A team from Bangladesh has qualified for the World Cup of Pokémon, an international online tournament hosted by Smogon, the largest competitive Pokémon community in the world.
This year’s World Cup of Pokémon qualifiers featured over 200 players from 17 teams, each representing their countries/continents to claim the final three spots in the main knockoff series. Each player faced two opponents each and the top 3 teams with the best overall score advanced to the main stage.
Team Bangladesh scored the highest in the qualifiers, with a score of 12-4 against nations such as the United Kingdom, China, Brazil, Argentina, Greece, and South Korea. Starting on June 4, Team Bangladesh will face 15 other teams from the US, Latin America, Oceania, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, India, and more in the main stages of the tournament.
The online competitive Pokémon community
Smogon, the host of this tournament, is an online community that promotes and hosts multiple large-scale competitive Pokémon tournaments every year, bringing about 18.5 million users to their website every month. The matches are played on Pokémon Showdown, a browser-based simulator where anyone can make Pokémon teams and battle each other. Over 10 million matches are played on Pokémon Showdown monthly, in over 100 active formats with sub-communities of their own.
Pokémon is currently the highest-grossing media franchise in the world, reporting a total revenue of $76.4 billion as of May 2021. Their latest Nintendo Switch games, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, sold over 22 million copies since their release on November 18, 2022.
While official formats of competitive Pokémon, known as VGC (Video Game Championships), exist that are hosted by The Pokémon Company International and Nintendo – such tournaments are held internationally and are generally difficult for Bangladeshis to attend. As such, online fan-based communities such as Smogon host tournaments that anyone from anywhere in the world can join – simply using a browser-based simulator.
This is the 5th year Bangladesh has attempted to pass the qualifying stage of the World Cup of Pokémon. The team members are part of a Facebook group called ‘Bangladeshi Pokémon Battlers’, which has been a hub for local Pokémon fans and competitive players since its inception in 2012.
