Catching Duplicate Pokémon Is Not A Waste

If you want to be a Pokémon Master than you have one job: capture all 151 of the original Pokémon with the help of Niantic's latest mobile application, "Pokemon Go." Just like Ash Ketchum, you must travel across the land and search far and wide to catch them all. However, as you go about your journey through the neighborhood, you'll start to notice something that even Ash himself struggled with in the beginning. Some Pokémon are more common than others. If you've downloaded the app, you may have already run into handfuls of Pidgeys, Rattatas, and Caterpies. Meanwhile, you have yet to capture a Pikachu, Dratini, or Magnemite. But that doesn't mean that you should let the Pokémon you see that are already in your Pokédex go to waste. In fact, you should capture every Pokémon you find, because catching duplicate Pokémon in "Pokemon Go" is an important part of the game.

As tedious as it might be to have so many of the same pocket monsters, capturing any Pokémon gets you 100 XP, which allows you to level up. And capturing the same Pokémon can also help you evolve the Pokémon that are not yet evolved and make your current Pokémon stronger. Every time you catch one, you get three candies for that specific Pokémon and 100 points of stardust. Once you get enough candies and stardust for each Pokémon, you can evolve them to their next form — or just simply power them up until they're stronger. The stronger your Pokémon are, the more likely you are to be strong enough to take over the nearest gym.

But the benefits of catching more than one Spearow or Zubat doesn't end there. As a Pokémon trainer with 151 Pokémon to catch and only 250 spots in your Pokédex — you also need to catch more Pokémon so that you can transfer them to the Professor. All you have to do is scroll down on the Pokémon you don't want's page, click "Transfer," and then confirm that you don't want that Pokémon any longer. Doing so will give you one more candy towards that specific Pokémon and 50 more XP towards leveling up without having to carry around a bunch of duplicates. From there, your chances of becoming the very best are heightened even more.

So stay stocked up on Pokéballs. There's a whole lot of Pokémon for you to catch.

Images: Pokémon USA/Nintendo; Giphy