Glossary

Every term used across the PkDaTa tools, in plain English. Terms are grouped by topic: the game and its formats, team building, damage math, and the statistics the tools report.

The game and its formats

VGC (Video Game Championships): The official competitive Pokémon video game circuit. VGC is a doubles format: two Pokémon per side are on the field at once, which makes speed control, spread moves, and positioning far more important than in singles play.
Regulation (format): The rule set defining which Pokémon are legal for a given period — for example the Champions regulations M-A and M-B tracked on this site. Statistics never transfer cleanly between regulations, which is why every tool has a format selector.
Bring 6, Pick 4: VGC teams are registered with six Pokémon, but you select only four of them for each battle after seeing the opponent's six. Usage stats on this site count what was actually brought into battle.
Best-of-1 (Bo1) / Best-of-3 (Bo3): Whether a match is a single game or a set decided by winning two games. Bo3 rewards adaptation between games; ladder play is mostly Bo1. The Win Rate Identifier can weight these sources differently.
Ladder: The ranked matchmaking queue on Pokémon Showdown. High-volume, variable-quality games — great for sample size, less predictive of tournament play than bracket data.
Top cut: The single-elimination playoff bracket at the end of a tournament's Swiss rounds. "Top-cut data" refers to the teams that made it there.
Elo: A rating system that estimates player skill from wins and losses. The Min Elo filter restricts ladder statistics to games between higher-rated players.

Team building

Core: A group of two or more Pokémon designed (or discovered) to work together — covering each other's weaknesses or enabling each other's win conditions. The "Discover cores" panel searches for combinations that win more together than apart.
Mega Evolution / Mega slot: A temporary in-battle transformation requiring the Pokémon to hold its Mega Stone. A team realistically gets one Mega per game, so choosing which Pokémon Megas is itself a team-building decision — the Megas filter in the Win Rate Identifier exists for exactly this.
Restricted / Mythical: Categories of legendary Pokémon banned under the current Champions "Flat Rules." Legality on this site is derived from the official rule set, not from fan tier lists.
Speed control: Moves and abilities that manipulate who acts first — Tailwind, Trick Room, Icy Wind, paralysis. Doubles games are frequently decided by whichever side establishes their preferred speed order.
Trick Room: A field effect that inverts speed order for five turns: the slowest Pokémon move first. The reason the EV Optimizer supports underspeed constraints.
Team sheet (OTS): The open team sheet shown to opponents at official events: species, items, abilities, and moves (but not stat spreads). OTS data from official tournaments feeds this site's statistics.

Stats and damage math

Base stats: A species' fixed underlying values in HP, Attack, Defense, Special Attack, Special Defense, and Speed. Everything else (nature, stat points) modifies these.
Stat Points (Champions) / EVs (classic): The trainable, allocatable part of a Pokémon's stats. In the Champions format, every Pokémon is level 50 with maxed IVs and gets a budget of 66 stat points, at most 32 per stat. (Classic VGC used the 0–252 "Effort Value" system — same idea, different budget.) The EV Optimizer solves for the cheapest allocation that meets your goals.
Nature: One of 25 personality values granting +10% to one stat and −10% to another. The right nature often decides whether a benchmark is affordable.
OHKO / 2HKO: Knocking a Pokémon out in one hit, or in two. A "guaranteed" OHKO means even the lowest damage roll suffices; anything less is a probability, not a promise.
Damage roll: The game multiplies every attack's damage by a random factor between 0.85 and 1.00 (16 possible values). This is why KO claims come with percentages.
Coverage: The set of opposing Pokémon your moves can meaningfully threaten. The Coverage Optimizer measures it as the usage-weighted share of the legal roster your team can bring into OHKO/2HKO range.
Super-effective (SE): A move whose type hits the target's type(s) for double (or quadruple) damage. Necessary but not sufficient for a KO — which is why the Coverage Optimizer defaults to real damage math instead.
Speed tier: The ranking of Pokémon by their final Speed stat under a given spread. "Winning" a speed tier by one point is as good as winning it by thirty, which makes exact benchmarks valuable.
Benchmark / breakpoint: A concrete stat target with a purpose: "survive Chi-Yu's Heat Wave," "outspeed max-speed Dragonite." Spreads built from benchmarks waste nothing.

The statistics the tools report

Usage: How often a Pokémon appears (is brought) in the selected data, as a share of games. Usage measures popularity, not quality.
Win rate: The share of decided games won by teams that brought the Pokémon or core in question, within the selected format and window. An observed historical rate — not a prediction.
Lift: How much better a combination performs than its members' individual records would predict. High lift is evidence of genuine synergy; ordinary win rate can just mean the members are individually strong.
Sample size (games / teams): The number of games and distinct teams behind a statistic. The single most important number on any page: a 56% win rate over 300 games is a finding, over 20 games it is a rumor.
Confidence tier: The site's shorthand rating (LOW / MOD / HIGH) for how much sample stands behind a number, so you can filter noise without doing the arithmetic yourself.
Blended (win rate source): A mixture of tournament and ladder replay data — more volume than tournament-only, more competitive signal than ladder-only.
Window: The date range of games counted. Short windows track the current trend but shrink the sample; long windows are stabler but slower to notice a meta shift.

Missing a term you expected? Tell us — the glossary grows from reader questions.