Cheese: FEAR

There aren't too many ways to cheese other players in Pokemon; usually because tournaments don't allow the use of such devious tactics, specific Pokemon, or other nuisances.

Today's quasi-appropriately named cheese will be the FEAR tactic, which has existed since the existence of the Focus Sash.

Fear is an acronym, which stands for:

Focus Sash
Endeavor
Attack
Rattata

Attack should actually be Quick Attack, but FEQR doesn't have the same flavor to it.

This particular setup allows a Lv1 Pokemon to be able to knock out a Lv100 Pokemon, with a fair degree of certainty.  A typical FEAR battle goes as follows:

1. Higher level pokemon, who is almost certainly faster, attacks first.
2. Assuming that the attack does direct damage, Focus Sash on the Rattata kicks in, leaves Rattata at 1 HP.
3. Rattata uses Endeavor, which drops the opponents HP to match the users.
4. Rattata follows up with Quick Attack, which (normally) has priority over the other attack, will knocks the opponent out.

This is quite an evil little beast; those older people who are familiar with it have a different meaning for the acronym; as I want to keep this blog appropriate, I will leave that part out.

Quick attack can be replaces with other increased priority abilities; such as Ice Shard, ExtremeSpeed, or Vacuum Wave.  Likewise, the pokemon can be any one which can learn endeavor and one of the increased priority moves.

The tactic has become more prevalent in Generation V, as the ability Sturdy (which has been all but useless up until this point, as One Hit Knock Out attacks are generally banned) now functions as a Focus Sash; allowing a greater number of pokemon to use this ability.

Of course, any cheese has a counter; and this one has quite a few:

1. Not using a direct attack the first turn (inflicting a status, via Toxic, Will O Wisp, Sing, etc)
2. Ghost-types are immune in most cases; unless an ability such as Scrappy, a Ring Target, or Odor Sleuth is in effect.
3. Any weather hazard (note that certain pokemon which can utilize the FEAR strategy are immune to weather effects).
4. Entry hazards (unless it is a Flying-type in the case of Spikes)
5. Multi-Hit attacks, such as Double-Slap (since these always hit twice, the Focus Sash will be used after the first attack)

Overall, I would rate this cheese as Swiss:  it is effective, but there are quite a few holes in the strategy.