What is the GO Battle League Premier Cup and how will it work?

There’s another competition coming to GO Battle League, the Premier Cup!

The inaugural Pokemon Go cup competition will be part of the much anticipated GBL Season 2. Not a lot is known about the new format and currently trainers have more questions than answers.

What do we know about the Premier Cup?

While details remain sparse, Niantic did reveal some basic information. The Premier Cup will run concurrently alongside the Master League portion of Season 2.

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It will be open from June 15, 1pm PDT to July 6, 1pm PDT. The first two weeks of this will see only the Premier Cup and Master League available, while the third week is when all competitions are opened up. The same happened in Season 1.

• Read More: Should Darkrai be a GO Battle League reward encounter?

Much like Master League, there won’t be any limit on CP either. However, there will be some important restrictions to the species you can use – Legendary and Mythical Pokemon won’t be eligible.

There are plenty of non-Legendary and Mythical Pokemon that have high CPs to utilize, but the vast majority of the very highest CP ‘mons are made up of the likes of Dialga, Mewtwo and Rayquaza.

In fact more than 75% of the top 25 Pokemon based on max CP are Legendary and Mythical. So, the Premier Cup could look very different to Master League.

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Will it be a knockout competition or league?

There are still plenty of questions, though. The most important of those is whether, as its name suggests, it will be an actual cup competition or a league format like we have already seen.

The former would no doubt be more exciting but there would be questions about its feasibility given the sudden death nature of a knockout competition. Therefore, a straight, sudden death knockout cup seems unlikely as this would mean half of all players would only get to play one game.

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An alternative way it could work is to have a league within a cup – we’ll explain. Trainers could be put into a league with a selection of others and the top 50% of them in terms of results qualify for the next round.

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This could continue all the way through to the very end. A perhaps more likely scenario though, is that each match is against a completely random opponent and the trainers with the most wins/best win ratio qualify for the next round.

Of course at this point this is purely speculative. If it isn’t a cup competition we’ll simply be looking at Master League minus the Legendary and Mythical Pokemon. We can expect Niantic to reveal more details soon.