So you want to be the very best? It will be a tough challenge to top the millions of other trainers, therefore let me share you a few tricks to speed up your progress.

Catch Everything

You might think that you do not need masses of pidgeons after a while. Wrong. These little critters are the key to a fast leveling process, see below.

Evolving

Do NOT evolve your pokemon right away. Pile them up until you have 50+ ready-to-evolve pokemon. Especially pidgeons, ratattas and bugs are your friend here. Then use a lucky egg and mass-evolve everything in the 30 minute time window. This will net you 1000 XP per pokemon, plus extra 1000 if the pokemon isn’t already in your pokedex.

Catching a pidgeon gives you 3 candies, sending one away an additional one. Evolving gives you another candy. So catching 4 pidgeons, sending 3 away, and evolving one gives you 16 candys, 12 spent for the evolution, and 4 left. Ensure to have enough critters use all your candies at once during an egg-phase.

Getting Lucky Eggs

Conquer and hold 10 gyms in your area. Then go to the shop menu, and look at the button in the top right corner. It will display the number of gyms you currently control. It doesn’t matter if you’re the gym leader or just put a weak pokemon there. For every gym you control at the moment of button press, you get 10 coins and 500 dust. This is capped to 10 gyms max. So you can get 100 coins (and 5000 dust) per day.

An egg costs 80 coins in the shop. This way you can buy an egg a day, evolve all your pokemon at once, and have 20 coins left. There is no need to spend real cash here, except you’re living in rural areas without plenty of gyms. No “Pay 2 Win” here. Also, you’ll get eggs every few level-ups.

Fighting Gyms

It doesn’t actually matter if you started the game late and have weaker pokemon than the players in your area. In fact, you can easily conquer a gym with far weaker pokemon than the defenders. The key here is dodging.

There is a visual clue right before the defending pokemon attacks, look for it. Swipe left or right 0.5 seconds afterwards, and the enemy’s attack will miss. Depending on the attack speed of your pokemon, attack with 1–2 light attacks, then dodge again. You just need to do enough damage to kill the enemy in 99 seconds, that’s it.

Currently it is just not important which pokemons defend a gym, with the dodge-tactic you can beat everything without getting a single hit. This also spares a lot of potions/revives. I must stress it here again: it doesn’t matter how much cash players spent on stuff in the shop, every player can easily beat everything in the gyms right now, there is no “Pay 2 Win” in the competitive game aspect here.

Keep your Dust

Do NOT waste your dust on pokemon in the early game. Whenever your trainer levels up, you will find stronger pokemons in the wild, that should replace the weaker ones you already have.

You should use dust only when you’re above level 15 (when the leveling curve begins to go steeper), on rare pokemon (hatched from 10km eggs, final evolutions, …) which gain above 30CP per boost. Focus on 1–3 pokemon and max them out.

Walk. A Lot.

The real edge you can have is through sheer walking. Wherever you’re located in the world, only a subset of all pokemon is available near you. The others are available through eggs. Eggs are also an excellent source of XP, dust and candies. Use your unlimited hatcher for those 2km eggs, and use the other hatchers for the 10km/5km eggs.

This is the only game aspect where spending cash does make a difference: buy more hatchers, so you can breed up to 9 eggs at once. But this again is not really “Pay 2 Win”, it just gives you an time advantage at the beginning of the game AND you have to put in the kilometres still. This does just help players who are already putting in insane hours in the game.

Ideally go to high-density areas for the walking, since there seems to be much more “exotic” pokemons and a higher quantity of them in general where more people are playing actively. Join a walking group near you if possible!

Choose Team Yellow/Instinct

This is not a joke. Most players are on team red, and many on team blue. Since conquering gyms is trivial, pick the team with the lowest percentage of players, so you’ll have plenty of XP through attacking gyms. Taking down a level 6 gym solo gives you several thousand XP in just a few minutes. And since other players of the big teams are probably around, they’ll reclaim “their” gyms fast, so even more XP for you.

If one team in your area is underrepresented instead of yellow, pick this one. But in general, yellow is the best bet if you plan to become the very best.

Final thoughts

It’s quite addicting, and probably great for getting in shape if you let it immerse you. Also it is really cool to see people socializing in the streets like never before. This game benefits niantic/nintendo enormously, rewards players who put the effort, and even is a joy for players who only dabble a little here and there. If I were them, I would double down on this stellar success and provide updates as soon as possible to keep the hype train going:

International Rollout

2nd gen pokemon in a few months

trading system

friendship system/grouping feature

inverse the pokemon spawns: cities should have more pokestops/”shops”, while rural areas should have way more/exotic wild pokemon

Make the combat system actually competitive. Currently it’s just dodge2win.

This is my personal wishlist for the immediate future, feel free to add yours in the comments!

One thing that bugs me: It would be nice to have any mechanic for better gym defense. They are oscillating right now in different colors on a per minute-basis even in smaller cities. It should be a more challenging fight to succeed in a gym, lore-wise… But maybe this is just me.

Update 7/14: Downloading a offline map from Google Maps was a hoax, tip removed.