A professional Pokemon player has admitted that, in his estimation, 80-90% of competitors are using hacked 'mons.
Just last month, a number of competitive Pokemon players spoke out in reaction to last-minute changes that resulted in their disqualification from this year's World Championships. Now, VGC Corner's Brady Smith, a competitive Pokemon player who was among those banned, has a revelation that could be disillusioning to some: almost everyone cheats.
In an interview with Gameland, Smith explained that this likely won't be a big surprise to those with knowledge of the competitive Pokemon scene, but for me, it's just a tiny bit sad having confirmation that, at least in the real world, Pokemon trainers aren't actually friends with their pocket monsters at all. Instead of traveling the world, training together, and overcoming challenges together to build trust, competitors use a tool called PKHex to alter and "generate" tournament-viable Pokemon.
"80 to 90% of top-level players modify or hack their Pokemon. It's a trade secret, but everyone ‘in the know’ knows this," Smith said.
YouTuber Pokemon Challenges explained in a recent video why "genning" Pokemon is so ubiquitous. Essentially, actually catching and training a competitive team would mean you have to own five games, along with the tools required to access all five games at once to adapt to changes in a tournament's meta. Furthermore, you'd need to dedicate dozens of hours of gameplay to train your teams to competitive standards - time that could otherwise be used to practice.
As long as tools exist to relinquish pro Pokemon battlers of the hard work that goes into building out meta-relevant teams, competitors will continue using them unless The Pokemon Company really brings down the banhammer.
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