Pokémon Company International (TPCi) has been increasingly strict about checking for hacks at physical tournaments, but there is growing evidence that the system is flawed. The system may even be punishing the wrong players.

Kurt, aka "Kaphotics", creator of the genning program PKHeX, posted a report on X (formerly Twitter) on May 6, mainly about a "new case of VGC judges wrongly removing a Pokémon from a player's team." According to Kurt, the issue revolves around traded eggs and can be triggered if the breeder has "a very long OT name."

The creator of PKHeX noted that if you have a long OT name, breed an egg, and then trade that egg to a player with a shorter name (two characters or more), the Pokémon they hatch will likely fail TPCi's hack check. There's nothing illegal about this under the rules, but Pokémon hatched under these circumstances will still be flagged as hacked. After explaining the science behind it, Kurt noted, "Legality checking is an incredibly complex beast, full of quirks and edge cases across dozens of games."

This wasn’t even the first time Pokémon hack checks had failed. In March, there was also an issue with Gold Bottle Caps, which caused perfectly legal Pokémon to fail hack checks. Gold Bottle Caps and Hyper Training may allow you to take some shortcuts when building your team for tournaments, but they are a feature of the game and are perfectly legal. Under no circumstances should a competitor be penalized or disqualified for a glitch in the hack check system if they haven’t broken any rules.