Congratulations, you’ve done it. You’ve built your very own team in-game! Well done. It’s taken a lot of effort and you should feel proud of yourselves. But if you’re planning on using this team in a tournament — either in an online circuit or at an in-person event — we’re not done just yet. 

Tournament hosts will usually require participants to submit a “Team Sheet” listing all the relevant information regarding your Pokémon: Items, Abilities, Stats, etc. And because in-person events ask for the exact in-game stats for your Pokémon at the level they’re at, it’s important to double check all of your hard work. Here’s the best way to do that. 

You’re going to want to have your Box open with all your prepped Pokémon easily accessible. You’re also going to want to have the website Pokémon Showdown open with all of your Pokémon loaded in the Teambuilder. For this example, we’ll use a team that gained some popularity toward the end of the Series 9 format that I built in-game to use for myself. 

For VGC formats, Pokémon Showdown presets everything to Level 50, but 5 of my 6 Pokémon in-game are at Level 100. In order to properly check the stats, I can set the Pokémon to Level 100 on Showdown by clicking “Level” next to their sprite and setting it to 100.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll notice the stats have changed but the EVs remain the same. This is because the Venusaur on Showdown is now representing how the equivalent EVs would translate at Level 100. Take a look at the column on the bottom right.

These should now match my Venusaur’s in-game stats. Even though you can easily check your Pokémon’s EVs on their respective Summary pages by pressing the Y button, you can’t see the exact numbers unless a certain stat has the maximum 252 EVs (when it sparkles). For this team, I’ll now set the other four Pokémon to Level 100 in Showdown. 

Now I can go through each of the Pokémon to ensure everything is correct. It’s easiest to do from the Box screen where you can see all of the numbered stats, items and Ability all at once. Let’s take a look at my Venusaur first. 

Everything looks good here! The stats in Showdown match up with the stats shown in my game, the Item and Ability are correct and the moves are good as well. And I’ve made sure to feed my Venusaur all of its Dynamax Candy. It’s important to note that you cannot see G-Max symbols from this page, so check out the Summary page if you’re using a G-Max form and confirm there. Let’s take a look at Registeel next.

Well, here the stats and moves all look good, as do the Dynamax Candy and Ability. But it looks like I’ve forgotten my item! Per my teambuilder, I need to give my Registeel its Leftovers, and then everything will be A-OK. Next up is Torkoal.

Everything looks good here too! Two out of three ain’t bad. Moving on to Landorus-T…

The stats and moves are good here too, but it looks like I forgot to change my Landorus-T’s item over to Life Orb. It’s important that I caught this mistake here because had I entered the tournament with Assault Vest instead, I would not have been able to click Swords Dance or Max Guard when Dynamaxed. After giving Landorus-T the proper item, I’ll check Grimmsnarl.

Because my Grimmsnarl is Level 50 in my game, I don’t have to do any level adjustments here. Everything looks good here too, so last up will be Porygon2.

Things are looking great here too! I was even able to calculate the correct Attack IV by referencing the in-game Porygon2 with its Showdown counterpart. Since I don’t have any physical attacking moves, the Attack IV doesn’t matter to me, but I should still enter the in-game stat as is. With everything verified, I can safely enter all the correct info into my team sheet for the tournament. It’s a good thing I caught those mistakes!

It’s important to note that, in your game, you don’t have to have everything at Level 50 or Level 100 when checking stats with Showdown. It is, however, much easier because it’s at these levels where the EV math is the cleanest. If you’re in a pinch, you can also input all the stats manually into a damage calculator website and look at the in-game levels that way. 

As mentioned before, double checking everything is extremely important because the penalties for incorrect information can be severe. If you mistakenly entered something incorrectly and then played with a different move or item, you may be disqualified from the event or be forced to play with the set you didn’t prepare. I would not have been happy if I’d had to play with Assault Vest Landorus-T when I meant to use Life Orb, and I imagine you wouldn’t either!

Some online tournament circuits don’t require the exact in-game stats, but rather what’s called a “PokePaste” or “Paste” of your team. This is something that can be created at the website Pokepast.es and Showdown has an easy button where you can export teams. If you scroll all the way down in your team after selecting it from the teambuilder, you’ll see a button that looks like this:

And here’s what that paste looks like!

If you’re starting off with a paste you got from a friend, you can also import the Pokemon into Showdown by pasting the URL into your teambuilder after clicking “New Team” and the “Import from Text or URL” button and then clicking Save.