The Fire-Grass-Water triangle is where every Pokémon player starts. Fire beats Grass, Grass beats Water, Water beats Fire. It's the starter lesson and it's deliberately simple: three elements in a cycle, no dominant strategy, each one with a natural counter. Nintendo didn't invent this logic. They licensed it from the oldest hand game in the world and expanded it across eighteen types.
The expansion creates complexity that the original game doesn't have. In standard Rock Paper Scissors, every throw beats exactly one thing and loses to exactly one thing. In Pokémon, type matchups are one-to-many: Water is strong against Fire, Rock, and Ground, and weak against Grass and Electric. The relationships multiply further with dual typing, which stacks advantages and vulnerabilities. A Water-Flying type hit by an Electric attack takes quadruple damage. A Grass-Steel type resists both Water and Grass attacks. The eighteen-type chart contains hundreds of individual matchup relationships, all derived from the same underlying logic as three-gesture RPS.
The competitive game adds layers that standard RPS doesn't need. STAB — Same Type Attack Bonus — increases the power of moves that match a Pokémon's type by fifty percent, which means identifying your STAB combination and playing into favorable matchups rewards the same type-advantage thinking the game teaches from the beginning. Coverage moves exist to handle the counters to your primary type, which is the Pokémon equivalent of gambit-mixing: you're not just playing your main strategy, you're anticipating what your main strategy is weak against and carrying an answer.
Switching is the mechanic that makes the type system genuinely strategic rather than just educational. In standard RPS you can't change your throw once the count begins. In Pokémon, you can switch your active Pokémon on your turn, which means the matchup can shift mid-battle. The game becomes a layered prediction problem: you're trying to threaten a favorable type matchup while anticipating your opponent's switch, while they're doing the same thing. Two players who both understand the type chart and both understand switching are playing a game of what the competitive community calls "prediction" — essentially, recursive read-and-counter at higher and higher meta levels.
The WRPSA connection is direct. When people say Rock Paper Scissors is a framework for understanding competitive games, Pokémon is the clearest illustration of that framework scaled to hundreds of variables. The starter triangle is still there at the foundation. Everything else is built on top of it.