Pokemon Tiers and Smogon Rankings Explained
Competitive Pokemon isn't a free-for-all — it's a layered ecosystem where a single overpowered team member can warp every match around it. Smogon University's tiering system is the framework most serious players use to understand where any given Pokemon sits in that ecosystem, which formats it belongs in, and why certain matchups feel lopsided before a single move is used. This page breaks down how the tier structure works, what drives placement decisions, and where the system's edges get genuinely complicated.
Definition and Scope
Smogon University, the community-run competitive Pokemon hub at smogon.com, maintains a tiering system that sorts every Pokemon into competitive brackets based on real usage data and community evaluation. The tiers function as a ban ladder: Pokemon too powerful for one tier get pushed upward into the next, keeping each bracket functional for the players who compete in it.
The main tiers in the standard singles ladder, from highest power floor to lowest, are:
- Ubers — Reserved for Pokemon whose presence would break any lower tier. Legendaries like Zacian-Crowned and Calyrex-Shadow typically land here by default.
- OU (Overused) — The primary competitive tier. A Pokemon earns OU status by appearing on more than 4.52% of teams in a given month of ladder data, per Smogon's official tiering policy.
- UU (Underused) — Pokemon that don't meet the OU usage threshold but are too strong for lower tiers.
- RU (Rarelyused) — A middle tier for Pokemon that fall below UU's threshold.
- NU (Neverused) — The lowest official usage-based tier for Pokemon that remain functional but rarely selected.
- PU (informally "P.U.") — Pokemon that fail to reach NU's usage floor, effectively the basement tier.
- AG (Anything Goes) — A format without bans, sitting above Ubers. Essentially an experimental or overflow bracket.
The competitive formats page covers how these tiers interact with official tournament structures like VGC, which operates under entirely different rules set by The Pokemon Company.
How It Works
Tier placement follows two parallel tracks: usage-based and suspect-based.
The usage track is mechanical. Smogon pulls ladder statistics monthly from the Pokemon Showdown simulator. If a Pokemon's usage crosses 4.52% in its current tier's high-ladder data, it gets promoted. If it drops below that threshold for an extended period, it gets demoted. The 4.52% figure is not arbitrary — it's derived from the combinatorics of a 6-on-6 team format, representing the expected frequency if one slot on every team were filled by the same Pokemon.
The suspect track is more nuanced. When a Pokemon is considered potentially broken but hasn't necessarily dominated usage data, Smogon can initiate a suspect test. Players earn "requisite" status by achieving a specific rating on the ladder during the test window, then vote on whether to ban the Pokemon to a higher tier. This process has moved Pokemon like Mega Kangaskhan and Flutter Mane through the system based on strategic analysis rather than raw popularity.
Smogon also maintains a separate Banned from OU list (sometimes called the BL tiers — BL, BL2, BL3) for Pokemon that are too strong for their home tier but don't see enough OU usage to register there organically. BL Pokemon are banned from UU, BL2 from RU, and so on down the chain.
The Pokemon meta analysis page goes deeper on how tier shifts ripple through team-building decisions.
Common Scenarios
Three patterns show up repeatedly in how tiers actually function in practice.
Newly released Pokemon almost always enter OU or Ubers provisionally, since no prior usage data exists. Smogon's tiering council makes an initial placement call, then lets the data settle over subsequent months.
Forme splits create legitimate complexity. Rotom-Wash and Rotom-Heat share a base species but compete in different tiers because their typing changes their role entirely. The same Pokemon with a different move set can occupy two separate strategic niches — something that Pokemon abilities explained touches on in the context of how hidden abilities further split competitive viability.
Legendary and mythical Pokemon often skip directly to Ubers regardless of usage, because their base stat totals alone can make suspect testing feel like a formality. Zacian-Crowned, with a base Attack stat of 170, is a representative case — its presence in OU would demand that every team build around countering it specifically.
Decision Boundaries
The system's hardest judgment calls involve Pokemon that are strong without being broken — the line between "excellent" and "too centralizing."
Smogon uses the concept of "centralizing" as a formal threshold: a Pokemon becomes a ban candidate when teams can no longer be reasonably built without explicitly addressing it. That's distinct from a Pokemon simply being good. Garchomp, for instance, has sat in OU through most generations despite elite stats, because its counters and checks are accessible enough that it doesn't warp team construction catastrophically.
Speed tiers add another dimension. A Pokemon with base 110+ Speed in OU forces a different kind of preparation than a slower wallbreaker. The Pokemon natures and stats page covers how Speed EVs and natures interact with these thresholds at the calculation level.
Doubles formats like VGC use entirely different tier logic — many Ubers-level Pokemon are legal, and the evaluation framework centers on restricted Pokemon slots rather than ban ladders. Players exploring the full competitive landscape will find both systems useful, but they answer different questions about what "balanced" means.
The broader Pokemon Authority homepage connects these competitive frameworks to the full scope of the game's formats, from casual play to championship circuits.