Wolfe “WolfeyVGC” Glick is one of the most prolific competitive Pokémon players in the space. He’s won the official World Championship tournament, competed in several events around the world, and has amassed millions of followers on his YouTube channel where he talks about competitive Pokémon and the events he attends. However, Glick says in a lengthy new video that he will likely step away from in-person events because of harassment from fans.
The pro player says he’s had to deal with fans groping him during pictures and pushing boundaries like touching him without consent. He says this meant leaving this year’s Worlds tournament early because he wasn’t able to watch the event in peace after he’d been eliminated and that the stress he feels from these events has now started to outweigh his enjoyment of competing in the tournaments themselves.
Glick also says he wants to be there primarily to compete, but the fan interactions have begun overtaking his private time at the shows and even, in some cases, prevented him from getting to the matches on time.
Beyond that, Glick says that he doesn’t want to make a video for this year’s Worlds tournament because it would make him “relive” the event and all the bad memories he has associated with it. For now, he’ll be taking time off from in-person events, which could affect whether or not he qualifies for 2026’s World Championship.
“Even if I do qualify for the World Championships this year, it is very likely that I will not attend,” Glick says in the video. “It’s gonna depend on how the rest of the season and how the rest of these events go. But what I will say is that I do not want to have another Worlds like the one I just had. I would rather not attend than take the risk because I think that if I don’t attend Worlds there’s a chance I could come back in the future. I think if I have one more Worlds like this one, I don’t think I’m coming back.”
Glick says that these “parasocial” interactions have been both a problem in-person and online. The pro claims that while he isn’t above criticism, the “vitriol” from some has become so prevalent that he’s not comfortable interacting with fans or critics online, and that the unwanted attention has included sexual harassment in online messages too.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is that I feel like I’ve become more of a symbol and less of a person,” he continues. “There is a lot of responsibility and I’m very privileged to be in that position, but at the same time, I would like to be a person. Sometimes I would like to be Wolfe and not WolfeyVGC.”
For now, Glick will be taking social media breaks, doing fewer videos, and even playing Pokémon Legends: Z-A in solitude rather than on stream. He signs off the video saying that he still wants to create content about competitive Pokémon, but that he’ll have to take time to reevaluate his approach after these “dehumanizing” experiences. But he isn’t fully walking away and says he still wants to make changes to improve his relationship with the competitive Pokémon space.
“I always figured that if I stopped competing it would be because competition stopped being fun for me; like I lost the love of the game or maybe I wasn’t able to keep up with a new guard and it was really hard for me to never win. […] The thing I’ll say about this that is positive is that I’m still having fun. I still love competing and I’m still having a blast. If I could just do the competition part of tournaments and not everything else, that would be great for me. […] Because it’s still fun for me, I have motivation to try and fix things.”
He says he’s still looking into arranging meet-and-greets where fans can chat with him in-person, but isn’t yet sure what form those will take moving forward.
“I wish that I could do more,” Glick says. “I wish there was more of me to give. I really have tried for so hard for so many years to be the person people see me as, as this symbol, as this kind of unshakable bastion in the scene, but I am only human, and I think pretending that I’m not is not doing me or you any favors.”
