I would not have bothered with GO Battle League (GBL), but Matt told me about how he was getting free legendaries and Stardust by tanking ELO, and I was jealous...
So as promised, I've written a guide to teach you to do the same. The strategy I will be explaining is:
- How to rank up to 20 (where legendaries are available)
- How to tank your rating so battles are mindless and easy
- How to maintain this every day afterwards for resources
Once you learn how I do this, you can adapt the strategy for yourself.
It usually takes me about 2 weeks of lazy playing at the start of each season to set everything up. You can accomplish it faster if you are more diligent, or you can take your time if you don't feel like playing every set every day.
GBL provides many resources that you would normally have to raid for. Once you get the right setup, GBL is a consistent source of Stardust, Rare Candy, Golden Razz Berries, Silver Pinap Berries, regular TMs, and Elite TMs.
You receive an Elite Charged TM once you hit Rank 19 and an Elite Fast TM at the end of the season if you finished at Rank 19 or higher. You can get additional Elite TMs from the GO Battle League Timed Research Pass. All other items are awarded through daily farming.
I usually get so many TMs that I end up discarding them for bag space, and Rare Candy goes into Origin Dialga to extend its Roar of Time.
You can rarely get legendaries in the Pokémon encounters once you hit Rank 20. The legendary that is available is usually the one that is in raids, so you can try for one if raiding isn't a good option for you. Yes, these encounters can be shiny if the shiny has been released.
You can check out my GBL tracking spreadsheet to see what I got over the last few seasons. I am not particularly lucky and I have seen other people's records with way more legendaries than me.
Here is Matt's GBL tracking spreadsheet.
I made a GBL Encounter Log Template you can copy to record your encounters. It's essentially my own log with sample data and instructions for your use. (If you are consistently tracking and want to show your sheet here, let me know and I can add it too.)
It is genuinely fine if you are bad at GBL. We will be playing at the low ratings, so many of the opponents you run into are doing the same thing and may instantly forfeit or AFK while you claim a win.
Here are some of my records to show you what sort of win rate to expect.
I do recommend slowly building up a team of Pokémon that are more meta in case you have to fight for a win, but perfect GBL IVs and moves are not necessary to start.
Depending on what you have, you may still be able to participate, but you'll be more reliant on matching with other people who want to forfeit. It's best if you come back to this after you have some Pokémon to use and resources to power them up.
This guide will not help you earn the Pikachu Libre or any of the limited clothing rewards. I will be showing you how to play poorly so battles are easy and you can get resources instead.
This guide does not guarantee you shiny legendaries -- those are still luck-based.
It's important to understand how this part of the game is structured before we start.
There are 3 main formats, Great League (max CP 1500), Ultra League (max CP 2500), and Master League (max CP unlimited). These will cycle in and out through the season. Ideally, you'll have at least one team for each format. There are often variants on these leagues that restrict the Pokémon in different ways. You can play any of the available formats for this.
This is the most visible measure of advancement in GBL, but it is not a measure of how good you are.
You start at Rank 1. When you satisfy the criteria for the next rank, you rank up after you complete a set.
You can only gain 1 rank per set, and you won't gain any ranks until you complete the set.
I use Serebii's GBL page to see what the requirements are for each rank.
You reset back to Rank 1 at the start of a new season. Since a season lasts 3 months, setting this up early lets you take advantage for about 2.5 months.
You are limited to 5 sets of 5 battles daily, for a total of 25 battles per day. Each day resets at midnight local time.
The rewards vary based on your rank, but at Rank 20 where we will be farming, you'll get:
- 1st win = Stardust
- 2nd win = random item, berry, Rare Candy x3, or TM
- 3rd win = Pokémon encounter
- 4th win = Rare Candy x3
- 5th win = Stardust
After you complete a set, you will earn more Stardust rewards, even if you lost every battle.
Occasionally, there will be special GO Battle Days or GO Battle Weeks where you can play more than 5 sets per day. For example, this GO Battle Week allowed users to play 20 sets per day. Take advantage of these days to rank up quickly or farm more resources.
Once you hit Rank 20, you'll be able to see your rating after you complete each set. Rating is being tracked in the background even when you can't see it. You need it to be high to reach Rank 21+. For farming, we want it to be low so we match with other unmotivated players, keeping our battles easy.
Since we are playing at the lowest ratings, your Pokémon don't have to be ideal. I would suggest looking at the top species for each format on PvPoke and pick a variety of types. This site tells you what moves are preferred and the roles each Pokémon can play.
If you want to be the very best, you can power up Pokémon with the most ideal IVs. Great and Ultra Leagues tend to use Pokémon with low Attack and high Defense/HP. Stadium Gaming is a good site you can use to check if your Pokémon are the best. Mind you, these may still not be the most preferred if you were a top ladder competitive player, but this is good enough for most people.
As I said before, you do not need the best Pokémon to farm resources. Try to aim for a variety of popular Pokémon and power them up close to the limits. Slowly work on unlocking the second moves if you want.
Here are some of my own teams that I've used in the different leagues. I like to have a Pokémon with the "Spammy" trait on PvPoke in my first slot so it can wear down opponent shields.
Here, I'll go over what you need to do to go from a lowly Rank 1 to a Rank 20, where legendaries are unlocked.
You'll want to learn to forfeit well. If you plan to forfeit a match, tap where the "run" button on the top left will appear as the countdown starts, and be ready to hit the "YES" button where it'll pop up in the middle of the screen. Learning to forfeit quickly will prevent you from earning too much rating when you are in the daily farming stage.
After you forfeit, there are a few seconds of cooldown before you can queue for another battle. If it kicks you out immediately with "Error finding match," you started searching for a new battle too quickly. This looks to be fixed now as of March 2026!
There are many guides with advanced techniques for how to win a match if you need to. You can study how GBL allows you to use fast and charged moves, switching mechanics, and shields. For the most part, I get my wins when I match with other people putting in low effort or instantly forfeiting, and I'm not paying much attention during the rank up process.
I suggest bringing a team close to the CP limit of the format. This gives you more control if you run into someone who is AFK since you can either beat their Pokémon one-by-one or forfeit if you don't need the win.
I will use Serebii's Season 20 Rank Unlock chart to explain how you are going to work up to Rank 20!
Remember our rules: You can only rank up after you finish a set, and you can only gain one rank per set.
We want to finish with low rating at the end. This means it's fastest to forfeit every battle we don't need, and only win the ones we need.
If you look at the requirements for Ranks 2-6, they are all "5 more battles".
Since you get 5 sets, your first day can go like this:
- Set 1: forfeit all 5 -> rank up to 2
- Set 2: forfeit all 5 -> rank up to 3
- Set 3: forfeit all 5 -> rank up to 4
- Set 4: forfeit all 5 -> rank up to 5
- Set 5: forfeit all 5 -> rank up to 6
See what happened? You forfeited the entire day's worth of sets and made it to Rank 6, good work!
On day 2, you'll get another 5 sets. Notice that Ranks 7-10 want "1 more win", and Rank 11 wants "5 more battles".
You can do this with your day 2 sets then:
- Set 1: win 1, forfeit 4 -> rank up to 7
- Set 2: win 1, forfeit 4 -> rank up to 8
- Set 3: win 1, forfeit 4 -> rank up to 9
- Set 4: win 1, forfeit 4 -> rank up to 10
- Set 5: forfeit all 5 -> rank up to 11
That should leave you at Rank 11 after the end of the second day by doing pretty minimal work.
After Rank 11, you'll notice that you start seeing "5 more wins", "6 more wins", etc. Remember that you aren't required to win all of the battles in a set, and when a rank requires more than 5 wins, you'll need multiple sets to have enough wins.
Take Rank 15's requirement of "8 more wins". You could advance from Rank 14 to 15 in multiple ways:
- Set 1: win 4, lose 1; Set 2: win 4, lose 1 -> rank up to 15
- Set 1: win 3, lose 2; Set 2: win 3, lose 2; Set 3: win 2, lose 3 -> rank up to 15
- Set 1: win 2, lose 3; Set 2: win 2, lose 3; Set 3: win 2, lose 3; Set 4: win 2, lose 3 -> rank up to 15
At this point, don't be worried about winning lots of battles per set. It's better if you win 1-3 per set and slowly satisfy the criteria. If you're keeping count and know that you don't need any more battles, you can forfeit everything you don't need. Winning every battle increases your rating by a lot in the background, and you'll end up forfeiting it all away in the end.
This part feels like it takes forever, but as long as you are getting a few wins a day, you're still progressing. Don't give up!
Of course, when you reach "5 more battles" for Rank 16 and 20, do what you did before and forfeit all 5 battles in the set.
Hurrah, now you are at Rank 20! You can tap on the encounter prize to see that the legendary is now available. Rating will now be displayed as you finish each set.
The next step is to forfeit every single battle until your rating drops close to the minimum of 300. It may take a few days if you ended up with a very high rating.
This is why I told you not to worry about winning lots of matches per set. If you raced through the criteria by winning everything, you'd finish with higher rating and spend several days forfeiting.
At this point, you can pick a daily farming strategy based on what you're aiming for. I originally played GBL for a chance at legendaries, so I'll introduce this concept by explaining what I initially did.
Since the 3rd win of each set gets you a Pokémon encounter, you can aim to win 3 battles in every set of 5. This is a very achievable goal if you keep your rating low; you'll often spend a whole day's worth of battles playing people who immediately forfeit on you, AFK, or bring low level Pokémon.
Here is an example of how a set looks in your journal when you aim to win 3 out of 5 battles. You do not have to win all 3 in a row; if an opponent is putting up a fight early on, you can always forfeit and hope to win a battle later in the set.
A sample day for encounter farming and aiming to keep rating under 400:
- Set 1: win 3, forfeit 2 -> get 1 encounter
- Set 2: win 3, forfeit 2 -> get 1 encounter
- Set 3: win 3, forfeit 2 -> get 1 encounter
- Set 4: win 3, forfeit 2 -> get 1 encounter
- Set 5: forfeit all 5 -> rating drops under 400
You can modify this schedule however you like, such as aiming to win 3 out of 5 until your rating hits 400, then immediately forfeit the next set.
You do not need to play every day either. If a format cycles out and you don't have a good team for the available ones, consider using the downtime to forfeit and reduce your rating.
As you get more experience, you'll find that it's not necessary to keep the rating under 400! There are times when it may be beneficial to earn more encounters at the cost of increasing your rating, such as when a Pokémon is out for a limited time.
For example, when shiny-possible Zacian debuted for a week, I tanked my rating to 300 before the event started, then aimed to win 3 out of 5 for every single set. After 5 days, I had done 25 encounters, my rating was just over 700, and I was still running into a lot of opponents who didn't put in effort to win.
You may prioritize Rare Candies over encounters. In this case, it may be beneficial to aim for winning 4 out of 5 since the 4th prize is guaranteed Rare Candy. Winning 4 out of 5 has the disadvantage of raising your rating more quickly than winning 3 out of 5. If you're able to win 4 out of 5 consistently, you'll find that you need to forfeit sets more often to keep rating from going up too high.
Since people are still forfeiting at the middle ratings, you can even choose not to immediately tank your rating to 300 after hitting Rank 20. At the end of the day, decide what rating is too high for you based on whether you are running into too many people who want to win. Whenever you hit that rating, start forfeiting. You can adjust your desired win ratio based on what event is happening and how much time you want to put into GBL.
If you don't want to play for a day, consider throwing a set to put yourself at a lower rating when you feel like playing again.
Will add extra tips here as I think of them.
You should pick up the GO Battle League Timed Research Pass from the in-game store before grinding GBL. This pass is free each season and provides a Timed Research with additional Stardust and Elite TMs. Stardust rewards can be boosted with a Star Piece even if they don't show up properly.
You can play 6 sets on the first day of a new season this way:
- Complete 4 of 5 sets the day before the season ends.
- Start the 5th set, but don't do any battles.
- Wait until the new GBL season starts at 1:00 PM Pacific Time. (Note that this is different from when the in-game content changes over at 10:00 AM local time.)
- You'll be able to finish your 5th set and then play your usual 5 sets of the day for a total of 6.
GBL has some bugs that you'll almost certainly run into. As far as I know, the one where you could queue with no UI and Error 1000:6 are gone now. You can still get kicked out of a battle with "error 6".
When you enter the GBL page on the first day of a new season, you'll get a bunch of rewards. Using a Star Piece beforehand can get you a lot of extra stardust.
Most of the initial strategy, I learned from Matt.
This guide belongs to Anubis.