How to find Pokémon events and tournaments near you

Pokémon events are popping up all over the place, and here is how to easily find them.

Pokémon is a massive game that has multiple communities that compete in various types of tournaments at events around the world, but sometimes those events can be hard to find if you don’t know where to look.

From Pokémon Trading Card Game locals to things like regional tournaments hosted by The Pokémon Company, there are easy ways to find what you are looking for.

The Official Event Locator

Thankfully, the official Pokémon website has its Event Locator that lets players search for upcoming tournaments near their location. Searching using the official site is extremely easy and intuitive with just how precise the search can be.

The basic search asks for your country, postal code, and city so it can accurately provide information on all of the events within a reasonable distance to your home. From there, you can narrow the search down further by choosing how far to search between 10 and 250 miles.

Next, you can specify which event types you are looking for, between the TCG and video game tournaments. The results will vary depending on if you are looking for local leagues, bigger tournaments, or Premier Events, which can be toggled on and off in another menu.

Lastly, players can also sort by distance relative to their location or by date depending on their preference. An overall simple way to find most of the events you are looking for relatively quickly.

If you want to get extremely specific, there is an even more advanced version of the search that can specify dates or other things as needed.

More Locals

The only issue with using the official website to try and find an event is that sometimes it won’t list smaller local events.

This isn’t entirely on The Pokémon Company, as even if they make sure smaller tournaments still register through the official means, things can still slip through the cracks. Unfortunately, that can lead to local card shops that run weekly events getting a lesser turnout because it won’t pop up when people look at the official listing.

The easiest way to work around this is to look at your local card shop’s website and see if they have a section where they list scheduled events. Most of the time, they will have a weekly schedule that shows times for weekly events on a specified page.

Of course, not every local will be excluded from the main Event Locator, so try that first regardless.

Other Events

Not every kind of Pokémon event is even mentioned on the Event Locator. Like, what if you want to find a local group who goes out to play Pokémon GO together every week?

For events outside of TCG and VGC, look into local Discord servers and Facebook groups that are dedicated to those specific topics. There are dozens of Pokémon GO Facebook groups that are explicitly used for finding people to go out and walk around with.

Even just posting about it on Twitter or trying to find people to connect with on a Pokémon related subreddit is easy to do. Just make an effort to reach out, and things will fall into place.