Is one of the world's best Pokémon speedrunners cheating?

A speedrunner known as Werster's accomplishments in Pokémon Emerald are being put under a microscope

A prolific Pokémon personality has been accused of falsifying his world record claims, but the remarkable part here isn't the scandal. What makes this situation astonishing is the specific person making the accusations — and the lengths the accuser goes to try and argue against his own claims.

Werster is a speedrunner who has attained so many achievements that skimming through his accolades takes nearly 30 seconds of continuous scrolling. One of the games Werster competes in is Pokémon Emerald. More specifically, he is first place on the leaderboard for the game's Battle Factory.

Battle Factory is a challenge that opens up after the player defeats the Elite Four and completes the main storyline. It's tough, too. The mode gives players a random assortment of Pokémon and then throws them into seven consecutive battles. If the player survives, they're given a new set of Pokémon for the next slate of battles. The mode is endless, and the point is to see how far the player can go before they are defeated.

The mode has a lively speedrunning community that tracks how fast players can finish 42 battles in a row. Notably, players can submit a screenshot and explanation of the record to qualify for placement. It was common for people to speedrun the game without streaming or recording it.

Werster is a talented Pokémon player — that's what he's known for — but he didn't throw his hat into the ring until 2024. That year, he reached a personal best streak of 75 on camera. The Pokémon speedster claimed that his off-camera streak was much higher: 104. Both numbers are big, especially compared to a typical Pokémon player. Compared to Battle Factory speedrunners, however, both of those streaks were average. Werster wasn't good enough to even be in the top 10.

Then, in 2025, everything changed. That year, the largest streak anyone had attained in Battle Factory was 259 wins in a row. By November 2025, Werster was claiming that he had reached a personal best of 147 — offline. The number was much smaller than the world record of 259, but significant enough to make Werster claim third place on the leaderboard. One month later, Werster appeared to conclude a livestream with a streak of 210 wins.

Werster wasn't claiming to be the best in the world, but the jump shocked people in the Pokémon speedrunning community. One of these people was a speedrunner with the handle Magpie, the narrator of the hour-long video breaking down the Werster debacle. The situation seemed fishy to Magpie, but he didn't raise a fuss about it then. Werster was so trusted in the community that he was a moderator for some speedrun categories. Plus, Magpie didn't have proof — all he had was a hunch.

Over the next couple of years, Magpie collected an incredible amount of data from Werster's stream.

“There is a very serious mismatch between the player Werster claims to be and what hundreds of hours of footage from his stream actually prove," Magpie says in the video.

The short of it is that there's a gap between Werster's actual documented performance — his pace and streaks during livestreams — and the progress that the speedrunner claimed to make while no one was watching him. While live, his average playtime for a set of 7 battles was 35 minutes. His record time clocked in at 25 minutes per set. His offline pace? Twice as fast, somehow.

Magpie acknowledges that this could be explained by the nature of livestreaming, which requires interacting with an audience. So far, this is mostly describing the start of the video. The rest of the video is an entire hour of Magpie going through every possible scenario he could think of that might explain the discrepancy.

"This is not only my best attempt for a good faith defense of Werster, but also, if we can prove Werster was cheating even when biasing all the data toward him, it removes the need to do further analysis," Magpie says.

Werster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The video by itself is lengthy, but it's meant to be an accessible breakdown. The real hardcore stuff is contained in the separate research paper where the rival speedrunner further fleshes out his claims. We're talking footnotes and complex equations.

And at every step of the way, Magpie tilts the scales toward Werster. The mathematical models he references are built to assume Werster could not possibly have cheated.

"Imagine there are hundreds of parallel universes where Werster is playing Factory over this time period," Magpie muses. "We will assume that we live in the 1 percent of the most unlucky universes to exist," he says, explaining how he will approach every scenario in the video.

The conclusion Magpie reaches is that Werster might be using external tools, like spreadsheets and references. The how of it, or what of it, is not nearly as interesting as Magpie's willingness to show his work — and how far he goes to defend Werster.

"What is most sad about all of this is that Werster himself is a good player," Magpie says near the end of the video. "Werster is capable of doing a lot of this fully legitimately and without resorting to cheating, lying, and manipulation.

"It's very likely that some of Werster's more impressive achievements are actually real. But sadly, because of his own actions, we're never going to be sure which ones are."