You can earn Championship Points by placing well in officially sanctioned Play! Pokemon tournaments – this means Premier Challenges, Midseason Showdowns, Regional Championships and International Championships*. You can read more about these events here.

Do online tournaments ever award Championship Points? Footnote: (*) Rarely, Pokemon will run “International Challenges” as Official Competitions in the Sword and Shield game, and these count for a small amount of Championship Points. These are the only online tournaments that award points.

The number of points awarded to a player at an event is based on:

-the event type

-the player’s performance (what place do you finish in?)

-the number of players that attend (also referred to as a “kicker”)

You can find tables that show how many points you can expect based on all 3 numbers at the Pokemon.com Championship Points resource.

Your final standing at the tournament is determined by your Swiss record and, if you qualify, your path through Top Cut. (Read more about these tournament phases here).

In most circumstances, the players that reach Top Cut will get points, and sometimes highly placing players who don’t reach Top Cut will get points as well.

At the end of the World Championships, all players' points totals reset to 0. This means that you'll need to start all over again once the World Championships happen, whether you've qualified or not.

You can only earn a certain amount of points from each type of tournament that count towards your total Championship Points. For example, if the best finish limit for Premier Challenges is 6, that means only your top 6 Premier Challenges will earn points towards your total.

For example, if these are the Premier Challenge events that I’ve attended:

PC #1 - 30 points

PC#2 - 16 points

PC#3 - 12 points

PC#4 - 8 points

PC#5 - 8 points

PC#6 - 8 points

PC#7 - 8 points

PC#8 - 0 points

My total from these tournaments is 30 + 16 + 12 + 8 + 8 + 8 = 82 points. If I attend a 9th Premier Challenge, and get 30 points from it, my point total will then be 30 + 30 + 16 + 12 + 8 + 8 = 104 points. However, this number doesn’t restrict the points that I would earn from Midseason Showdowns or other events– their best finish limits are calculated separately.

There are rewards for the players who amass the most points in their qualifying region. The four regions are North America (US + Canada), Europe, Latin America, and Oceania (Australia + New Zealand). These rewards are called stipends and pursuing them is informally referred to as being on the snowball (because attending more events helps you earn the stipends, which let you attend more events, thus “snowballing” the points).

If you place in the top 8 during a “season” (the period of time between two International Challenges, excluding the first one but including the second), you will gain a Travel Award to the next International Challenge. If you place in the top 8 until the end of the non-Worlds season (from last Worlds up to and including NAIC), you will gain a Travel Award to attend Worlds. You will also skip the first stage of the competition.

Travel awards are valued around 2,000$-3,500$, and more if you’re under 18. Attempting to gain a stipend is quite challenging and often requires an extreme amount of travel for Pokemon. We don’t necessarily recommend attempting to earn this many points for your first season. You can read more about these awards on the Pokemon website here.