Pokemon Emerald speedrunner Werster accused of faking record after investigators check his in-game clock

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A surprisingly detailed cheating scandal has emerged within the speedrunning community, and it’s centered around the Battle Factory in the game Pokémon Emerald.

The Battle Factory is designed to truly test your skills as a Pokémon Trainer. You don’t use your regular team; instead, you build a team using rental Pokémon and battle seven opponents. After each run, that team is discarded, and you start over completely – that’s the whole idea behind it.

Werster was a well-known Pokemon speedrunner for over ten years, famous for streaming hundreds of hours of the Battle Factory. He also managed community leaderboards and often hinted at a remarkable, unrecorded run of 212 consecutive wins. Someone eventually decided to verify his claims by looking at the game’s internal clock.

Werster accused of faking Pokemon Emerald Battle Factory win streak

YouTuber MagpieLabs recently published a thorough report claiming that Werster faked a 212-game winning streak in Pokemon Emerald’s Battle Factory. The Battle Factory is a notoriously difficult part of the game where players can’t use their usual Pokemon teams and have to build new ones from scratch every few battles.

The whole case rests on something hiding in plain sight: the in-game clock.

The Battle Factory automatically saves after each group of seven battles. This means the game’s internal timer accurately tracks how long you’ve played, even if you aren’t actively streaming – making it a very reliable measure of your true playtime.

The investigator thoroughly reviewed over two years of Werster’s past broadcasts on YouTube and Twitch, and meticulously compared the in-game timers from stream to stream. This analysis revealed that there wasn’t enough time between broadcasts for Werster to have genuinely completed the parts of his gaming streak that were supposed to happen offline.

He won 217 offline matches without a single loss, a statistically improbable feat estimated to occur between once in 129 million and once in 1.5 trillion times, depending on how it’s calculated. This contrasts with his online win rate of around 93%. While the investigation doesn’t offer definitive proof, it concludes that luck alone couldn’t explain these results.

At the time of writing, Werster has not publicly responded to the accusations.

This isn’t the first time the Pokémon speedrunning community has faced issues with false records. Similar situations happened before, like when a Pokémon Red speedrunner was banned in 2024 for cheating, and when a Metal Gear speedrunner presented a pre-recorded video as a live run during SGDQ.

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2026-06-16 20:48