By Mark McDonnell

I wrote this guide because there’s too much clickbaity bullshit on the internet and a lack of any consolidated guide. The in-game tutorial to this game blows, and trying to figure it out as your game constantly crashes just isn’t fun. This guide will help you to be a Pokemon Master in no time.

Tips range from basic as f*ck to advanced and downright exploitative:

Save poke balls by tapping them after they roll

Ever miss a throw and lazily watch the ball roll away, cursing at yourself? Laze no more, tap the ball and you can reclaim your shitty throw.



Preserve your battery life

I know this is wrecking your phone and stopping your silly Pokemon safaris.

Tap the pokeball at the bottom of the screen, tap settings in the top right, and tap ‘battery saver mode’. Whenever your phone is pointing down, like in your pocket, the screen will dim but still vibrate when pokemon are nearby.

Go to google maps. Tap the top left with the three horizontal lines. Tap ‘offline areas’. Tap the + sign. Zoom out. Tap download. Now your GPS won’t wreck your battery as badly.

Next time you’re catching a pokemon, tap AR in the top right to turn off your camera and save battery. It will also dead center the Pokemon no matter what direction you are facing. Your phone won’t sway around the Pokemon wildly anymore every time you take an overly excited swipe.

Get better at catching Pokemon

Like I said, turn off AR. That circle that appears as you’re trying to catch them…minimize that circle’s size while still hitting your ball within it. You get more exp and I believe an increased catch rate. Use two hands if you have to, and make sure you steadily swipe directly up. Faster and longer swipes mean the ball travels a farther distance. Wait if the Pokemon is in an attack animation until it stops.

Razz Berries are supposed to make the pokemon easier to catch if you open your backpack in the bottom right and throw them, but I’ve found them to be wildly ineffective.

The color of the circle: green, yellow, or red indicates the difficulty to catch the Pokemon. Use shitty balls on shitty Pokemon and better balls on better Pokemon. You get better balls by leveling up, for example: great balls at level 12 and ultra balls at level 20. They will start appearing as normal drops from Poke Stops.

At the bottom right of the screen, you can see nearby Pokemon. They are listed nearest to furthest. The number of steps indicates their distance from you.

What team do I choose?



You choose a team at level 5: red, blue, or yellow. Choose the same team as your friends. Why? So multiple of you can stack up at a gym and wreck scrubs for coins.

What’s all this about gyms and battling?



VERY IMPORTANT: As soon as you capture a gym, you can collect 10 poke coins. However, you can only collect from all of your gyms at once every 21 hours. You want to maximize the number of gyms you control before you press collect. You can assign 10 total pokemon to protect gyms at once. When you do assign a defender, you can’t use that pokemon to battle until it gets defeated and returned to your inventory at 1 hp. Then you can heal it back to full health with potions.

Note that you do have to beat a gym down below level 1 to take it over and install your pokemon as leader. Each time you beat it, the gym’s level/prestige decreases. When the gym is empty, you need to install your pokemon fast, or someone else will. You can’t install a hurt pokemon, so heal up or use a different one.

What are poke coins?



If you can’t beat a gym, these cost real money. Some gnarly whale players will pay whatever it takes to win, which is why this is the number one grossing app right now. Coins buy pokeballs, lures, permanent Pokemon/item capacity upgrades, and more.

What does team color have to do with gyms?

A shit ton.

If the gym is not the same color as you, you can take 6 Pokemon to battle it. If it’s the same color, you can only choose 1. This is a ridiculous advantage and means any trainer worth their salt should be able to take down even the strongest gym if it’s an opposing color.

Gyms get stronger and can stack up more Pokemon the more they defeat other players. If you get a gang of friends from the same color team, you can actually all battle the same gym at once. This obviously means you should completely demolish a gym of a different color.

The dirt nasty gym exp exploit

Once you conquer a gym, put your shittiest 10 cp Rattata as the leader. Battle yourself and one shot that shitty Pokemon over and over again as you gain exp. You animal.

How do I win battles?

Tap your Pokemon super silly fast.

I know that you can swipe left and right to dodge, but that shit has been really ineffective in my experience, and you need to know the opposing Pokemon’s specific attack pattern.

You can also tap and hold to do a special attack when your blue box is done filling up from normal tap attacks. Pay attention to typing and lay out a team accordingly to be super effective. Due to the ridiculous prevalence of flying and water Pokemon, I find that Jolteon and lightning types in general are particularly good.

There’s a glitch where opposing Pokemon won’t faint. Slow down on your tapping. The server blows and can’t catch up on all your taps in time, so don’t add to that load. Try using a special, tap and hold, then see if that fixes things.

How do I catch stupid strong Pokemon?

Leveling up will naturally increase the ceiling for strongest Pokemon you can catch. You can auto-sort Pokemon by combat power and evolve your strongest. They have a maximum potential based on your current level and indicated by the white circle above them after you tap them in your inventory.

Some Pokemon have better potential than others. For example, Raticate blows.

You can attract more Pokemon to you with incense (just for yourself), or lures at a pokestop (affects everyone in the area.)

Don’t blow all your stardust on your favorite Pokemon. That shit is precious. As you level up, Pokemon that you catch will be stronger, and rapidly outpace your ability to upgrade.



That filthy level up exploit

Caught a shit ton of Pidgeys, Rattatas, and Weedles?

Excellent, I know you did, you poor bastard.

So, why should you give a shit?

Evolution gives 500 exp normally, which is a lot. Now let’s exploit this.

Use a Lucky Egg item. No, this is not a normal egg, this is an item that doubles exp to make that evolution worth 1000. You get one every 5 levels or so.

Now count up your evolution candies and start evolving as many pokemon as you possibly can. No joke, this can take you to level 15 easily.

If you’re a real dog, you’ll do this next to a bunch of poke stops and keep spinning them in between evolutions to really abuse that exp gain.





How do you get enough candies to evolve your Pokemon?

Each Pokemon you catch is worth 4 candies: 3 from the initial catch and 1 for trading it in.

You can “transfer” Pokemon for evolution candies by tapping that Pokemon, scrolling to the bottom, and clicking transfer. It’s gone forever, and Professor Willow’s office is flooded with Pidgey shit as he performs depraved experiments on them for science.

Evolve Eevee

I find that Eevee is both the strongest and most prevalent. Its evolution is based on its moveset. An Eevee with swift will turn into Vaporeon, with Dig will become Flareon, and body slam will turn into Jolteon.



Update: Eevee’s evolution is actually completely random. Fuck me, right?

On Pokemon and driving.

Don’t do it. Unless you’re the passenger.

Where do I find a shit ton of Pokestops?

Go to populated places like big cities, malls, monuments, and even parks. Apparently some cemeteries have a pokestop at every grave stone, so if you’re a Poke Freak, you can do that too.

Some next level shit is to download Ingress, the predecessor to this game. If you google Ingress Intel and sign in with your account, you can get a map of all the pokestops. Type in your address in the search bar. Zoom out. Wait a long time for it to load. Find the densest group of pokestops. Go there. Spin that shit. Drop some lures. Do the dirt nasty Lucky Egg trick.

Remember, you can spin these every 5 minutes. Purple means you already spun it. The game may say “try again” and still be blue, but if you close and re-open the game, you’ll notice the stop will turn purple and your inventory will be updated.

That’s all I’ve got. Go become a Pokemon Master.

Mark is a DDR expert and an IT consultant currently residing in Virginia. He also wrote this in one day. That’s, like, f*cking insane.