Twitch streamer Pokemon Challenges to host competitive event amid VGC hacking controversy

Twitch streamer and popular Pokétuber Pokemon Challenges, aka Jan, let the competitive community know that he would be hosting a VGC-style tournament for all the players that were disqualified or forced into sudden death matches earlier this weekend at the 2023 Pokémon World Championships.

Pokémon Worlds 2023 took place over the past weekend, Aug. 11 to 13, in Yokohama, Japan and was riddled with mishaps and controversy. A lot of players were disqualified midway through their Worlds run due to hack checks finding out their Pokémon were genned—a process that means players don’t have to spend hours breeding ‘mons with perfect IVs and can instead focus on match strategies.

Other players that managed to reach the high-stakes top 16 bracket were forced into a sudden death round because the venue’s LAN began to have problems, causing their best-of-three matches to disconnect. This led to a lot of winning positions turning into losing ones, to no fault of the players, making the participants and the VGC community in general absolutely livid.

To soften the back-to-back blows for the Worlds competitors, a sympathetic Jan tweeted that he is going to host a VGC-style tournament for every player that got “DQ’d or forced into a Sudden Death this weekend.” He concluded by mentioning that his tournament is going to boast a “fat” prize pool.

A lot of notable names from the Pokémon community are outwardly supporting Jan in this endeavor, including James Baek who himself competed in this year’s Worlds, and Pokémon Single battle icons like Finchinator.

The general public can’t shower enough praise for Jan’s upcoming tournament, but a few people are slightly skeptical of who should and shouldn’t get a chance to participate, while others are simply waiting for what they think will be an impending Cease and Desist from the side of The Pokémon Company. With Pokémon players threatening to strike over hacking disqualifications at VGC, TPC may have to focus on pacifying the players before going after community-led alternatives.