Written by Austin Le with assistance from Yotam Cohen and Sean Huang.
With the last Regional Championships of the Scarlet & Violet era wrapping up, the race for the 2026 Pokémon World Championship in North America rages on. Before the 2025 season, all you had to do to qualify was perform well enough to earn Championship Points at locals, sanctioned online tournaments, and majors to surpass a pre-established threshold — 500 points in the case of the qualification format's final year. Since the 2025 season, the desire for exclusivity at the World Championships has led to the "Top X" format, in which only the top-performing players over the course of the season qualify. Last year, the top 75 players from the U.S. and Canada received invitations, excluding players who auto-qualified by winning a Regional or Special Championship, finishing in the top 4 at an International Championship, or finishing in the top 4 at the 2024 World Championships.
In late March of last year, my push to get one of my friends for Worlds led me to create the BFL Tracker Spreadsheet — a tool to monitor where North American players in the race could earn points and to project where the cutoff bar would land. If you're unfamiliar with what a BFL is, a player's top placements at each level of competition contribute toward the points they can earn. For example, major tournaments allow for the top 5 point contributions to count, whereas locals and online tournaments allow for the top 4 placements of each type. This is called a "Best Finish Limit" (BFL).
Thanks to Yotam Cohen, we eventually developed an accurate range for where the cutoff would be right before the final tournament of the year — the North America International Championships. Yotam's prediction of 945 ended up being just 5 points off from the eventual cutoff of 940, nearly double the prior season's requirement.
One additional note about how the cutoff progressed between late March and the North America International Championships in June: the final cutoff was 940 CP, which corresponded to 31st place at that point in the season. If that's any indication of where the bar will be this year, we're looking at a cutoff of 819 CP.
This year, the number of qualifiers increased from 75 to 80, and North America also received three additional auto-qualifiers at the start of the season due to the performances of Montana Mott, James Evans, and Giovanni Cischke at the 2025 World Championships. Now that the season is approaching late March, let's compare this year to last year to see how similar the numbers are — and whether we can extrapolate from them to estimate this year's point total. Keep in mind: I'm not a statistics major or data analyst — I'm simply looking at trends that seem meaningful and presenting what I find relevant.
First, let's look at where the current cutoff is this year compared to last year.
- 2025 cutoff on March 25: 80th place; 692 CP
- 2026 cutoff on March 26: 89th place; 566 CP
The 2026 cutoff includes 13 auto-qualified players: 9 above the cutoff and 4 below, compared to last season, which had 5 above the cutoff and 5 below. It's worth noting that each auto-qualified player only shifts the cutoff down to the next player in line, and thus does not affect it by a fixed amount. This year, without the 9 extra slots, the current cutoff would be 27 points higher, up to 593. Similarly, 9 extra Worlds slots at the end of the 2025 season would've dropped the final cutoff by 35 points from 940 to 905. Regardless, we're currently seeing around a 100-point difference between last season and this season, with an additional 30-ish points due to extra qualification spots.
Comparison of auto-qualified players between the 2025 and 2026 seasons
However, the extra qualifying slots aren't actually the primary source of difference between this year and last year. The two major differences in how points are distributed across events are a slight increase in points from majors and a significant nerf to Grand & Global Challenges (GCs), which are online competitions. The third source of points — local tournaments — remains unchanged in format from last season, as does the completion percentage of the maximum 260 CP available from locals.
Update to GC Points
The online tournaments received a heavy nerf in the 2026 season, with the top 8 earning just over a third as many points as in previous years, and anything below 9th place earning between a tenth and a fifth of those points. This change comes alongside a regional split in point distribution, meaning that one player per region earns first-place points rather than a single global winner.
Comparison of CP payouts from Grand & Global Challenges between the 2025 and 2026 seasons
The increase in Grand & Global Challenges BFLs from 3 to 4 isn't enough to offset the reduction in available points, and we're seeing approximately a 135-point deflation in Grand & Global Challenges totals across players vying for qualification spots. This is further emphasized by the fact that higher placements in the first 4 Grand & Global Challenges are taken by players who are either comfortably qualified or aren't in the business of making a qualification push this year.
With no current plans for a Grand Challenge in March or April — and the May Global Challenge not awarding Championship Points—this deflation will likely increase or, at best, remain stagnant. If the season ends with only 5 Grand & Global Challenges eligible for Championship Points, we can see this deflation increase to nearly 150 points, but if we get more points-eligible Grand & Global Challenges, that deflation should remain around 135.
Update to Points earned from Major Events
Let's continue with the changes to points for major events:
Comparison of CP payouts from Regional and Special Championships between the 2025 and 2026 seasons
Comparison of CP payouts from International Championships between the 2025 and 2026 seasons
More points were added to majors this season, with placements from 9th–64th earning up to 40 additional points at regionals, and placements from 17th–128th earning up to 40 additional points at International Championships. Based on this, we should expect a slight inflation in the number of points earned from majors among players on the leaderboard.
Following the results of Houston, the numbers align with expectations. With over 1,500 points added to the ecosystem per Major, the total number of points earned from majors by the top 256 players has increased slightly, about a 13% bump. Overall, these changes have raised the bar by approximately 25–30 points.
Last season, the increase in major points between late March and Worlds varied significantly depending on position in the standings. The top 20 players saw their major points increase by only about 20%, largely because most had already filled their BFL slots and additional strong finishes yielded diminishing returns. Around the cutoff "bubble", however, players saw approximately a 45% increase in major points—roughly a 180-point gain. Considering the 13% inflation in majors, we can estimate that the average major points for bubble players could increase by around 205 points.
Jumps in the Cutoff after Major Events
We have an estimate of how much the cutoff will change from now until the end of the season, but the main "jumps" in cutoffs often occur at majors, with only a slight increase on other weekends. There are 4 remaining tournaments in the North American circuit: Orlando Regional, Los Angeles Regional, Indianapolis Regional, and the North America International Championships (along with a handful of out-of-Regional majors, only one of which should impact the North American standings by any amount, Querétaro).
Let's take a sample of the relevant majors for North Americans: all majors after Atlanta in the 2025 season and all majors after the Latin America International Championship in the 2026 season, excluding Mexican or Puerto Rican events but including the Europe International Championships. Naturally, early regionals cause the cutoff to increase more sharply due to the lack of pre-existing points from other sources, so we've excluded those events from this case study.
On average, the cutoff increases by about 45 points after a major. This is slightly influenced by how many "bubble" players attend and how they perform. With a sample size of just eight events, it's difficult to draw firm conclusions. Aside from Houston, we're generally seeing a slightly higher rate of bubble players missing out on points this year, which is offsetting the increase in points from Majors and keeping the average jump in the cutoff around 45 points.
The average jump of 45 points can be used to further extrapolate the cutoff by season's end, and with 4 majors left, we can predict an increase of around 180 points. Accounting for a small estimated gradual increase in the cutoff of 7 points per week, we can extrapolate the current cutoff with all of this information, and by the end of the season, it should look something like this:
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