[
http://www.smogon.com Smogon] is the premier website in competitive [[Pokémon]] battling. It offers detailed, well-written guides on battling strategies for both newbies and pros alike. The website was founded by chaos (one of the developers of [[Pokémon NetBattle]]) and is considered by many to be one of the best competitive Pokémon battling websites. While Smogon.com is indeed one of the leading websites in competitive battling, it focuses on the traditional [[Pokémon single battle|Single Battle]] style and fails to cover the aspect of [[Pokémon Double Battle|Double Battling]], which was introduced in Ruby & Sapphire and also stereotyped by many as "Explosion, Earthquake, Flying/Levitate, incredibly lame, and nothing else."
The term 'competitive battling' within Pokémon refers to battling against other human players using either the downloadable program NetBattle<sup>[http://www.netbattle.net]</sup> or any of a number of battle simulating bots, usually found on [[IRC]]. Both of these are online simulations of the Pokémon games, where one may build a team of Pokémon with relative ease. Experienced players, 24-hour servers, diverse communities and an oppurtunity to test out strategies are just a few advantages of online battling, but perhaps the most vital advantage is battling against sentient players rather than [[Artificial intelligence|AI]] - which requires a significant amount more intelligence and strategy to succeed.
Smogon has three primary faces through which it operates: the Smogon website and forums, #smogon on your-irc.net, and the Smogon NetBattle server.
Smogon has attracted a great deal of negative attention due to their position as being one of the fastest, and certainly the most popular NetBattle server on the registry: many lesser entities have taken to "Smogon-hating" due to Smogon's apparently monolithic dominance over smaller servers. Many of these Smogon-haters have taken to trolling or spamming the Smogon server and forums, often by use of floodbots and other scripts.
Being the most populated server, Smogon is also disliked for its inevitably high population of [[newbies]] which have occasionally repelled users and made them look for solace on smaller servers with far stricter moderation. Others simply believe the Smogon population to be immature, such as [[Serebii.net]], although their claims are questionable.
Residents of the Smogon forums are referred to as "Smogoneers" or "Smogonites" and have at one point been rumored to be [[Nazi]] sympathizers due to an avatar fad involving swastikas. At one point it was also rumored that the Smogonites would lead trolling raids on "lesser" communities such as [[Serebii.net]] and [[PokéCommunity.com]] but this fad has died down dramatically since. The Smogon motto is "Pokemon on the Internet: Let's make it happen" and their mascot is the ever-smiling Pokémon [[Koffing]], the name Smogon itself being the German moniker for this Pokémon.
Smogon is affiliated with NetBattle and many, if not most, serious competitive battlers are now part of Smogon. The SmogonDex, although currently not yet fully realized, is by far the best current option for competitive battling reference, although other Pokédex sites like [http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~psypoke/dex/index.php Psypoke] and [http://www.veekun.com/ Veekun] currently possess more information related directly to in-game interests on the original GB and GBA cartridges.
==Administrators==
* chaos
* skarm
* Vineon
* Brain
==External Links==
*[http://www.smogon.com Smogon]
*[http://www.netbattle.net NetBattle]