2014 VGC Championship Points, Invite Structure, and Regional Prizes Revealed
The official Pokémon website just updated and just about everything we’d been waiting for in regards to this year’s tournament structure has been revealed. Information revealed in the last update hasn’t changed, but we do have some new information and clarifications.
2013 Pokémon World Championships
Let’s start with the carry-over from last season. The top 2 players from last year’s World Championships will be receiving a fully paid trip with invite to the 2014 Pokémon World Championships in Washington, DC just as they have for the last several years. However, this year, the rest of the Top 8 will be receiving prizes for this season as well:
- 1st – 2nd: Travel Award and Invite to Worlds 2014
- 3rd – 4th: Invite to Worlds 2014
- 5th – 8th: 120 Championship Points
Earning an Invitation to Worlds 2014
Like last season, players in North America and Europe will once again need to be among the top players with Championship Points in their region and age division to receive an invitation to the World Championships. This number will be Top 32 in Europe and has been increased to Top 16 in North America.
Championship Points will be calculated for this on July 10th, 2014 — after all National Championships in Europe and North America have been completed. This is the time at which Championship Points from Worlds 2013 will be added. If a player who already has an invitation from placing in the Top 4 at the 2013 Pokémon World Championships is in the Top 16 or 32, their invite will be passed down to the next eligible player.
Players who do not have an invite via the normal qualifying methods can play in the Last Chance Qualifier that will be held in Washington, DC the day before the 2014 World Championships officially start. Four Players in each age division will qualify through this tournament.
Travel Awards, Stipends, and Byes
Unlike previous years, this year’s travel awards to the World Championships and US National Championships will also rely on Championship Points. The players with the most Championship Points at the end of the 2014 Spring Regional Championships will receive one of the following awards to the 2014 US National Championships in Indianapolis, IN:
- 1st – 16th: Travel Award, $300 Travel Stipend, 1 Round Bye
- 17th – 32nd: $700 Travel Stipend
- 33rd – 64th: $350 Travel Stipend
On July 10th, 2014 after all National Championship Points have been added along with Championship Points added from the 2013 World Championships, players will receive the following awards to the 2014 World Championships in Washington, DC:
- 1st – 4th in North America: Travel Award
- 1st – 16th in Europe: Travel Award
A Travel Award consists of a paid flight and accommodations to the event.
Championship Points
The amount of Championship Points you earn at this year’s season’s events will differ from last season. Please pay close attention as many criticisms from last season’s system have been addressed!
Select Online Competitions
| Placement | Points |
| 1 | 10 |
| 2–8 | 8 |
| 9–16 | 4 |
| 17–64 | 2 |
| 65–128 | 1 |
Regional Championships
Best Finish Limit: 3
| Placement | Points | Kicker |
| 1 | 120 | 0 |
| 2 | 110 | 0 |
| 3–4 | 90 | 0 |
| 5–8 | 70 | 0 |
| 9–16 | 50 | 0 |
| 17–32 | 30 | 64 |
| 33–64 | 10 | 128 |
| 65–128 | 5 | 256 |
National Championships
| Placement | Points | Kicker |
| 1 | 480 | 0 |
| 2 | 440 | 0 |
| 3–4 | 360 | 0 |
| 5–8 | 210 | 0 |
| 9–16 | 150 | 0 |
| 17–32 | 90 | 0 |
| 33–64 | 30 | 128 |
| 65–128 | 15 | 256 |
2013 World Championships
| Placement | Points |
| 1 | 600 |
| 2 | 550 |
| 3–4 | 150 |
| 5–8 | 120 |
A best finish limit of 3 means only your top 3 placings at Regional Championships will count.
Regional Prizes
With travel awards depending on cumulative Championship Point counts, Regional prizing has shifted:
1st Place
- A Pokémon VG Regional Championships 1st Place award
- A Nintendo 3DS system
- A copy of Pokémon X or Pokémon Y
- A combination of 72 booster packs from current Pokémon TCG expansions
- 120 Championship Points
2nd Place
- A Pokémon VG Regional Championships 2nd Place award
- A copy of Pokémon X or Pokémon Y
- A combination of 72 booster packs from current Pokémon TCG expansions
- 110 Championship Points
3rd & 4th Place
- A Pokémon VG Regional Championships 3rd or 4th Place award
- A copy of Pokémon X or Pokémon Y
- A combination of 36 booster packs from current Pokémon TCG expansions
- 90 Championship Points
5th Place through 8th Place
- A combination of 18 booster packs from current Pokémon TCG expansions
- 70 Championship Points
9th Place through 16th Place
- A combination of 9 booster packs from current Pokémon TCG expansions
- 50 Championship Points
17th Place through 32nd Place
- 30 Championship Points (if division attendance is 64 or greater)
33rd Place through 64th Place
- 10 Championship Points (if division attendance is 128 or greater)
65th Place through 128th Place
- 5 Championship Points (if division attendance is 256 or greater)
The Fall Regional Championships will use Pokémon Black Version 2 and Pokémon White Version 2. Regional Championships in Winter and Spring will use Pokémon X and Pokémon Y. Please check this thread for the ruleset. Regional Championships are open to all.
About the Author
Firestorm is one of the co-founders of Nugget Bridge and the Community Manager for eSports Tournament Platform Battlefy. He has been playing Pokémon since 1999, competitively since 2007, and attending tournaments since 2010. He lives in Vancouver, Canada with a degree in Interactive Art & Technology + Communications. You can follow him on Twitter at @rushanshekar.
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So glad to hear all of this, and in a timely manner as well! Couldn’t be happier with all of the CP, stipend, and invite changes this year. I love that TPCi has listened to the playerbase in the past few years and have steadily been improving each year.
Changes this year are really strong. Regionals award more than I expected them to considering that the season travel stipends are significant enough to have been all there was for Regional prizes, though I’m sure people will appreciate actually winning something on the spot.
CP Distribution for Nationals looks a lot better this year, too. I think it was way too low last year basically across the board relative to Regionals. This year Nationals CP seems more appropriate, with top 4 safely guaranteeing invites, top 8 giving almost as much as top 4 did last year, and the rest of top cut getting an amount of CP that more accurately represents the difficulty of their placing relative to Regionals this year. Have to imagine the top two spots will be ending with travel stipends to Worlds, too, so looks good all around.
^that
This sounds pretty good (for those who can make use of it). I kinda wish they would have increased the CP earned from wi-fi competitions since dc-ing has reportedly been addressed, but oh well. Earning a copy of X or Y for placing 1-4 sounds like a neat way to scoop up extra copies for RNGing.
I’m sure plenty of players will take advantage of that… or spread the love if they don’t RNG themselves. 
Hopefully I can step up my RNG supplying this season, since I probably won’t be attending many (if any) events. If I can’t attend, I’ll at least make victory a possibility for others.
They’re probably just being cautious for this first year, just in case people find a way around the system.
Overall, I like these changes to the system. The only thing missing that would probably make this perfect is a CP bar instead of the Top 16 NA/Top 32 Europe invite setup
Now they decide to give an invite for 3rd place at worlds to next years? And now 6th place gets 120 CP? That would have put me at 330 CP and earned an invite last year.
Good thing I didn’t get to play, we needed more Americans to go 3-3 (or worse)
I wish online stuff counted for more. But since we can’t know whether or not its secure, that makes sense. I’m very glad that the points from only 3 regionals will count. Did I read that correctly that even 64th in the US gets 350$ when they arrive at Nationals? That would pay for your hotel and is very much appreciated and doesn’t at all seem unachievable. This seems really fair.
I agree, or at the very least that’s $350 you don’t have to worry about once you cash in their traveler’s checks.
The only thing I am really confused about is why 5-8th at Nats gets you more CP than if you went 5-8th at Worlds last year. ????????
Otherwise these changes seem good for US and EU folk. How many Worlds trips were there last year, btw? 4 US and 16 EU seems more than last year.
I will laugh if come Oct 12 they announce Kalos-only VGC rules for Winter Regionals onwards after making a big deal of the Pokemon Bank and the ability to migrate from gen 5 to the new games. Sorry not sorry.
Why should losing in the first round of cut at last year’s World Championships be worth more than getting through two rounds of cut in the largest tournament of the year in the current format?
There are the same amount of trips as last year.
They already said that after Autumn regionals everything will shift to X&Y. No specifics, but Kalos-only is a very real possibility.
so just top 16 in North America based on championships points gets an invite to worlds as a competitor!!
I’d like to think we’ve moved beyond marketing gimmicks like that. I really don’t know why people keep thinking that this is the likely way to go when it was a one-off format. Reminds me of the people who were convinced that 2013 would be GS Cup. What is the logic behind going Kalos-only and returning to a ruleset a majority of people did not like, keeping many favourites from being used, and creating unnecessary complication to the ruleset? We still get people asking what Pokemon are allowed after stumbling across leftover pages from 2011.
If people want to speculate about a possible ruleset starting in January we can take it to another thread as it is off-topic here, but most signs point to the same rules we have now updated for X&Y — you know, what the game is actually built for and has a random matchup mode for.
I think you’re being a little silly acting like Worlds t8 is a comparable accomplishment to t16 Nationals. However, I have found the answer for you:
There’s just gotta be a line where what you did last year stops being as important as what you did this year. Even giving points for top 8 is awfully generous when you consider what players get in plenty of other competitive games. Using League as an example since I know it the best, they get absolutely nothing in future seasons for any finish in the World Championships, and neither of the finalists from last season even qualified this year as a result. The people who did well at Worlds should be happy with what they got.
Now if you’re a european with a minor at your disposable, you don’t even need to attend events to get the paid trip. Just do reasonably well by playing for them in the juniors/seniors wifi tournament, get 16 cp and BAM paid trip to washington DC.
At least now they’ll have enough players with cp to actually hand out all the paid trips in European juniors
Amazing changes and what is most important, they have been announced with enough time. Now they need to do the same for Europe, Australia and every other region they decide to include. I don’t want to know the places of the awfully european season structure one month before of the events, or even worse, one week before them without a chance to participate if you didn’t have a ticket for the PAX already because they were sold-out and you needed one to participate in this year’s australian nats.
I don’t mind if we don’t get as much love as the US talking about season structure, organization of their nats with a lot of prized side events and all. We can continue with our poor bye and Nats systems but please, announce the cities now so we can start searching for cheap flights for all of them.
Talking about the top 8 prizes for this year worlds it seems I always get the short end of the stick. I’ve reached semi-finals or finals 4 of the 5 years I’ve been competing in vgc and the only year I didn’t get that far was the only one they were awarding prizes, now the cp and invites announcement.. I think I showed that I deserved to be at worlds but had to sell stuff from 2012 worlds to get cash to go to UK Nats.. Well looking at things like this and to the acomplishments of lucky people only encourages me even more to win. Serperior is superior.
I’m really glad to see these changes; it looks like TPCi has really stepped up their game.
I looked at the official website, and only five North America fall Regionals are listed over the three weekends. Are these the only locations, or will TPCi update again?
All changes considered, I am pleased they decided to give me an invite after it was all up in the air beforehand.
Now just to win that travel award…
All the news looks great so far. Can’t wait to get started with the season. Is it October yet?!
Curious how byes in general are going to work this year. I would be surprised if, assuming byes will exist again, they don’t come purely off of CP this year for Nationals like the travel stipends do. I don’t think we really found out much about byes from CP standing until just before events last year anyway, so maybe it isn’t too surprising there isn’t anything yet. It’s the potential Regional byes that I’m really curious about, since using CP ranking or a CP bar for byes this year won’t work as well as it did last year because players will have potentially played in vastly different numbers of events before the best finish limit starts being relevant around Nationals.
Also, I forgot to mention this in my first post, but I think my favorite part of the changes this year is that it gives many more players something achievable to shoot for. While I think it’s sort of a trademark of our community that everyone thinks they should be in Worlds every year rather than just working to try to make it, I think realistically most players start falling off of the pace of that top 16 group at some point in the middle of the season. Finishing in the top 32 and top 64 and winning the stipends they award continues to be an achievable goal for players before Nationals who don’t start out the season as well as they hoped. Similarly, top 16 and top 32 and the CP they award at Regionals stay achievable for a while even when top cut is probably out of the picture, so there’s something to try to shoot for instead of just dropping if players are having a bad day. Think we’ve all been there having a bad tournament or a bad season, but the system this year is really smart in that it keeps the hope of winning something alive a lot longer without having to like, win Nationals, than it has ever been in the past.
Thanks for clarifying guys. I’m not saying that it isn’t enough, it just seems… odd that the amount is merely the equivalent of winning a Regionals, for someone who isn’t acquainted with the US season. I agree there should be a line between last year’s accomplishments and this year’s. If you meant Worlds t8 not comparable to Nats t16 in the same year it would imply an issue with the competitor skill level at Worlds (but this has been clarified and would be off-topic).
Coming 9th at Worlds isn’t getting any easier…
How many European seniors aee graduating this year? Especially the Top8 finisher?
Henrique does, but what about pokealex and woopahking?
^ Is Melisa still a Junior because if last year is any indication she already has a trip and invite!
No, melisa graduated to seniors, but i can’t follow kok, who said 16Cp from wifi tournaments should be enough for a paid travel?!
Btw what i see is that juniors won’t get extra trips, will they?
Only Juniors last year. Top 16 in CP after the final National will get trips this year. Top 4 in one National does not get you a trip anymore.
Though last year Top 16 in Seniors was 110 CP so with 120 CP your sister has a good head start! I think anyone under 18 will still get the extra trip for a guardian.
They removed the kicker in nationals, so Top32 earns Cp, even jf there are only 33 player. So only wifi tournaments won’t be enough
I think the most important fact for Europe is, will there be 3 or 4 nationals?
Yeah, I’d like to force an official response from AZ regarding EU tournament structure because the CP information is incomplete if we don’t know our tournament layout. I mean, Americans already know when their regionals and their nationals tournament will be so can’t be that much of a stretch to do the same for Europe, eh?
Getting suitable venues can be difficult and take some time, I would assume that Tournament Organizers in North America have a fair bit of control on venue selection and work hard to get their TCG/VG venues secure as early as possible. European Organizers won’t be much different, but VG Tournaments only need to occur at Nationals as far as we know, and it seems like this will be the case again. I know North America has their Nationals sorted already, but I don’t see the need for such a rush even though it’d be nice to get information earlier. As long as we got information this year on European events, that’d be great. Though I think they could release the Wi-Fi tournament schedule earlier – as long as we know it by the end of the year though, that won’t matter.
I’m happy with all the changes, but I would have preferred the Wi-Fi tournaments to be worth more points. However, I can understand why they don’t at this point in time.
I assume PokeAlex and woopahking are both still in Seniors
Alex because his account name is PokeAlex1999, and assuming that’s his birthyear, he’d have another year in Seniors
Mark because he told me himself lol