Hacking Gets Top Players Disqualified At Pokemon World Championships

The Pokemon Company always holds something special every few years, if not annually, called the Pokemon World Championships. Pokemon’s equivalent of DOTA 2’s The International, or Street Fighter’s EVO, is every bit a star studded and world renowned affair, if not even more so given the preeminent popularity of Game Freak’s and Creatures’ franchise.

However, one thing that The Pokemon Company always frowns upon is cheating, and 2023’s Pokemon World Championships was no different.

As reported by the Video Games Chronicle, a few players were disqualified from going forward in the video game tournament section of the Pokemon World Championships, because they had used hacked Pokemon.

Now, to be clear, if a player had come in using a Pikachu with a green afro, that would be obviously hacked from the onset and those players would not have even earned their tickets to go to the grand finals this year in Yokohama, Japan.

No, the hack here involves the use of rare or hard to acquire Pokemon. These Pokemon that the players used could be earned in the course of normal play. However, these players were caught using Pokemon that they caught using third party applications.

Ironically, the reason they were found out was the reason that they got so far in the first place. These Pokemon had the optimal stats for playing in the tournament, and the tournament organizers saw enough red flags in the Pokemon being used to check and disqualify these players.

Another tell was the region locking of certain Pokemon. Again, it was technically possible for Pokemon that were locked to the Japanese version of the game, for example, to be obtained by a player in Europe, but some of the players who showed up had Pokemon that were too high level to have been obtained that way.

Video Games Chronicle also reports that this indicates a change in how The Pokemon Company is monitoring and penalizing players for cheating in earning their Pokemon. This may lead to some players or teams bowing out of playing in the future. However, as you can see in the image above, The Pokemon Company won’t be lacking in finding champions.

As featured in the official Pokemon Worlds website, these players are the actual champions of this year’s Pokemon Video Game Championships. They passed The Pokemon Company’s screening, and still earned their way to win those coveted titles. And that’s the way Pokemon should be played.