These are the most powerful Pokemon

By Brenna Hillier

Pokemon Showdown has released a list of the most popular Pokemon amongst successful players.

Hardcore competitive Pokemon is distilled down to its most pure form on Pokemon Showdown, an online simulator allowing you to just choose and customise your team and take them into battle without all that catching and training business.

Here, trainers refine their tactics against each other, gradually narrowing down the Pokemon metagame – so if you’re thinking about training up a team for tournament play, you could do worse than see which Pokemon are being used by the most successful players.

Compiled by a Reddit user, the graphic below shows the most popular Pokemon used by winning players in each tier. I don’t know all of these mean, but Kotaku explains that the Uber tier is for slightly over-powered Pokemon and the Anything Goes category lets in even the game-breakingly good ones. Below that, you have “over used”, “under used” and “rarely used”, and a baffling array of further acronyms. Let us know if you have any insight into this mysterious and fascinating world.

Here’s some further information from the Reddit post linked above:

“OU is the ‘main’ tier on Pokemon Showdown. Anything too powerful for OU (most recently Greninja, RIP) gets sent to Ubers. Anything too powerful for Ubers (right now, just Mega Rayylmao and Moody/Swagger users) gets sent to Anything Goes.

“If a Pokemon falls below 3.41% usage in OU, they get sent to UU. If they miss the UU cuttoff, they get sent to RU, then NU, then the unofficial tiers PU and FU. Little Cup and VGC are completely separate from this system.

“If you’re wondering why Klefki of all things is in the top 6 of the top tier, it’s because Swagger and duplicate Pokemon are allowed there, so 5 Klefkis and Ditto is a common sight.

“I used Smogon’s usage stats to get this data, but there a pretty large difference between the “0” usage stats, which count every player, and the “1760” stats, which count only the best players. Newbies are more likely to use their favorites, like Charizard, the Eeveelutions and Electivire.

“Finally, Megas might be under-represented here due to the one Mega limit, especially in OU and UU. Rayquaza, Salamence, Swampert, Steelix and Kangaskhan are all in that pic because of their Megas.”