Pokémon Red and Blue/Raising Champions

Pokémon isn't just about defeating the Elite Four and beating the game—it's also about raising your chosen Pokémon into a powerful fighting force. Whether it's for your own personal satisfaction or to fight your friends, you'll want your Pokémon to be the best they can be. To do that, you'll need to start planning early.

Go for the stats
Any two Squirtles will learn the same exact skills at the same levels, but they may have significantly different strengths. Start a game, pick your Starter, check out his stats, and then restart and pick the same Pokémon again. Odds are that at least one or two of his stats will be a bit higher or lower than they were before. So sometimes it pays to catch a wide variety of the same Pokémon, since some will be faster, some will simply be weaker in all categories. If you're trying to raise a champion, make sure you're starting with champion material.

What the stats mean
HP (Hit Points) : This is the amount of damage your Pokémon can take before it Faints. Obviously, the more the better, but don't overestimate the importance of HP. Chansey has more HP than any other Pokémon, but with dismally low Defense and Special scores, many Pokémon can still knock Chansey out in a single shot! Attack : This stat effects the amount of damage your Pokémon deal when they use attacks of the type Normal, Fighting, Flying, Poison, Ground, Rock, Bug, and Ghost. It's important to remember that your Attack score has no bearing on your Special attacks (Fire, Water, Psychic, etc.), so if your Pokémon uses mainly those types of attack, his Attack barely matters at all. This is the stat to watch for Normal, Flying and Fighting-type Pokémon (like attacking powerhouse Hitmonlee), as well as the other types mentioned above. Defense : This is usually more important than HP. Cloyster may not have a lot of health, but with a very high Defense score, most regular attacks will barely scratch its shell. But a high Defense won't protect him from Special-type attacks, especially if they have an advantage against his type. No amount of Defense will save Cloyster from a blast of Thunder. Speed : Speed is more important than you might think. Pokémon like Electrode have terrible Defense, but with their lightning Speed ensuring they always go first, they can K.O. most foes before they even get a chance to fight back. If you switch Pokémon in mid-battle, a really quick Pokémon may even be able to attack first that same turn! (Most Pokémon wouldn't get a chance to attack at all.) Special : This important statistic determines both how much damage you do with Special attacks (such as Fire, Water, Ice, Electric, Grass, and Psychic), and how much damage you'll take from opponents' Special attacks.

Once again, the difference between Attack types and Special types is important, and is a key to understanding the worth of each Pokémon. Hitmonchan may look like a great Pokémon with a wide variety of Special attacks, but with a pathetically low Special score, they'll never do as much damage as its basic Fighting attacks. Alakazam, on the other hand, has nothing but Special attacks, and a through-the-roof Special to make good use of them.

Get 'em while they're young
When you're catching a Pokémon you plan to use in battle, catch it as low a level as possible. Without the supervision of a trainer, wild Pokémon gain fewer stat points when they level up and may choose moves you don't want. So a level 20 Pikachu that you evolved from level 5 will be much stronger than a level 20 Pikachu in the wild. Wild Pokémon may also have lost useful skills as they grow--a wild Kakuna only knows how to Harden, but one you raised from a Caterpie will remember how to use Tackle and String Shot.

When to Evolve
Remember that you can always prevent a Pokémon from evolving by hitting during the evolution screen. The reason you would want to do this is so you can learn skills earlier. For example, a Charmander will learn Flamethrower at level 38, four levels sooner than a Charmeleon and eight levels sooner than a Charizard. There's really no danger in doing this, either... When you finally do evolve that Charmander all the way up to Charizard, he'll end up with the same stats he would have had if you had evolved him immediately. So if you can stand dealing with a weaker Pokémon for a little longer, consider preventing his evolution until he has his best skill.

As mentioned here, Pokémon who evolve via Elemental Stones should never be evolved until they've learned all ther good skills, since their evolved forms will usually learn inferior skills, if they learn any at all. Pokémon that evolve through trading learn the same skills at the same pace they would have if you didn't trade them, so evolve them immediately.

Picking the right skills
Pokémon can naturally learn up to 12 skills, and with TM's and HM's, some can learn nearly 50! The only problem is that they can only know four at once... And once they've forgotten one, it's gone forever. So plan carefully which skills you want your Pokémon to have. Check the Skills section for detailed descriptions of each skill, so you don't accidentally cripple your Pokémon by replacing a good skill with something bad. A few pointers:
 * Always have at least two techniques that are capable of dealing damage. The ability to lower your opponent's stats doesn't mean much when you don't have the firepower to knock them out afterwards.
 * Carefully check the amount of PP each skill has. No matter how powerful the attacks are, a Pokémon with two attacks that have only five PP each is a Pokémon who will be totally spent after four or five fights.
 * Stay away from novelty skills like Whirlwind or Teleport. Ending a battle whenever you want is nice, but it's not worth wasting a valuable skill set.

Using TMs and HMs
In addition to the skills they learn as they evolve, each Pokémon (save for a few like Magikarp and Ditto) can learn additional skills from the TM's and HM's you find as you play the game. With the exception of a few that can be purchased in the Celadon City Department Store, there exists only one copy of each TM in the game, so you'll want to think about it carefully before you teach one to a Pokémon. First, check a PokéDex to make sure they won't learn that skill anyway. Second, only teach Special attacks to Pokémon with high Specials, and Normal and Fighting attacks to Pokémon with high Attack scores. Otherwise, you'll be wasting a TM on a Pokémon that can't fully exploit its full potential. And while it's nice to, say, teach a Normal Pokémon an Electric-type attack, you may get Electric-type Pokémon (like Voltorb or Magneton) that don't learn any Electric-type attacks themselves. Since they'll get the 50% bonus for using an attack of their type, the TM would be better spent on them.

HM's are different in many ways. One HM can teach its skill to as many Pokémon as you want, but the catch is that those Pokémon can never forget it. A skill taught with an HM is a skill for life. This isn't always so bad when they're good HM's; even late in the game, Fly is a very useful attack, and Surf is one of the best Water attacks in the game (these techniques are also necessary to progress in the game). Unfortunately, skills like Flash and Cut are all but useless later on, so don't give them to Pokémon you're planning to use for the long run.

The right type at the right time
Perhaps each Pokémon's most important attribute is their type. As mentioned before, each Pokémon gets one or two types, like Thunder, Psychic, Fighting, Normal, etc. Each type means three things:
 * That Pokémon gets a 50% bonus when using a damage-dealing skill that matches one of his types (not that this is not true for Normal skills)
 * That Pokémon is now vulnerable to certain attack types (for example, Fire-type Pokémon will take double damage from Water-type attacks).
 * That Pokémon is now protected from certain attack types (for example, Ground-type Pokémon cannot be damaged by Flying-type attacks, and will take only 1/2 damage from Poison and Rock attacks).

Remember that your Water-type Pokémon only has an advantage against Fire-type opponents if it's using Water-type attacks. Many Pokémon, like Rhyhorn, have types (Ground and Rock) that they never learn any attack for (although they can learn Rock and Ground attacks with TM's). It's important to remember that types hurt your Pokémon as well as help: With no ability to take advantage of the weaknesses to Ground and Rock types other Pokémon may have, Rhyhorn may actually have been better off simply being Normal-type.

As you play, you'll learn which types are good against which other types. Pokémon is like a big game of Rock-Paper-Scissors, except with fifteen different types instead of three.