Earlier this year, we kicked off the second season in which Pokemon Go has taken part in the Pokemon World Championship series. The opening weekend of the season crowned our first 6 Worlds qualifiers (excluding last season’s champions), however it is the qualifiers from the Porto Alegre Regional in Brazil which caught my eye particularly.

LNDsRargef and LNDsAureo took 1st and 2nd places respectively, but a closer look at the tournament shows all top 4 competitors having the LNDs tag in their name with a further 2 in the top 12. You may have come across this tag every now and then in different parts of the competitive scene, but with LAIC taking place in Brazil this weekend, I wanted to find out what LNDs means and what was behind this group of players at the top of the Brazilian game.

LNDs stands for GBLindos, a play on the words GBL and Lindo (meaning ‘beautiful’ in Portuguese) and started out with a group of PVP passionate friends from Brazil trying to build a community around their shared love for the competitive side of the game, while trying to improve their skills together.

LNDsKanan, one of the more senior members of the group, spoke to me about the group’s origins:

“The group was founded by KRUSTZAO, DiegoXD, Rafa31ca, Rossinho and NathanJettar, all players well known throughout the GBL seasons for showing up on the GBL leaderboards. The group originated when Krust faced off against Rafa in GBL, where Krust opened up with a Snorlax against Giratina, which led to Rafa sending an angry message as a joke, as nobody used Snorlax as lead. From there came the idea where Krust wanted to group up good GBL players who were also friends to brainstorm strategies and teams for GBL based upon what they were facing around the same elo; this started GBLindos.”

“We would get together and have people from different places in Brazil play and interact in order to get better, and the friendship developed”

The group has since evolved into a community hub for all its members providing help with gameplay, team building, preparation for tournaments as well as internal Discord live streams encompassing all these aspects. While most of the members live in Brazil’s most populated city São Paulo, GBLindos can be found all over Brazil and even outside the country, with members such as LNDsAzaray and LNDsPortuga originating from Scotland and Portugal.

For the LATAM player base, finding online content in their native language isn’t too hard. Streamers like Marto Galde and Youtubers such as Torretto Master provide PVP content digestible by a large majority of South America. However when it comes to content for the Portuguese speaking side, the options are not as vast. Alongside individual streamers such as Xilonha, Zarddy, LNDsAureo and RafftyGamer; GBLindos have worked to fill this gap in content for viewers from Brazil and help populate the pool of high level competitive videos for a Portuguese speaking audience.

“The streams started with the purpose of showing what we were already doing privately between the original LNDs members in our Discord. Now we have live streams on Twitch and Youtube, internal streams in our Discord for subscribers, alongside a help network on Telegram. We try to help out with team building, explaining core mechanics and game techniques. Anything that is within our reach.”

You will often see GBLindos high up on the GBL leaderboards, as well as taking part in other facets of the competitive scene. There are 2 factions teams in the LATAM division, MagnisPVP and Hydra E-Sports, whose rosters consist of many LNDs players. However the fact that these players adopted the LNDs tags after the formation of the teams shows the bond that these players have created and developed with the GBLindos community, wearing it as a badge of pride within their Gamertags.

The Latin American International Championships will take place this weekend in the home country of GBLindos, and while Brazilian players have only had 2 regionals between both seasons to prove their mastery of the game, this weekend will for sure be the biggest opportunity yet. Expect to see many LNDs players on stream throughout the weekend, with some no doubt making it to top cut, showing the fruits they have gained being part of such a supportive community within Pokemon Go.

You can follow GBLindos on their Twitter and Twitch

Follow all the action from LAIC on our coverage page here