>>32332610I apologize, but your statement is false.
Assume we can order every trainer at a pokemon competition by a ordinal number system can, within it, rank the strongest trainer and order it all the way down to the weakest. In our ordering scheme example: Let 16 be the highest ordinal and 1 the lowest. So, if we get a pokemon match between say, 16 and 12, 16>12 and 16 is the winner in all cases.
Using this, we can create a tournament bracket such that the person who's ordinal number is 8 reaches second place, as opposed to the more appropriate number, 15 (as presented in this picture).
This heavily implies that the only thing that second place can tell us is if Ash's ranking are between right below Alan's ordinal number, being the trainer that's only better then the worst 1/2 of the contestants at the tournament.
It's not an indicator of if he's getting better, just that he's better than a particular partition of those who entered.
