Pokemon Worlds 2026 Results: Every Champion

Two weeks ago, our guide to getting into PokemonXP could tell you exactly what a badge cost and nothing at all about who would win — the interest-list lottery had closed, but the tournament hadn't started. It has now. The 2026 Pokemon World Championships ran August 28 to 30 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, with Championship Sunday moved into Chase Center, and four world titles — VGC, TCG, Pokemon GO and Pokemon UNITE — were decided in front of what multiple outlets reported as a sold-out arena.

Here is every champion, the two finals worth knowing the details of, and the story bigger than any single trophy: this was the last time Pokemon UNITE will ever be a World Championship division.

Every 2026 World Champion

A word on why that table looks the way it does. Two separate outlets — Bulbagarden's own results thread and Pokemon.com's official coverage — publish slightly different runner-up names for three of these divisions, which is the exact kind of internally-inconsistent sourcing this site checks for. We cross-referenced every pairing above against the official Play! Pokemon results posts and match-footage coverage before printing it; the "what we could not verify" section near the bottom names the two figures we chose to leave out rather than guess at.

Yamazaki's first Worlds — ever

Takuma Yamazaki won the VGC Masters title in a best-of-three final against fellow Japanese competitor Hiroshi Onishi, 2 games to 1. Play! Pokemon's own recap post calls him "the underdog" and states plainly that this was his very first Pokemon Worlds appearance — after, by other reporting, more than 15 years of playing competitively without qualifying for one.

Yamazaki's winning team: Mega Floette, Mega Dragonite, Kingambit, Sneasler, Basculegion and Garchomp. Onishi's finals team leaned on the same Floette/Kingambit/Garchomp/Basculegion core but paired it with Mega Charizard Y and Whimsicott instead. Four of six Pokemon overlapping between the two finalists' teams is a decent snapshot of what "the metagame" actually meant at Worlds this year.

This was also the first World Championship where the VGC title was decided on Pokemon Champions rather than a mainline RPG — the format shift we flagged as the headline mechanical change in our pre-show guide. Regulation Set M-B was in force, restricting teams to a pool of 76 Mega Evolutions and 208 eligible species. Reporting on the bracket also notes that several past champions had rough tournaments: 2022 winner Eduardo Cunha missed the Day 2 cut outright (Top 128), 2016 winner Wolfe Glick made Day 2 but fell in the Top 64, and the reigning 2025 champion, Giovanni Cischke, also missed the Day 2 cut, finishing 170th.

Moscone Center hosted VGC, TCG, GO and UNITE competition for all three days; only Championship Sunday's finals moved to Chase Center. Photo: Guilhem Vellut via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Hedrick wins by decking out his opponent

Andrew Hedrick took the TCG Masters title from Argentina's Diego Cassiraga, 2 games to 0, finishing the event with a 13-2-0 record piloting a Dragapult ex deck against a field where Cassiraga's own Alakazam ex / Dudunsparce archetype had been the stronger matchup on paper.

The finish is the part worth remembering. Coverage of the final describes game two ending with Hedrick winning without taking a single prize card — a well-timed Red Card disrupted Cassiraga's hand, and Hedrick then let Cassiraga's own card-heavy Alakazam engine grind through its resources until Cassiraga simply had no cards left to draw, an automatic loss, instead of knocking out his final Pokemon. Decking out an opponent is a legal, if unusual, win condition in the TCG, and it is not the way most Masters finals end.

Hedrick's build ran a 4-4-3 Dragapult line, two Munkidori, two Budew, Meowth ex, Fezandipiti ex, four Crushing Hammer, four Poke Pad, four Buddy-Buddy Poffin, Unfair Stamp, and a Dunsparce/Dudunsparce pairing of his own — the same disruption-heavy Dragapult shell that has been a Standard mainstay since the format's H-regulation cutoff, playing Crushing Hammer for the sole purpose of stripping an opponent's Energy and stretching a game long enough to deck them out.

The Seniors and Juniors finals

The younger divisions produced their own champions across both games, all confirmed against multiple independent reports of the finals footage:

• VGC Seniors: Vikram Thiagarajan (UK) defeated Carlos Verástegui (Peru).
• VGC Juniors: Kazuki Kage (Japan) defeated Kazutaka Hatahori (Japan) — an all-Japan final in the youngest division.
• TCG Seniors: Jake Ng (Australia) defeated Cobey Huh (US).
• TCG Juniors: Yuta Araki (Japan) defeated Luke Giffen (US).

Between them, Japan produced three of the six VGC and TCG Masters/Seniors/Juniors champions crowned this year (Yamazaki, Kage and Araki), and was represented in the final of a fourth (Onishi).

GO and UNITE go to Japan, again

Pokemon GO's single Masters-style division was won by Hiroki Yamauchi, competing under the handle GGs489hiromaru, who beat Switzerland's Maxwell Ember (MEweedle) for the title — the fourth Japan-based champion on this page.

Pokemon UNITE's team title went to ZETA DIVISION, a Japanese roster captained by Vitoppo, over France's KOMAÏ, 3 games to 1. ZETA DIVISION had finished only 5th at the Japan national qualifier before climbing back to win it all in San Francisco.

This was the last UNITE World Championship

Here is the part that outlasts every bracket result on this page. The Pokemon Company confirmed on its official UNITE news page that Pokemon UNITE will not be part of the 2027 Pokemon World Championships. In the company's own words: "We have decided that Pokemon UNITE will not be part of the 2027 Pokemon World Championships and will instead hold a separate tournament, Pokemon UNITE Aeos Crown 2027 Tokyo."

What replaces it, per the same announcement:

So UNITE is not being cut outright — it is being spun off into its own standalone international event, on its own calendar, separate from the VGC/TCG/GO Worlds weekend it shared a stage with in San Francisco. But 2026 was the last time a UNITE World Championship trophy was handed out at Worlds itself, which makes ZETA DIVISION's win the final entry in that specific column of the record book.

A Worlds merchandise line from a previous year. This year's Pokemon Center store ran on a one-visit reservation system instead — see our PokemonXP guide for how that worked. Photo: Daniel Ramirez via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Ed Sheeran closed the show

Championship Sunday's closing ceremony carried a genuine surprise: Ed Sheeran walked out unannounced and performed live, according to matching reports from NME, GoNintendo and the San Francisco Chronicle. He played "Celestial," the song he recorded for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet in 2022, followed by an acoustic run through the original Pokemon anime theme song.

It is a detail that belongs in a results roundup rather than a logistics guide precisely because nobody could have told you it was coming — it was not on any published schedule, panel list or broadcast rundown ahead of the show.

How big this actually got

ABC7 San Francisco, covering the event on the ground, reported more than 50,000 fans across Moscone Center and Chase Center combined, with organizers expecting over 16,000 people at Chase Center alone for Championship Sunday. Coverage of the finals separately describes Chase Center as sold out and as the largest venue ever to host a Pokemon tournament.

Put next to the numbers in our pre-show guide, that scale checks out: this was the event that moved Worlds' Sunday finale out of a convention hall and into an NBA arena for the first time, specifically to fit a crowd a partitioned exhibit floor could not hold.

Where Worlds goes next

Pokemon.com's own event-results coverage confirms the next stop before anything else does: the 2027 Pokemon World Championships will be held in Singapore, announced during the 2026 closing ceremonies alongside unspecified news about the Pokemon TCG and Pokemon TCG Pocket. The dates and venue followed quickly: August 13-15, 2027, at the Singapore EXPO, with Championship Sunday moving to the Singapore Indoor Stadium — the same two-venue split San Francisco just used. It will be the first time Worlds has returned to Asia since Yokohama in 2023. Ticketing details are not yet published.

What we could not verify

Being straight about the limits of same-week sourcing on a fast-moving results story:

• We found and discarded two wrong runner-up names. One widely mirrored results page listed João Felipe Leite as the VGC Masters runner-up (it was Hiroshi Onishi) and separately named Prince Williams and Bo-Sen Chang as the TCG Seniors and Juniors runners-up (they were Cobey Huh and Luke Giffen). We only printed a name once we could confirm it against a second, independent report or direct match footage.
• We did not print total attendance-per-division figures. A single results thread reported specific competitor counts by division (for example, 395 in VGC Masters); we could not corroborate those figures against a second source, so they are left out rather than repeated on one thread's authority.
• Full Seniors and Juniors finals team lists and deck lists are not yet compiled anywhere we could verify, unlike the two Masters finals covered in detail above.

Quick Action Checklist

• The eight champions, if you only need names: Takuma Yamazaki (VGC Masters), Vikram Thiagarajan (VGC Seniors), Kazuki Kage (VGC Juniors), Andrew Hedrick (TCG Masters), Jake Ng (TCG Seniors), Yuta Araki (TCG Juniors), Hiroki Yamauchi / GGs489hiromaru (Pokemon GO), and ZETA DIVISION (Pokemon UNITE).
• If you play UNITE competitively, redirect your attention now. The division will not run at the 2027 World Championships — track Pokemon UNITE Aeos Crown 2027 Tokyo instead, with online qualifiers tentatively starting November 2026.
• Diarise the 2027 destination: Singapore is confirmed as the next Pokemon World Championships host city, August 13-15, 2027, at the Singapore EXPO with Championship Sunday at the Singapore Indoor Stadium.
• Curious what the weekend cost to attend or how the badge lottery worked? Our PokemonXP guide covers the pricing, the interest-list system, and the venue split that this recap builds on.
• For the deck itself, the Pokemon TCG vertical covers what a Standard-legal Dragapult build looks like outside the Worlds spotlight. More convention coverage lives in the Gaming Events archive, and everything else is on the Mythras blog.