Everything that happened at the Pokémon World Championships in Hawaii

Last weekend, all Pokémon fans had their eyes on Honolulu, Hawaii, US. From August 16th until the 18th, the Pokémon World Championships took place, the most awaited competitive tournament of the year, with exclusive items and the best trainers on Earth, fighting for the title of Pokémon Master on many categories. Here, due to its huge public and player base, there are age league divisions: the Junior League is set for kids up to 12 years old, the Senior League includes trainers from 13 to 15 years old, and all players who are 16 and above compete in the Master category.

A special detail for the decorations and arrangements of the event is the cultural representation of the region it is held in, with flower patterned garments, Pokémon in diving gears, dances, ukulele and acoustic guitar music, among others. The four main competitive categories of the event were: Pokémon VGC, or Pokémon Video Game Championship, TCG, or Trading Card Game, Pokémon GO and Pokémon Unite.

To compete, however, there are certain predetermined requirements: only players with the invitation for the championship have the right to confirm their presence and join the tournament. Among the many ways of getting an invitation, the most common one is playing in competitive events throughout the year, such as League Cups or Regionals, that grant Championship Points, or CPs. The invitation is granted after beating a certain competitive threshold, besides also being sent to players that performed well during last year's Worlds. Therefore, the matches show an extremely high technical level, and only players who are consistent in competitive events can join the big one.

With an exciting result, the Top 8 was composed of teams from 8 different countries! Luca Ceribelli won, representing Italy - and Yuta Ishigaki from Japan guaranteed his silver medal. The tournaments also followed some specific rules: the match would be played in the most recent generation game (in this case, Scarlet & Violet), the battles were all Tag Team, or Double Battles, and some older Pokémon could be used, with a specific list of Pokémon, that also considers the limitations on the usage of Legendaries.

Some quick explanations: On Tag Team format, even though the teams consist of 6 Pokémon, only four compete each round, and the trainer decides which ones. With that, there is a certain mind game upon getting to know the enemy’s full team and trying to foresee which ones will be chosen and which strategies that could bring. In Gen 9, we were introduced to the concept of TERAstralization, a special transformation that can change the base typing of a Pokémon until it gets knocked out. This brought some spice to the battles, for bringing Terastralized Pokémon with reduced weaknesses, besides preventing the use of certain TERA transformations that are far too powerful.

The first day of the championship defines who progresses to day two, and between 8 to 10 rounds, only those who lose a maximum of 2 battles usually go to the next stage, making the competition more challenging. On day 2, we had a total of 61.32% of the players using Urshifu, who is originally from Gen 8; Something that was quite expected, due to Urshifu having an outstanding offensive power. With his Ability Unseen Fist, its contact attacks ignore moves like Protect, which is usually overused, besides having access to Wicked Blow, a guaranteed Critical Hit move. After that, other very present Pokémon regarding their pick percentage have some already known names as well for having wonderful setups or their walling capabilities, such as Rillaboom, Raging Bolt, Farigiraf, among others.

On Pokémon Go, besides the grand finals, there were also announcements of new Pokémon that will soon be available for players to catch, and a new mechanic that allows changing the typing of the Pokémon after charging an attack, which promises to completely change the play style of the current competitive teams. The Gigantamax/Dynamax are getting a comeback, along with the addition of Morpeko to the game. In the Finals, the winner was Yip Kai Cheng, with a victory over Martijn Versteeg.

Divided into different Esports teams, the Nintendo MOBA has a lot of success, and many teams aimed for a good result at the World Championships. This time, the Japanese team FENNEL took the trophy, defeating XoraTigersGaming, from Korea. With all the announcements hype throughout the weekend, it wasn’t any different with Pokémon Unite: a new casual game mode got confirmed, besides the new playable Pokémon Darkrai, Armarouge and Psyduck.

The main focus of the players at the festival, it gathered 1147 players, and Fernando Cifuentes got the trophy for Chile for the first time after an amazing turnaround that showed how much game knowledge the winner has. It was also announced the return of Trainer Pokémon cards, which was delightful news for rare card collectors.

The Pokémon Company brought even more people this year, since its collections that recall to the 151 original monsters up to new mechanics that bring challenge and flavor to the players and competitors. All of that culminated in the festival that was this World Championship, with incredible announcements and amazing competition. And it is worth mentioning that we have many events like Regionals and Internationals that take place in Brazil, and this brings a whole new hype to Latin America for being recognized as a very strong region among the community.