Pokemon Gold FAQ
 
Q: What are you trying to do?
A: Beat Pokemon Gold as quickly as possible without using glitches.
 
Q: What are you playing on?
A: A GameCube using a GameBoy Player.
 
Q: What is the best time?
A: 3:16:15 by me. (It should be 3:15:xx by pokeguy84, but he lost TWO god runs to terrible luck on Red)

Q: What is your goal?
A: 3:15 would be nice.

Q: Why are you resetting?
A: Probably because my Totodile's stats are bad. I want at least 12 Attack and 10 Special Attack at Lv. 5, and ideally 14 Attack, 12 Special Defense and 11-12 Speed at Lv. 6. Sp. Atk and Sp. Def are carried by the same DV in this game, so seeing good Sp. Def indicates good Sp. Atk as well.

Q: Why not Silver?
A: You can't encounter Sandshrew in Silver, and some runs want to catch Sandshrew as a backup Cut slave.

Q: What are the biggest run killers?
A: Rival 2 and Whitney each have about a 1/4 chance of killing you, and there are no safety strats to prevent this. Otherwise, you have to be very unlucky or take a big risk to die. Gen 2 speedruns are mostly about getting good encounter and spinner luck, not surviving difficult fights. Thus, it's easy to complete a deathless run but hard to complete a good one.

Q: How do you get the Master Ball every run?
A: By manipulating the lottery ID to be 01001, which matches the TID of the Spearow you receive for free on Route 35. The LID is set when you select NEW GAME, and it will always be the same as long as you execute the same inputs from a hard reset to NEW GAME. Inputs in the intro sequence have large buffer windows, so this execution is trivial. Conveniently, the LID stays the same until you clear all save data, so you don't have to do the manip before every reset.