Pushing breakthrough over the terminator

The switch from Moltres to Zapdos happened Tuesday, May 1st at 1:00 PM. PDT according to the original announcement, but PST according to this site. Just to be on the save side, I waited until the later time had passed by 10 minutes. In local time that was 11:10 PM CEST, inconveniently only one hour before midnight.

As I did not play for two days on Easter, I collected my seventh stamp on Monday, April 30th at 8:00 AM CEST. This gave me a chance to withhold collection without loosing anything. I could collect my breakthrough reward after May 1st, 11:00 PM CEST and still get my stamp for Tuesday. For a chance to collect an early Zapdos, but mostly to satisfy my curiosity. Of course, I might just get one more Moltres, if breakthrough rewards were fixed like eggs at the time of finding them.

With little time until midnight and no desire to run around searching for pokemon at this time, I needed a research task I could do at home. This was impeded by my research list being blocked up pretty soon: You cannot collect a normal research reward while a breakthrough reward is waiting uncollected. Luckily, when this happened I already had one suitable task.

Preparations finished, I collected my breakthrough reward on May 1st, 11:10 PM CEST and I got:

Zapdos!

ATK 15, DEF 13, STA 11. Only 87%, but ATK 15. Also, my first Zapdos. So, not unhappy. :-)

Afterwards, I collected one of the two research rewards I had already completed on Monday. This did work for the May 1st stamp. No need to save up an unfinished research task.