Well, this is it. The big day. All of the USA qualifiers had boiled down to this, the national competition. Held in St. Louis, Missouri, the Pokemon VGC national competition was held over two different days and used two entirely different methods of elimination. This event did have a random drawing as the other qualifiers, but those who had qualified at the previous stops were guaranteed a spot for competition. About 224 people showed up for the 104 spots that were left for the random drawing, which is significantly less than a lot of the qualifier stops.
The method of play on the first day, Saturday the 27th, was Swiss style. In a nutshell, you play a set number of games; in this case, most people played 5 games total. If you won and kept winning, you were paired against people closer to your own record(so, if you won two matches in a row, you would probably be paired against someone else who was 2-0 or 2-1); this went for both winners and losers, each played someone of their own skill level. As an example, here is a picture of two of the flights that competitors were competing in that day(credit goes to FiveKRunner for the pictures):
Once this portion had been completed, the top 4 in each of the four flights got to move on to the Single Elimination portion on Sunday and were also awarded a trip to San Diego for the Worlds! Here is a picture of all of those who qualified for San Diego.
The overall winner was third from left on the bottom row, Mike Suleski. He took first and received a first place trophy along with other goodies. The second place finisher, Allen Liu, is second from the right on the top row. He also received a trophy and other goodies. Allen is known as imperfectluck, both on our forums and smogon.com.