Game Theory - Poké Balls Are KILLING Pokémon?!

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

Pokeballs are a DEATH TRAP! Join Game Theory host Tom as he explains how these cute little balls designed to capture our beloved Pokemon will be the last thing our little “friends” see before they DIE…

This poker ball is a death trap. These cute little balls designed to capture our beloved Pokemon will be the last thing our little friends see before they die. Hello internet! Welcome to Game Theory, the show that captures your heart with science. And today, loyal theorists, I come to you guys with my head hanging in shame. I've been host of this channel for over a year and a half at this point. And yet, somehow, in that time, I've not done a single Pokemon episode. No, you don't count.

This franchise was my childhood. It's the series I probably put the most hours into in my three decades of existence. How have I never covered this series properly? Well friends, that ends today. With Legends EA just being released, it re-sparked my passion for this franchise and made me want to go back to one of the most basic parts of the series, the humble poker ball. You might be wondering what is there to talk about when it comes to these things?

They've made us do the same catching tutorial about a dozen times. You throw the Pokeball, Pokemon goes in the ball, three shakes, done. But have you ever stopped to wonder just how all this happens? I mean, these are devices capable of capturing sentient elemental beings against their will. That's some MCU levels of technological advancement that they make out of fruit and sell to 10-year-olds. Watching the anime growing up, I'd always assumed that the beam of light that came from the Pocable somehow digitized the Pokemon so that they could get stored in a PC.

But then, while I was replaying Legends Archaeus in the buildup to Zia, I noticed this line from The Professor. You'll recall, of course, that Pokemon possess the odd power to shrink themselves down. With the poker balls we craft, we can make use of that power to catch them. What? They just shrink? That feels so hand-wavy. Like the kind of thing you tell a 10-year-old to sort of justify the whole capturing creatures against their will thing.

Don't ask questions to me. You've got to catch them all. I mean, I suppose this is a game for kids. But this is game theory. And the truth is, while at first that explanation feels like a slap in the face, it may be grounded in plausible explanations. It's just a shame that those plausible explanations are also the things that are going to kill, not just our little friends, but all of us.

First, we have to address the whole shrinking thing. At first glance, it seems like a simplified explanation of how poker balls can work in the Hesui region, a region that takes place in the distant past with seemingly no advanced technology. But considering all the other strange abilities that Pokemon possess, Like the ability to literally explode without dying? Is it that ridiculous of an idea that they can all shrink? Pokemon does literally stand for pocket monsters after all.

How did they get that name before the invention of pokeballs without demonstrating some pocket-fitting abilities? There's even a move that Pokemon can learn straight up called minimized. So there is clearly some precedent for it. But it's actually much more scientific than that. For a moment, let's put on our evolution caps. No, not that kind of evolution. Like real biological evolution. In the real world, there are four main reasons why an organism might develop a seemingly wacky ability.

In biology, we call these the four Fs. Feeding, fighting, fleeing, and four, uh, mating. And of these four options, fleeing is the most logical explanation for this shrinkage. Plenty of creatures in our world have evolved to have the means of escape that at first glance seem quite ridiculous. But, hey, if it can help you get away enough to survive, it's worth it. Many types of lizards, like the Anol lizard, will detach their own tail if a predator takes a chompack. it, allowing them to make a daring escape. Likewise, puff of fish balloon into a giant ball of spikes and toxins to avoid becoming something else's snack. But when it comes to bizarre escape acts,

nobody beats the humble sea cucumber. When threatened the slow as molasses cukes will, and I hope you're not eating, they will literally fire their intestines out of their butts. This sticky and toxic substance can get caught in whatever is trying to eat it, giving the cucumber just enough time to make it out alive. Man, talk about spilling your guts. And if that's sounding a little familiar to the Pokemon world, yes, this little trick is the inspiration behind Pukumuku's ability, Innods out. You know, the sea cucumber Pokemon. Wait a minute. If Pukumuku shoots its intestines out of there, then that means this part of it is...

That uncomfortable thought aside, the point I'm trying to make here is that while shrinking oneself down to avoid predators may seem like a bit of overkill, compared to other things real animals have done to protect their hides, it's not really that crazy. Have you ever stopped to think about how when you walk into tall grass, you can't actually see where the Pokemon is until you step into them? Even in the new games where some Pokemon are visible, when you walk into grass, there is a chance you'll find a Pokemon that isn't visible initially. Like, I'm pretty sure I'd be able to see an entire snorlax chilling behind a two-foot blade of grass long before I walked up to it. Unless, the Pokemon are all shrunk down. Hiding, avoiding detection from predators, or overzealous 10 year olds. It's only after we step in the grass and presumably on top of them that they spring in. into full size and get ready for battle.

Speaking of battles, why can't I catch a Pokemon after I knock it out? Shouldn't it be unable to wiggle free? Well, not if shrinking is something they need to be awake to do. As we know now, no shrinking means that pokeballs can't capture anything. So if we accidentally one hit K-O, our would-be HMule, then it probably wouldn't be able to shrink to fit inside the ball. It's unconscious. I gotta say, at this point in my research, I was totally shocked.

By doing just a little bit of digging, not only could tiny pocket monsters be a totally legitimate defense mechanism, but it also helps fill in some of the series' biggest plot holes. However, notice how despite all of these Pokemon having the ability to shrink whenever they want, they don't do it all of the time for their protection. Especially in the newer games where you just see them walking around outside. Why? Because shrinking a living creature down to microscopic size comes with some uncomfortable side effects. Let's use my favorite Pokemon Evie as an example. it shrinks down, everything about it shrinks, its little ears, its tail, and yes, its eyes.

The reason that humans and most animals are able to see in the first place is because light rays enter our eyes through our pupils. As EVs shrinks down, the pupils will also shrink, allowing less light to pass through, leading to its vision becoming darker and darker. If the pupils manage to get smaller than the wavelength of visible light around 400 nanometers, then absolutely no light would pass through, and the captured Pokemon, would live a life in total darkness. Think about that the next time you send a Pokemon to the box never to see the light of day again, literally. A similar issue would arise when it comes to sound as well.

At that scale, Evie's cry would be so small that our ears wouldn't be able to pick it up, and sounds coming from our voices would be more like shockwaves than audible communication. But being unable to see or hear would be the least of Evie's troubles. For one, Evie would have a tough time just trying to maintain its own body temperature. If Evie were to shrink to one-tenth of its size, that would mean that its surface area would decrease by a factor of 100, and its volume would decrease by a factor of 1,000 thanks to the square cube law. Because surface area shrinks with the square of the radius, but volume, it shrinks with the cube of the radius. That means that Evie would have a relatively tiny body to generate heat, but enough surface area to radiate away all of its body heat and fast. In order to maintain its body heat enough to, you know, not die,

would have to eat the equivalent of its body weight or more just to prevent shutting down from hypothermia. And this new smaller size is also going to make it near impossible for Evie to get any oxygen in its lungs. Because Evie's lung volume would be so much smaller compared to the surface area inside of the lungs, it literally wouldn't be able to breathe enough oxygen to survive. In fact, if Evie was shrunk down small enough, oxygen itself might be too big to enter the lungs at all, or bind to the hemoglobin in its blood. preventing oxygen from getting to all of its vital organs. All of this means that a Pokemon that was shrunk down would be unable to see, hear, keep warm or even breathe.

Now, for a few moments or perhaps even a few minutes, that's not a major issue. If we bring this back to the world of evolution, it's possible that a Pokemon that chooses to shrink down could survive for a bit, long enough to be able to get away from a predator before popping back to normal size. But what if someone came around and, oh, I don't know, forced a Pokemon into a metal prison, unable to regrow back to normal size for an indeterminate amount of time. That would mean that our friend Evie would slowly suffocate and freeze in a dark, silent coffin of our own making. But regardless of whether they're alive or dead inside the ball, we now have another potential problem. See, the idea of capturing our little buddies and shrinking them down to the size of a pokeball

might trigger the creation of a little something called a black hole. Theoretically, any object in the universe that has mass, from the sun to a soul rock, can become a real deal black hole if you compress all of its mass into a tiny, tiny, tiny space. This space is known as the object's Schwartzschild radius. For example, if you take the sun and compress it down to a ball with a radius of three kilometers, then our sun would spontaneously become a black hole. So if we're squishing sometimes massive Pokemon into really tiny balls, is that small enough to reach its Swartzschild radius? Let's take the heaviest Pokemon in the games, which is actually a tie between Cosmoem and Celestela,

both weighing 99.9 kilograms or 2,204.4 pounds. The formula for the Swartz Child radius is actually super simple, as most of the formula is just constants. It's two times the gravitational constant times the mass, divided by the speed of light squared. So just plug in the mass of our object and voila. We find that the Schwartz Child radius for the heaviest Pokemon in the games is 1.485 times 10 to the power.

of minus 24 meters or 1.485 yocktometers. Yeah, we're in yockto territory now. For context, that's about 2 billion times smaller than the radius of an electron. That's the same effect of radius as a neutrino, one of the smallest objects we know about in the universe. At this scale, even the ideas of size and radius start to break down for quantum physics reasons. So, yeah, unless Pokemon are able to shrink to Ant-Man levels, We couldn't rest easy knowing that derpy screw-ups like Ash don't have the ability to trigger black holes all across the Pokemon world. But even if it doesn't trigger a black hole, that doesn't mean that capturing Pokemon

won't get very tense. Or should I say, dense? If you followed this channel for a while, you know that we love talking about density, the amount of matter per unit of volume, or DMV. If we're cramming all of that mass into a tiny ball, wouldn't that become denser than the earth itself and sink to the core causing problems? Well, let's run the numbers. If we take the mass of the heaviest Pokemon again, 99.9 kilograms, and compress it to the

size of a pokeball, which, according to the wand company who makes the official Pocable replicas, has a diameter of three inches or 7.5 centimeters, with the volume of a sphere being pi r squared and the radius being half the diameter, the Pocables volume ends up being 220.9 cubic centimeters. Plug that into DMV, and you get that Celesteeler or Cosmoim shrunk to just fit inside the Pokeball would have a density of around 4,526,500 kilograms per cubic meter. That's over 370 times more dense than the densest part of the Earth's core. But that's not even the end of it.

If we assume that Pocables are instead as small as we've seen them in the anime, around the size of a ping pong ball, then the density shoots up to nearly 30 million kilograms per cubic meter. And if we know that objects that are more dense, sink in objects that are less dense, should mean that a freshly caught Cosmoem should therefore sink to the center of the Earth, right? Actually, no. You see, when we talk about objects sinking into other objects because of density, we're typically talking about two liquids or a solid in a liquid. This is because liquids offer very little resistance to an object falling around them. But two solid objects are different. When you stand on the ground, not only are you pushing down on the ground, but the ground

is pushing back with an equal and opposite force. Hence, you don't move. When you think about, it, Celestiela and Cosmoim have a weight of just 999.9 kilograms or 2,204 pounds. That is only one sick, the weight of an African elephant. If the ground can support elephants and their relatively tiny footprints, so could the Earth hold any captured Pokemon in its poker ball. Still, I wouldn't want to drop that polka ball on my foot, and if it falls in the ocean, forget about it. But wait a minute.

When Ash captures a snorlax, it's not like the ball suddenly becomes half a ton. I mean, unless ashes jacked underneath those spindly arms, all of the mass of the captured Pokemon has to be going somewhere. According to the law of conversion of mass, matter cannot be created or destroyed. So where is all of that snor-lac stuff going? Well, it's not going anywhere. Instead, it's being converted into a different form. Energy, described by arguably the most famous formula in all of physics,

E equals MC squared. Matter and energy are really just two sides of the same coin. Matter can be converted into pure energy and vice versa. This means a Pokeball needs to not only capture shrinking Pokemon, they also need to convert some or all of the Pokemon's mass into energy so that you and I are able to pick it up and transport it on our belts. Maybe the anime wasn't so wrong with the energy beams after all. But that is where the rest of Silfco's Pocable Empire comes crumbling down.

Let me explain with our pal EV again. Evie has a mass of 6.5 kilograms. Plugging that into E equals MC squared, with C being the speed of light in a vacuum, or 299,792,458 meters per second, we can calculate that an EV contains an amount of energy equal to, and hold on to your chairs for this one, 584 quadrillion, 190 trillion, 866 billion, 178, 1,931,466 joules. That is the equivalent of 139,624,9168 tons of TNT, 93,000 times as much energy as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima.

That is 40% more powerful than the most powerful thermonuclear bomb ever designed, the Soviet Tsar bomb. So big that even our favourite nuclear scaling website, NukeMap, can't display bombs that big. And that's just the energy to capture an EVEV. If we scale this up to that of Cosmoem or Celestina, we're dealing with 89 quintillion joules of energy or 21 gigatons of TNT. All of that mass needs to be converted to energy every time you want to capture your favorite mon and then reconvert it back into matter whenever youngster Joey wants to throw hands. I mean, clearly nothing has gone wrong yet, but we're talking about amounts of energy equivalent to apocalyptic-sized bombs all being contained in an item that costs only 200 pokey dollars. Now I finally get why Asheses Pikachu is always so hesitant to get in the ball. If he wasn't dead going in, he is almost certainly dead coming out of it.

But, hey, that's just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching.