job in UU which means that you can be very innovative in making teams and still compete pretty well.

Haha please don't do this to me it's hard enough having to pick between Asia and UK.

Omg the bear grylls one! That's not a football it's a turtle LOL. Yep, he's drinking turtle blood. What a legend. Here's the pic.


Yagura

I actually am not as interested in playing competitively as I was in my first two years here. Rather this time I've stuck around here because I genuinely enjoy contributing and being part of the community. I've made some wonderful new friends and the UU community is as fantastic as ever. I've heard a lot of people express a similar sentiment before, in that it's the people that make you stay rather than the game. Don't get me wrong I still love mons, but I'm not as passionate about competitive battling as I was before.


Void

Oh imperial, nice! London must be a great place to study and experience college life. Yeah I'm mainly looking at jobs in asset and portfolio management :)
 
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