The Pokémon World Championships are heading back to Asia. At the closing ceremony of the 2026 event in San Francisco on 30 August, The Pokémon Company president and CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara confirmed that the 2027 Pokémon World Championships will be held in Singapore from 13–15 August 2027.
It is a genuinely significant booking. The Worlds circuit has only left the United States three times in its history, and it has not visited Asia since the 2023 event in Yokohama. Singapore makes it four trips abroad, and the first ever in Southeast Asia.
Two venues, one weekend
The bulk of the competition will run out of Singapore Expo, the enormous convention complex out by Changi that regularly swallows trade shows several times the size of a Pokémon tournament. That is where the swiss rounds, the side events, the vendor hall and the inevitable queue-and-trade culture will live across Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Championship Sunday, though, moves to the Singapore Indoor Stadium — the 12,000-seat arena at Kallang. Splitting the finals off into a purpose-built arena is the same approach The Pokémon Company has been trending toward for years, and it is a straightforward acknowledgement that the finals are now a broadcast product first and a live event second.
Pokémon UNITE is off the Worlds card
The other headline from the announcement is a subtraction. Pokémon UNITE will not be part of the 2027 World Championships line-up. Instead, the MOBA is being spun out into its own standalone event in Japan.
That makes the 2026 UNITE World Championship the last one to run under the main Worlds umbrella, which gives Zeta Division's title a slightly odd historical weight — they are the final UNITE world champions of the combined-event era. Whether a dedicated Japanese event is a promotion or a quiet sidelining depends entirely on what the prize structure and qualification path look like when it is detailed, and none of that has been announced yet.
Every 2026 world champion
Before Singapore was announced, San Francisco spent three days crowning champions. Here is the full list.
Pokémon Video Game Championships (VGC)
- Masters Division — Takuma Yamazaki
- Senior Division — Vikram Thiagarajan
- Junior Division — Kazuki Kage
Pokémon Trading Card Game
- Masters Division — Andrew Hedrick
- Senior Division — Jake Ng
- Junior Division — Yuta Araki
Pokémon GO
- GGs489hiromaru (Hiroki Yamauchi)
Pokémon UNITE
- Zeta Division, who beat European side KOMAÏ 3-1 in the grand final at Chase Center
Japan took four of the eight titles on offer, including both the VGC and TCG junior divisions and the GO championship — a reminder that the country's grassroots competitive scene remains the deepest in the world, and a useful bit of context for why UNITE's standalone event is being staged there rather than anywhere else.
What it means for 2027
A mid-August date in Singapore is a friendlier proposition than it might first appear for the circuit's biggest regions. It is a short haul for the Japanese, Korean and Australian contingents who have historically had to cross the Pacific, and Changi is one of the best-connected airports on the planet for everyone else. The trade-off lands on North American and European players, who will be looking at a long flight and a punishing time-zone swing during the busiest stretch of their season.
The one thing worth watching is the invite structure. Worlds attendance is earned through Championship Points across the season, and a venue this far from the historical player base tends to test how many mid-tier invites actually get used. The Pokémon Company has not yet published the 2026–27 season's Championship Points thresholds or travel award details.
Registration, qualification criteria and the side-event schedule are all still to come. For now: Singapore Expo and the Singapore Indoor Stadium, 13–15 August 2027, and no UNITE bracket.
