The 2023 Pokémon World Championship is officially underway in Yokohama, Japan, and some VGC players are being disqualified in the middle of the tournament for using hacked Pokémon.
On day one of Worlds, fans might’ve been keeping tabs on Brady Smith who was personally called out by World Champion Wolfe Glick just one week ago. The day started out great with Smith going 2-0 in the first two rounds of Swiss before finding out he had been disqualified from the tournament.
According to Smith, half of his team was “genned,” meaning those Pokémon were illegally created and obtained. He received those ‘mons from a “reputable trader.”
Smith wasn’t the only one disqualified from Worlds, either, and this could be due to the tournament organizers becoming stricter with the rules.
While it’s understandable why players are penalized for using hacked Pokémon at an official tournament, the issue is much more complex than that. Certain Pokémon are impossible to obtain in Scarlet and Violet without access to other games like Legends: Arceus or Sword and Shield. If you don’t have any of those games (like in Smith’s case), you have to rely on trading Pokémon with other players.
Related: Chaos ensues after Pokémon Champion Wolfe takes shots at the VGC community
The problem with trading with other players is that it can be hard to distinguish a legit Pokémon from a hacked one. So there’s always a chance that someone may be trading an illegal Pokémon with you without you realizing it.
This means the only way to guarantee your team is legit is to catch and train all of the Pokémon yourself. Even then, it’s especially tough to obtain Legendary Pokémon since you generally only get one encounter per game and you can’t breed them.
When you consider how many different builds you can come up with for a single Pokémon, it’d be convenient to have access to more than one of that species, but you don’t always have that luxury with Legendary Pokémon—hence why VGC players rely so heavily on trading.
To solve this issue, players have hoped for quicker ways to obtain their Pokémon so that they can focus their time on teambuilding and practicing for the tournaments.
Related: How to get Mew and Mewtwo in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet
