For each group of Pokémon presented to you, click one or more of your favorites from that group and press the "Pick" button. Eventually, your favorite Pokémon will start appearing under "Found Favorites". You can continue as long as you like to construct an arbitrarily long list of your favorite Pokémon.

In principle, this picker is perfectly accurate, provided you pick consistently - you'll correctly get your second favorite second, even if it's pitted against your absolute favorite early on, for instance. Click here for more on how this tool works. You can reorder your favorites after you've found them, but in principle you shouldn't need to.

Various filtering and presentation options for the picker can be found in the "Options" tab next to "Found Favorites" below.

Want to create your own favorite picker? It's on GitHub with instructions to get you started.

How It Works

The idea for the favorite Pokémon picker is not original to me; it is inspired by an old, now-defunct original that has been recreated with upgrades here. Basically, it would present you with a random pair of Pokémon, you'd pick the one you liked better, and that would eliminate the other Pokémon from the running and then give you another pair randomly chosen from the remaining Pokémon. Eventually, when you had eliminated every Pokémon but one, the remaining one had to be your very favorite Pokémon, and the last few you eliminated were given second to tenth place.

This picker was designed to improve on this concept. The main differences are that it will present you with up to 20 Pokémon at a time by default, which speeds up the picking process considerably, and that rather than giving second to tenth place to the last nine Pokémon you eliminated (which leaves them partially up to chance - if the old picker happens to make you pick between your two favorites early on, your real second favorite won't even make the list), it will instead bring back all Pokémon eliminated by your favorite and have you pick between them in the same way as before. This recursiveness also means that instead of cutting it off at top ten, you can in theory continue picking until you've ordered literally every single Pokémon into a favorites list.

The basic principle driving this picker is still elimination - it just also keeps track of which Pokémon you picked over each eliminated Pokémon. For example, if the picker shows Charizard and Butterfree, and you pick Charizard, it doesn't give Charizard points or mark it as liked somehow; it just marks Butterfree as eliminated by Charizard. If you eventually go on to eliminate every Pokémon except Charizard, then Charizard will be added to your Found Favorites, and Butterfree (and any other Pokémon that were eliminated by Charizard) will be back in the running for second place. Similarly, if you had previously had a batch with Charizard, Butterfree and Blastoise in it, and you picked Charizard and Butterfree, then Blastoise will reappear whenever Charizard and Butterfree have both been added under Found Favorites.

All that picking means is therefore, "I like all of these Pokémon better than any of those." This is intentionally a broad, flexible statement; you'll end up with the same result regardless of how many Pokémon you choose to pick from each batch, so it's up to you how many you want to pick at a time. If you just want to get your number one favorite or a select few, it's quickest to try to pick just one Pokémon from each batch, while if you want to construct something like a top fifty list, you may want to start by picking every Pokémon that's likely to end up in that top fifty.

The elimination mechanic is also why you can't pick nothing; Pokémon can only ever be eliminated by some other Pokémon, so that the picker can know when to bring them back. The "Pass" button is instead equivalent to picking every Pokémon in the batch, which eliminates nothing and simply means all those Pokémon get shuffled into the next round - passing over and over won't get you anywhere, so make sure you do some actual picking.

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