Pokemon Showdown

Presented to you by Chris from MLH

You will need:

• A Challonge account

What is this?

Pokemon Showdown is a way to play pokemon with others for free. We’re playing a format called Gen 8 Random Battles, which is where you’re given a random team of pokemon to fight with. It makes it much more random and silly, so this way almost everyone has a relatively fair shot at winning.

• About an hour before your mini-event, tell your hackers to create an account at https://play.pokemonshowdown.com/ if they’d like to participate.

• Create a google form for your event that asks hackers to write down their discord name and their Pokemon Showdown name. Make sure to link it up to a spreadsheet so you have easy access to the list of members.

• Make an account over at challonge.com and make a tournament bracket for your event. It should be single elimination -- other than that all the other default settings are fine. You can see a sample bracket here.

• Once you have the bracket setup, begin collecting signups from your hackers. Cut it off 5 minutes before the tournament start time.

• Add your participants by navigating to the “participants” tab. From there click the “Bulk add participants” option to easily copy and paste your winners in from the sheet for your form.

From there, you can start your bracket. You’ll be given a live link to your bracket that participants can navigate to. Have them reach out to their opponents and begin fighting in pokemon showdown in Gen 8 Random Battles.

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• Give your hackers 15 minutes to begin their round 1 match. Non responders get Disqualified. Ask participants to report the results of their matches.

• Proceed down the bracket. Round 1 will have the most troubleshooting -- after that, it’s usually much calmer.

• For your grand finals match, ask your participants to post a link to watch the fight. Repost that link in your hackathon’s announcements with some hype around it, saying it’s the grand finals for the prestigious pokemon tournament!

• Award the winner the Pokemon Master role which you can easily make on Discord.