The World Championships for Pokémon in 2024 have just concluded. Whether you’re a Pokémon GO fan, a VGC fanatic following your favorite YouTube personality, or, like us, obsessed with the Pokémon TCG, there was lots to follow along with throughout this past weekend in Hawaii.
Now that the 2024 World Championship has concluded, the location for the 2025 and 2026 Pokémon World Championship has been revealed. For US players who want to participate and watch the festivities in person, we have some good news.
Pokémon Worlds 2025: Anaheim
The Pokémon World Championships in 2025 has been revealed to be in Anaheim, California. The event will take place on the August 15-17 weekend of that year. According to past and future patterns for World Championship events, this seems rather commonplace. As you can see from this year’s World Championship, and the location and time of next year’s World Championship, these tend to take place in August.
Pokémon Worlds 2026: San Francisco
The 2026 Pokémon World Championships has been confirmed to take place in San Francisco. Like, Anaheim, San Francisco will be held in a three-day time span in August; specifically, August 28-30.
It is a bit strange that this World Championships, as well as the next two, are all in the US. For reference, the 2023 World Championships took place in Yokohama, Japan, also during a three-day August weekend. In 2022, players got to travel to London, England for another Worlds event held during an August weekend.
Player Response
As you may expect, there are some mixed responses from Pokémon fans after this development. Not only are there three back-to-back World Championship events being held by the same country, but two back-to-back World Championships are even being held in the same state: California.
“Bro, USA AGAIN???? stop plzz. we have more countries in the world.”@krismultiverse
“Great, waited a whole day just to know that the next 2 WORLD champions will be also in usa” @Trex12x
Much of the sentiment behind these reveals is much the same. Previously, the Pokémon World Championship events were held in all kinds of different countries, giving repeat competitors the opportunity to see the world as they compete in their favorite games. Now, players will instead have an opportunity to get very familiar with California. While this can seriously cut traveling costs for fans in the area, it could be a nightmare for other Pokémon fans who need to travel from afar. Flying from Japan to the U.S., for example, is expensive.
Whatever your perspective is on this news, we now know where the 2025 and 2026 Pokémon World Championships will take place. Having them so close to one another is certainly a strange choice. Hopefully, the player feedback on this decision will be taken into consideration moving forward.