The Pokémon World Championships (or Worlds) kicked off in Hawaii last week, and since then, we've seen the best TCG players in the world duke it out for the top spot. The competition's winners have already been announced, but I think we've found the prize for the most controversial decision. 

One competitor, Ian Robb, sat down opposite Fernando Cifuentes in the masters quarter-finals. After a hard-fought battle, Robb came out on top, so it looked like he would progress to the next stage of the tournament. However, when the next battle began, fans in the audience were confused to see Cifuentes, not Robb, sitting in the challenger's seat. 

It turns out that The Pokémon Company's international global esports and events director, Chris Brown, had to step in between matches after the Championship judges decided to hand out a penalty to Robb. "It was an unsporting conduct penalty," Brown says in a follow-up interview with IGN. "We applied it to the match that had just occurred and the standard penalty for that's a match loss." 

The poor conduct that Brown was referring to seems to be a rude hand gesture that Robb made just after his win against Cifuentes. Blink, and you'll miss it, but just after the handshake, it looks like Robb turns to the crowd (or someone in it) and makes a lewd gesture. 

One fan shared the moment this happened on Twitter: "I thought Ian Robb had acted ungentlemanly, but it seems it was just a masturbation gesture he made at the end of the quarter-finals." 

The disqualification has since caused quite a stir, as fans seem to be split down the middle as to whether or not this gesture deserves disqualification. "Are they stupid? This is not a lewd gesture," one fan says on Twitter. And while this gesture certainly isn't particularly shocking, The Pokémon Company has to be very strict when it comes to enforcing good behaviour. 

Almost half of all the players attending Worlds fall under the junior bracket, which is ages 12 and under, or the senior bracket, which is ages 13-15, and plenty of the audience will be children. Pokémon TCG has a sizable young audience, so it makes sense that The Pokémon Company polices things a bit differently than other esports tournaments. I mean, come on, this isn't Tekken. 

Alongside being strict about conduct, The Pokémon Company is also pretty rigid when it comes to what constitutes match conduct in particular. "Generally, the match is not considered to be over until you've actually signed your match slip… And so that's sort of a key moment," Brown says. So Robb was disqualified as his actions technically still fell under match conduct rules. Despite winning the round, it wasn't over yet—it's finicky and annoying, but them's the rules. 

The Play! Pokémon Standards of Conduct also makes The Pokémon Company's feelings on conduct glaringly obvious: "Players should act with empathy and grace and remember to treat those around them as they would expect to be treated themselves." This sentiment is repeated throughout the document. 

But to be fair, Robb has taken the ruling like a champ. "I'm cheering for [Cifuentes] today,"  Robb says. "After meeting him and his dad, I could tell how much making the cut at Worlds meant. He's a deserving champion." And the tournament is finished now, so there's not much else to do. Worlds concluded last Sunday, with Cifuentes snagging the top spot after beating Seinosuke Shiokawa in the Masters bracket.  

In poker roguelike Balatro, poker isn't poker for very long. After a few rounds your standard deck will be anything but, filled with glass cards and gold cards and a dozen or so aces of spades, while your bizarre collection of jokers enchant every hand you play into earning millions or even billions of points. By the time you're facing off against the big boss, what started off as poker has turned into something else entirely.

Now you can mutate and mangle the game of blackjack, too. Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers is a blackjack roguelike adventure where you sit down in a stinky tavern and try to play your way through the townsfolk, some of them drunker than others. As you and your opponent try to get as close as you can to 21 without busting, you chip away at each others' health and earn new magical cards to add to your deck.

Even standard cards already have some abilities: hearts heal you, spades protect you, diamonds reward you with money, and clubs do extra damage to your opponents. But you'll quickly collect more interesting cards as rewards for winning, like tarot cards, business cards, birthday cards, and maybe even social security cards. With the ability to hold special cards in your hand—not the hand you've been dealt, I mean your physical hand—the game quickly spirals from standard blackjack into something far more absurd.

The specialty cards I came across in the demo are pretty imaginative. There's the jackhammer of clubs which does 5 points of damage to your opponent, a wild card that mimics the value of another card, and a "kingmaker" that lets you turn another card into a king. Others are a bit weirder, like the Pi of Hearts: It works like a three of hearts, mostly, but when you stand it rounds up from 3.14 to 4, and if you don't bust its value permanently increases by one.

I also came across an Uno-esque reverse card, and I was amused to see my drunken opponent playing with a "rules" card—and who in a friendly card game hasn't had that happen once or twice? The rules card does change the rules: you can set your opponent's bust limit to 20 (to ensure they never blackjack) or 22 (to tempt them into hitting when they should stand, I suppose). I even saw a Geralt card at one point, though it was in my opponent's hand, not mine. There's also a trading system so you can occasionally swap out some of your cards in exchange for new ones.

Like Balatro, Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers has a charming lofi look to it and I daresay if you enjoy weird poker, you'll probably also like weird blackjack. There's a demo you can try now, and the full game will be published by Yogscast Games later this year.