Pokemon Worlds 2026: The $60 Badge You Had to Win a Lottery to Buy

A Friday badge for the biggest Pokemon event of the year cost $60. The price is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that you could not simply go and buy one — you had to be drawn from an interest list, and the drawing finished in July.

PokemonXP and the 2026 Pokemon World Championships run August 28 to 30, 2026 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, with the final day staged across town at Chase Center. This is the first PokemonXP, and The Pokemon Company describes it as "an official fan convention that occurs during select years alongside the Pokemon World Championships." Both of those clauses matter. It is a convention, so it is open to people with no invitation and no competitive record. It happens in select years, so a 2027 repeat is not something the wording promises.

Two weeks out, here is what the weekend actually is, what the passes gate, and the genuinely large pile of it that costs nothing.

The thing that changed

Worlds runs on two populations. Competitor registration is, in the organizer's own words, by invitation only — you qualify through the season or you do not go as a player. Then there is the far larger group who want to be in the room anyway.

For 2026 the Pokemon Company built that second group its own show. PokemonXP has a panel stage, a workshop zone, an autograph room, a creator zone, a collect-and-trade corner, a pin trading area, a Play Lab for beginners, and an exhibitor floor carrying twenty Pokemon Partner booths plus twelve outside Event Partners — The LEGO Group, Bandai Namco Toys & Collectibles, Funko, Ravensburger, Crocs, Build-A-Bear Workshop, Jazwares, Sideshow, Stern Pinball, NHS / Santa Cruz Skateboards, JIMMYPAUL by Difuzed and the Planet Bee Foundation. The Worlds site puts it plainly: this year Worlds "will take place alongside the first PokemonXP."

The scale of that addition is visible in the published daily schedule, which is filterable and counted:

Those listings are tagged across twelve experience types — Activation, Autograph, Badge Pick-Up, Collect & Trade, Meet & Greet, Panel, Performance, Pin Rally, Retail, Side Event, Workshop and World Championships. Only the last of those is the tournament.

The other structural change is where Sunday happens. Championship Sunday moves into Chase Center, the Golden State Warriors arena, which the Worlds site sells on "increased seating, a grand stage, and stunning visuals." An NBA bowl is a different order of room than a partitioned convention hall, and it is the single clearest signal of what this event is being scaled toward.

Moscone Center, San Francisco. Moscone North, South and West are all in use for the 2026 Pokemon World Championships. Photo: Guilhem Vellut via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

A lottery, not a queue

This is the part worth understanding even if you have no intention of going, because it is a deliberate departure from how games conventions sell entry.

There was no on-sale morning. There was an interest list, run in two rounds.

Round one, multi-day. Sign-ups ran April 2 to April 23, 2026. Selected registrants could then choose between a regular Multi-Day Pass and a Multi-Day Plus Arena Experience Pass, the latter being the only pass on sale that includes Championship Sunday at Chase Center.

Round two, single-day. Sign-ups ran May 28 to June 18, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. Drawings happened in waves "until mid-July, or until all available passes have been claimed, whichever is sooner." Anyone who joined the multi-day list and was not selected was automatically rolled into the single-day list — you did not have to re-enter.

The mechanics after selection are strict, and they are the reason this is not a queue in disguise:

• Selection arrives as an email from events@registration.pokemon.com, and you get 72 hours to register and pay. Miss the window and the pass is released to someone else.
• One entry per person, one email account. Duplicates "may be subject to removal."
• A selected buyer may purchase for themselves, one additional adult, and up to three youth — no more.
• Single-day selectees pick Friday, Saturday or Sunday at checkout, subject to availability at that moment. You cannot buy two days.
• Passes are non-refundable and non-transferable. Resale, or attempted resale, is "grounds for cancellation without refund."

The registration site currently reads: "The Single-Day Interest List is now closed." The one door left ajar is written into the process itself — if passes remain or become available after the interest-list rounds, they "will be made available to the general public for sale," with details posted to the event site. As of mid-August no such public sale has been announced.

If you are used to the Gen Con model, where badges go on sale on a published morning and you set an alarm for it, this is the opposite trade. You cannot lose the badge by having a slow connection. You also cannot win it by trying harder.

What a pass cost, and what it opens

Published single-day pricing, straight off the event registration site:

Note what the Sunday row is telling you. Sunday is the cheapest day and it is flat-priced across ages, because a Sunday single-day pass admits you to Moscone, not to the arena. Championship Sunday at Chase Center sits behind the Multi-Day Plus Arena Experience Pass. Buying the $40 Sunday ticket and expecting to watch the finals live in the bowl is the single most expensive misreading available on this page.

The age rules are unusually specific, and they bite:

• Youth Passes are only sold alongside an Adult Pass. There is no standalone child ticket.
• Youth aged 13 to 16 must have a parent, guardian or chaperone present at the event.
• Kids 12 and under must remain with a guardian at all times.
• Children 5 and under need no badge and no pre-registration for Moscone — but they do need a pass for the Championship Sunday arena experience.
• Valid photo ID matching your badge is required from age 10 upward.

A 17-year-old may register as either an Adult or a Youth, and the difference is account functionality rather than access: a Youth Pass attends everything an Adult Pass attends, but cannot log in to build an agenda, cannot join interest lists independently, does not receive attendee emails, must arrive with the adult who purchased the pass, and stays permanently tied to that adult's account. If you are 17 and going with friends rather than a parent, that distinction is the whole ballgame.

Qualified competitors sit outside all of this. An invited competitor receives a Competitor Pass plus two complimentary Multi-Day Passes for named guests, all three including Championship Sunday arena access, with advance RSVP required. Competitors who bought an attendee pass before qualifying are eligible for a refund of that registration fee — which is why the event's own FAQ tells hopeful qualifiers to join the interest list anyway.

Badges are not mailed. Nothing is shipped. Pick-up opens in San Francisco on Tuesday, August 25, three days before the doors, and requires its own reservation.

Two buildings and a street

Moscone is not one hall. The schedule's location filter names Moscone West Level 1, Moscone North Level 1, Moscone South Level 1, Upper Mezzanine and Level 2, and the Lower Level exhibit halls split into A-C, D-E and F, plus a dedicated PokemonXP Stage on the Lower Level. Moscone's own venue listing confirms North, South and West are all in play.

Then it spills outdoors. Two of the listed locations are open-air:

• Rayquaza Road, including a Wharf Stage
• Yerba Buena Gardens, including the Garden Stage

The Garden Stage carries family-friendly entertainment across the weekend. Yerba Buena Gardens sits directly across Howard Street from Moscone, which makes it the natural overflow and decompression space for a show that has clearly outgrown a single footprint. Four official PDF maps are published on the Worlds site: a campus map, ground-level and lower-level Moscone maps, and a separate Yerba Buena Gardens map.

Yerba Buena Gardens, across Howard Street from Moscone. The Garden Stage runs family programming here all weekend. Photo: The wub via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

What is actually inside Moscone

The published rules for each zone are the useful part, because several of them run on interest lists of their own — a second lottery inside the first.

The PokemonXP Stage. Panels, typically an hour, held during regular event hours. No advance sign-up, open seating, and the audience is not cleared between panels — you can camp the stage all day if you want. Free with a valid badge, with designated ADA seating. No attendee photography or video recording during panels.

The Autograph Room, located in the Esplanade. Every session uses the interest list. Sessions are 90 minutes, guests sign a provided art print only (bring-your-own items are out), you may take a photo on your own device, and you are limited to one personalized autograph per guest session and one Special Guest signing per day. Most guests have a single session for the whole weekend, and a missed session cannot be rebooked. VIPs and Pokemon TCG artists cannot accept gifts.

The Creator Zone, in Moscone North. Meet-and-greets with Pokemon Partners and Notable Trainers, with a provided print for signing, and here you can collect from more than one creator.

The Fan Workshop Zone, in Moscone South. Sessions run 50 to 90 minutes, they are free with a badge, you keep what you make, and all of them use the interest list.

Collect & Trade, Moscone South, second floor. Any official Pokemon items, no cap on how many you trade. Pin trading is free and explicitly consensual — including with event staff, who will trade.

Play Lab is the beginner on-ramp, described by the organizer as a beginner-friendly way to try Pokemon games, with the possibility of walking away with a trinket.

One quietly clever addition: Pokemon HOME attendee medals, collected by NFC tap in the mobile app at the HOME booth, throughout PokemonXP, and at Chase Center on Championship Sunday. A special Greninja is distributed the same way. It is a physical-presence reward that cannot be farmed from a stream, which is a reasonable thing to give people who paid to be in the building.

On guests, the headline is Tsunekazu Ishihara, President and CEO of The Pokemon Company, listed as a VIP. Five Pokemon TCG artists are confirmed — Jerky, Naoki Saito, sowsow, Tika Matsuno and Yuka Morii, all from Japan. The Pokemon Partners roster spans the US, UK, France, Brazil and Mexico and includes Alpharad, Leonhart, Purplecliffe, RealBreakingNate, PKMNcast, LubaTV, SoliBolita and Sharous Pixie, among others. Credit where due: the Partners page carries an unambiguous disclosure that those creators "have been compensated through means of payment, gifting, sponsored travel, and/or accommodations." That is more transparency than most convention guest lists offer.

The Pokemon Center reservation system

The merch operation has been rebuilt, and it is the change most likely to be copied by other publishers.

The Pokemon Center store at this event is open only to registered attendees, running Wednesday, August 26 through Sunday, August 30. It requires an advance reservation, each registered attendee gets exactly one visit, and the reservation system was set to open in early August 2026. Your store slot does not have to fall on your pass day — a Saturday single-day holder can hold a Wednesday store reservation, capacity permitting.

Invitations to book went out in a stated priority order:

1. Competitors and Competitor Guest Passes
2. Multi-Day and Multi-Day Plus Arena Experience Passes
3. Single-Day Passes

The merchandise line photographed at the 2024 World Championships. For 2026 the store runs on one reserved visit per registered attendee, booked in a priority order set by pass type. Photo: Daniel Ramirez via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Whatever you think of reservation systems, the alternative is the photograph above. Tiering the booking window by pass type also does something quietly honest: it tells single-day buyers where they stand before they arrive, rather than after several hours on a pavement.

The competition, and the game that moved

The tournament underneath all of this covers four titles — the Pokemon TCG, Pokemon VGC, Pokemon GO and Pokemon UNITE — competing for a combined prize pool of over $2,000,000, the world champion titles, and return invitations for next year's Worlds. Competitor registration is by invitation only.

The headline mechanical change is in VGC. Competitors are told to bring Pokemon Champions downloaded on a Nintendo Switch system with the latest updates and an account in good standing. The video game world championship is no longer being decided on a mainline Pokemon RPG — it is being decided on a dedicated competitive battling title, and team lists are submitted through RK9.gg using RK9's Champions-specific flow.

The rest of the VGC operating rules read like tournament chess with docking stations:

• Systems must be in airplane mode, with Display Battle Names set to OFF, all friend notifications off, and the clock set to synchronize via internet.
• Matches run through Private Battle, Double Battle, correct ruleset and regulation, with both players exchanging official opponent-view team sheets and staying docked until the room is disbanded.
• Accepted hardware spans Switch, Switch Lite, Switch OLED and Switch 2, all needing a working USB-C port and wired internet set to automatic. Wired USB-A controllers and wired USB-A or 3.5mm headsets are permitted.
• Team lists are due by 6:00 a.m. PDT on the first day of the event for each age division. Late lists "may result in a loss for Round 1."

For the TCG, the format is Standard, with "H" regulation marks and onward legal. Deck lists go through RK9 under the same 6:00 a.m. PDT deadline and the same Round 1 penalty.

Pokemon GO runs the Competitors Cup format, with the Championship Series banned-Pokemon list applied, in a single age division. Competitors play on smartphones provided by the organizer, logging in and out around each match, on a primarily wired network — which is why the official kit list tells players to bring USB-A headphones or an adaptor if they want to hear the game.

Swiss round counts are set by attendance and split across a maximum of two days, and every competitor starts Friday and finishes Sunday. One detail that says a lot about the grind: Junior and Senior division players get one meal break per day. The Masters division gets none.

Qualified players collect a welcome kit containing a backpack, card sleeves, deck box, hat, pin, pin album, playmat, screen cleaner and T-shirt, on San Francisco-themed art. World champions additionally receive a gold-trimmed Champion bag, hat, hoodie and playmat.

Side events, meanwhile, are open to badge holders and cover VGC, the TCG under Standard, Expanded and GLC deck tags, Pokemon TCG Pocket, Pokemon Legends: Z-A, GO and UNITE, with a Free tag on part of the catalog.

Chase Center, home of the Golden State Warriors, hosts Championship Sunday on August 30. Of the passes sold to attendees, only the Multi-Day Plus Arena Experience Pass includes entry. Photo: Americo Toledano via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The free layer is the good half

Here is the genuinely surprising part of 2026: the show you can watch from your sofa is deep, scheduled, and openly published.

Broadcast windows, from the official coverage page:

A 2026 Worlds Preview Show runs ahead of the weekend covering top competitors and storylines. The confirmed caster and analyst lineup is Gabby Snyder, Rosemary Kelley, Aaron Zheng, Sierra Dawn, Lee Provost, Evan Latt, Scott Glaza and Ben Kyriakou.

Separately — and this is the part convention coverage usually cannot offer — seven PokemonXP panels are being streamed live on the PokemonXP Broadcast Hub:

An hour of Ishihara taking audience questions, streamed free, is not a small thing to put on the internet. Neither is a Pokopia postmortem with its concept director.

And then there are the drops, which are watch-time gated rather than luck gated:

Watch the expiry dates rather than the watch times, because they are wildly uneven. The 2026 Worlds Incineroar expires September 3, 2026 at 23:59 UTC — four days after the event ends. The other three Champions drops run to September 29, the GO rewards to September 11, the TCG Live rewards to September 25 at 16:00 UTC, the UNITE rewards to October 2, and the TCG Pocket hourglasses sit absurdly far out at November 28, 2027. If you only claim one thing on time, make it the Incineroar.

Three fiddly details worth knowing. The GO drops move channel on the final day — Friday and Saturday are on twitch.tv/pokemongo, day three is on twitch.tv/pokemon. The TCG Live and Pocket rewards are also earnable during Sunday's TCG finals on twitch.tv/pokemon, and the Pocket hourglasses are additionally claimable on twitch.tv/pokemonxp during Friday's Pocket panel. And the green 2026 Worlds Tee in GO is not a watch-time drop at all — it is a passcode announced on stream.

The 2025 champion research is the nicest piece of design in the list: watch 60 minutes and you are granted a Tinkaton with stats identical to the one on Beelzeboy's 2025 Worlds team, plus an Elite Charged TM. The UNITE selection box works the same way, letting you pick a license from PERU UNITE's 2025 Worlds roster — Leafeon, Psyduck, Zacian, Inteleon or Crustle. Co-streaming applications are open too, with their own rewards.

What is still unpublished

Being straight about the gaps, two weeks out.

The Creator Zone meet-and-greet schedule is not published. The FAQ says to check back, and notes that some attending Partners and Notable Trainers will not have a dedicated meet-and-greet slot at all.

Only seven of the thirteen panels have stream times. The daily schedule carries thirteen panels — five Friday, five Saturday, three Sunday — but the broadcast lineup announced so far is five on Friday and two on Saturday, with nothing listed for Sunday.

No public pass sale has been announced. The process allows for one if passes remain or become available. Nothing has been posted.

Quick Action Checklist

• Do not go looking for tickets. Both interest lists have closed and passes are non-transferable, with resale grounds for cancellation. Any listing you find elsewhere is a bad idea by the organizer's own rules.
• If you hold a Sunday single-day pass, you are at Moscone, not Chase Center. Of the passes sold to attendees, only the Multi-Day Plus Arena Experience Pass includes Championship Sunday.
• If you hold any pass, pick up your badge from Tuesday, August 25 — reservation required, and nothing is mailed to you.
• Bring photo ID that matches your badge if you are 10 or older. This is stated as a requirement, not a suggestion.
• Book the Pokemon Center slot as your own errand. One visit per attendee, advance reservation only, and it can be on a different day from your pass.
• Diarise Friday 3:30 p.m. PDT for the Ishihara panel and Q&A on the PokemonXP Broadcast Hub — free, no badge involved.
• Claim the Worlds Incineroar first. It expires September 3, 2026, the earliest deadline in the list — the next drop to lapse runs to September 11.
• Comparing shows this fortnight? gamescom 2026 opens on August 26, two days before this one, and it sells tickets the traditional way. For why Pokemon runs none of its competitive circuit through the big US tabletop show, see our Gen Con Pokemon breakdown and the rest of the Pokemon TCG vertical. More convention coverage lives in the Gaming Events archive, and everything else is on the Mythras blog.