This weekend, the officially sanctioned Pokémon Video Game Winter Regional Championships will be held in five cities across the United States.

Competitors will gather in Long Beach, California; Lake Buena Vista, Florida; St. Charles, Missouri; Salem, Oregon; and Sandston, Virginia and go toe-to-toe in Pokémon Black 2 or Pokémon White 2 for the title of Pokémon Winter Regional Champion. There are three age divisions, and the winners from each division will receive travel arrangements to the 2013 Pokémon U.S. National Championships being held July 5th through July 7th in Indianapolis, Indiana.

There will also be representatives at each location distributing a special Cloyster modeled after the one used by the 2012 Junior Division World Championship team.

More information, including the various addresses for where the events will be held, is available on Nintendo’s official Pokémon website.

Pokémon scares me. As phenomenon, it is rivaled only by Star Wars and Power Rangers. It just will. Not. Die. I remember playing the trading card game back in my freshman year of high school. That was 1998—fifteen years ago. My youngest sisters are almost as old as I was when Pokémon debuted on Game Boy. This weirds me out.

Source: Pokémon.com