The Pokemon TV Show is still around today. Since the airing of that particular episode, there have been stricter policies on flashing images that are similar to the ones that caused the problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Senshi_Porygon#Aftermath

The 36 people mentioned in the article are those who have qualified for the World Championship by ranking highly at the US National Championship. It doesn't even include people who qualified through other means or from other countries. The US TCG Nationals tournament (which allows all players who live in the US) had 1507 participants across 3 different age divisions. The Video Game portion is smaller right now. The US Nationals only had around 300 players in the top age bracket. I'm not sure about the lower are brackets but they probably had around 300 players for a total of 600 video games players at the tournament.