Did you misplay, or did you just get unlucky?
We are building an engine that grades the decision, not the dice. It is not finished. We need players.
You clicked Rock Slide. It missed. You lost the game.
Mistake
Unlucky
Same result. Different verdict.
A post-game report for VGC
Was it a mistake, or was it variance?
A Rock Slide that missed is not a blunder. The engine grades the decision you made with the information you had. The dice roll never enters the verdict.
What the right play actually was
Often there is no single best move. When your opponent can read you, the correct answer is a mix, and the engine will tell you the mix.
Where the game slipped away
The exact turn, and how much win probability it cost you.
How well you played, as a number
One score per game, so you can watch it move across a season instead of guessing.
VGC is a game of hidden information
What a chess engine assumes
You can see the whole board. Players move one at a time. Under those two assumptions, there is always a single best move, and a deep enough search will find it.
What VGC actually gives you
You do not know their last two Pokemon, their items, their spreads, or which one megas. Both players lock in the turn simultaneously. A search that assumes perfect information hands you a confident, exploitable answer.
The answer is a mixed strategy over the public game tree, and we can measure how exploitable it is.
A live distribution over what their team could be, narrowed every time they reveal something.
The Showdown engine itself is the only oracle for what a turn does. No reimplemented battle logic, no approximated mechanics.
This runs after the game, not during it, so it can search far deeper than any live assistant could.
We need VGC players. Here is the trade.
An engine like this is only as good as the games it is tested against, and the people who can tell when its analysis is talking nonsense. We are not looking for a crowd. We are looking for a handful of players who take VGC seriously.
Free access for the whole beta, and a direct line to the team building it.
Your replays, your judgement, and your bug reports. Especially the ones that say the engine is wrong.
When the service opens to everyone, beta testers keep permanent perks.
What exists, and what it still needs
Exists today
- Deep multi-turn search over the public game tree, with belief tracking over the opponent's possible teams.
- Turn by turn review of real Showdown replays, from the command line.
- Support for the current format, Champions Reg M-B, megas and stat points included.
Still needs work
- The engine is at an early stage. It needs more training, more search depth, and many more real games before every verdict is worth trusting.
- Win rates are not calibrated yet. Treat them as directional, not as true probabilities.
- Estimates are one sided and conservative by construction.
- Your games. Which is the whole point of the beta.
Help us build it
Leave your email and we will get in touch when there is something worth your time. We ask for nothing else. No Showdown username, no account, no tracking.
We store your email only to contact you about the beta. Nothing else, ever. See the privacy note.