Confession that 80-90% of Pokemon professional gamers use illegally modified Pokemon

The globally popular 'Pokémon' series holds world tournaments for player battles, and there are even professional gamers who participate in the matches and win prizes. However, a professional gamer confessed that ``80 to 90% of professional Pokemon players use illegally modified Pokemon,'' gaming news site gameland.gg reports.

Pro Pokemon player says '80-90%' of Pokemon pros are hacking
https://gameland.gg/pro-pokemon-player-says-80-90-of-pokemon-pros-are-hacking/

The person who testified to gameland.gg was Brady Smith , who belongs to the Pokemon professional gamer group VGC. Mr. Smith has been playing in official events since 2016, won two regional championships, and was a player who ranked 17th at the 2022 Pokémon World Championships.

However, at the 2023 Pokemon World Championships, Smith was suspended for using an illegally modified Pokemon. Mr. Smith said, ``Until now, the management has not seriously cracked down on the use of illegally modified Pokemon, but we are finally starting to crack down on it.''

Of course, in official tournaments, checks are conducted to see if the Pokemon used are illegally modified. In the 2023 Pokémon World Championships, the process for checking for unauthorized changes was improved, and one in three players was suspended from the tournament.

However, Smith says, ``80 to 90 percent of top-level players have illegally modified their Pokémon. This is a trade secret, but everyone who is 'in the know' knows it.'' He said that if the management had carried out more thorough checks for tampering, more players would have been suspended.

Kaphotics , which develops software that allows you to manipulate Pokémon save data, analyzed the Pokémon used by high-level players, including teams that participated in the Pokémon World Championships.

Mr. Kaphotics summarizes the rate at which Pokemon owned by high-level players are illegally modified by country. In the English-speaking world, the percentage of Pokemon that have not been illegally modified (% legal) is 47%, and it has been found that more than half of Pokemon have been illegally modified.

VGC Cheating 2023: with the Pokémon World Championships concluding last weekend, we've gathered >850 recent rental teams and analyzed them with our usual *free hack checks*. A season finale of @4Chris_Brown 's nightmare! Overall stats below: pic. twitter.com/1l5T8KjSIh

— Kurt (@Kaphotics) August 19, 2023

Kaphotics claims that Shohei Kimura, who won the 2023 Pokémon World Championships, also used a modified Moro barrel.

Shohei Kimura's first place team was not without sin – a pivotal Pokémon, Amoonguss, was modified to have a 0 ATK IV (originally 18). TPC does not check for raid RNG correlations, even though it takes ~1 millisecond to calculate. hopefully no Amoonguss Mystery Gift in the future! pic.twitter.com/sQCysZ3PNs

— Kurt (@Kaphotics) August 19, 2023

Smith says, ``The reason that illegally modified Pokémon are often used in Pokémon competitions is that it takes an incredible amount of time to train Pokémon for competitive teams.'' Smith continued, ``We like to fight against other players, and we're not interested in adding the Pokémon we've raised to our team.The hurdle of having to raise Pokémon is a hurdle that new players can't get into the game. It's a pain for veteran players because it prevents them from participating in the game.'

Although Smith will continue to undertake coaching as usual, he will not be participating in the professional Pokemon competition scene for a while, and his future plans are undecided.