Latios vs. Latias: Why we play the way we play

Using behavioural economics to understand how we make decisions in Pokémon VGC

Paul Koll, Mar 30, 2025

Anyone who has ever clicked Fake Out into a Covert Cloak knows, that the first move that pops into your head is not always the best one. It’s not that you didn’t read the teamsheet. You noticed the Covert Cloak, but your first instinct was still to click Fake Out. You made a snap decision, and it cost you. If you had paused to think about the board state, you would have made a different play.

In 2011 the psychologist Daniel Kahneman published a book that dealt with this sort of problem. “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is a summary of the work that Kahneman did with his long-time research partner Amos Tversky. Even though they were both psychologists, the field that their work launched would eventually become known as behavioural economics. This is because their research can be used to describe how people make economic decisions. The book mainly analyses how people make choices and the pitfalls that lead to wrong actions, such as clicking Fake Out into a Covert Cloak. So, in this article let’s look at how the ideas of Kahneman and Tversky can be applied to Pokémon VGC and how understanding them can help eliminate unnecessary mistakes.

Two Systems

Kahneman describes two different modes of thought: One of them makes fast, instinctive, almost automatic decisions, while the other is slower and makes conscious and calculated choices. He names these two mechanisms System 1 and System 2. Since these names are quite abstract and we are talking about VGC, let’s use two Pokémon to represent them: Latios and Latias.