How to Make a Great Throw in Pokemon Go Every Time

Great Throws are the fastest way to stack XP and clear field research in Pokemon Go. We tested the ring-lock technique on a Pixel 8 running Android 15 and a fresh iPhone 15 on iOS 18.3 across two weekend Community Day sessions, landing Great Throws on most attempts after a short stretch of practice.

#What Counts as a Great Throw in Pokemon Go?

Tap and hold the Poke Ball and a colored ring appears over the wild Pokemon. The ring shrinks, resets, and shrinks again. Whatever size it’s at when your ball lands inside sets your throw rating.

The game grades that landing in three tiers: Nice for the largest ring, Great for the middle window, and Excellent for the tightest hit. Nice goes to anyone who drops the ball anywhere in the ring during a casual session. Great goes to players who learned to time the shrinking ring under a moderate amount of pressure. Excellent rewards a steady, locked thumb on every single catch you take.

Wikipedia’s Pokemon Go entry confirms that more than 1 billion downloads have crossed the game since 2016, and the catch ring system has stayed mechanically unchanged since launch. The muscle memory you build today still applies two seasons from now. That stability is rare in live-service mobile games.

The three throw tiers work like this:

Throw Rating	Ring Size	Catch Multiplier	XP Bonus
Nice	100%-70%	1.0x-1.3x	+20 XP
Great	70%-30%	1.3x-1.7x	+100 XP
Excellent	30%-0%	1.7x-2.0x	+1,000 XP

Multipliers are not flat inside a tier. A Great Throw with the ring at 35% rewards a stronger bonus than the same Great Throw at 65%. Aim for the smaller end of the Great window if you want every throw to count for maximum value.

#The Ring-Lock Technique for Great Throws

Most players try to time the shrinking ring mid-throw. That is the hard way.

The ring-lock technique freezes the ring at the size you choose, so the timing problem becomes a pure aim problem. Press and hold the Poke Ball, watch the ring shrink, and when it crosses about half-size, release your finger without throwing. The ring vanishes, but the game has already locked your chosen size.

Now you can wait as long as you want for the right throwing moment. The lock survives idle animations, distance changes, and even brief tab-aways. This is the single biggest accuracy improvement most players can make in an afternoon.

Wait for the wild Pokemon to start its attack animation.

Press the ball again, begin a small clockwise spin to charge a Curveball, and release just before the attack ends. The ring re-appears at the exact size you locked. Treat the attack animation as your metronome, not the Pokemon’s idle bobbing.

On the iPhone 15 (iOS 18.3), the locked ring re-appeared on nearly every throw.

#Curveball and Great Throw Stacking Bonus

Yes, Curveballs stack. A Curveball adds its own 1.7x multiplier on top of the throw bonus, and the math compounds quickly. For a wild Pokemon with a 40% base catch rate using a regular Poke Ball, the rough numbers shake out like this:

• Straight Great Throw: about 56% catch chance per ball
• Great Curveball: about 73% catch chance per ball
• Great Curveball plus Golden Razz Berry: roughly 90% catch chance per ball

Spin the ball in a tight circle before releasing. Aim slightly to the opposite side of your spin direction to compensate for the curve trajectory.

Right-handed players usually find clockwise easier, lefties usually prefer counter-clockwise. Either direction earns the same bonus, so pick whichever feels stable in your dominant thumb.

You don’t need to master Excellent Throws to catch tough wild Pokemon either. A Great Curveball with a Golden Razz Berry sits within a few percentage points of a clean Excellent on most spawns, and the Great window is roughly twice as wide. Consistency beats peak performance over a 50-catch session, especially during Community Day grinds where ball-per-minute matters more than any single perfect throw.

#Best Pokemon to Practice Great Throws On

Larger Pokemon with closer positions and slow attack animations give you the most forgiveness.

Practice targets we relied on during testing:

• Snorlax has a huge ring and attacks slowly enough to telegraph every throw
• Wailmer fills most of the screen, making the ring hard to miss
• Mr. Mime stands close and has a wide hitbox
• Pidgey, Rattata, and Hoothoot are common spawns with fast but predictable animations

Smaller or distant Pokemon like Zubat, Murkrow, and Joltik are tougher targets. Their rings are tiny, they jitter erratically, and their attack animations finish before you can react. Save the Golden Razz Berries for raid bosses and skip those spawns until your aim is dialed in on bigger targets first.

For more encounters, walk more.

Try auto-walking with Adventure Sync in Pokemon Go so eggs and buddy candy progress on indoor treadmill sessions, or scout the best places for Pokemon Go spawns near parks, malls, or waterfront areas where biomes overlap.

#What Research Tasks Require Great Throws?

Niantic rotates field research monthly, but Great Throw quests are a permanent fixture. Common task variants include “Make 3 Great Throws,” “Make 3 Great Throws in a row,” “Make 5 Great Curveball Throws in a row,” and the Special Research line that gates evolutions like Sirfetch’d behind a streak.

Streak tasks are where most players stall.

A single Nice Throw resets your counter to zero. Stick to large, close, slow-attacking Pokemon while the streak is active and refuse to throw at anything erratic. Research-stage Pokemon don’t flee, so wait as long as you need between throws to line up a clean lock.

Bulbapedia’s Pokemon Go page confirms that reaching Trainer Level 40 requires roughly 20,000,000 XP, and an average daily session of 50 catches with consistent Great Throws contributes about 5,000 XP from throw bonuses alone. Stack that with catch XP and Curveball bonus and the leveling math becomes far less painful over the months it takes to push from Level 40 toward Level 50.

Stock up on berries before research stages. A Nanab Berry calms jumpy Pokemon that dodge mid-throw, and a Razz Berry boosts catch rate for finicky spawns.

#Great Throws on Raid Bosses

Raid bosses sit farther from the screen, have smaller catch rings, and start with brutally low base catch rates. Legendary and Mega bosses can drop under 3%, and Premier Balls cap your attempts at 8 to 14 per raid.

Always burn a Golden Razz Berry on every Premier Ball.

Wait for the attack animation every single time. Lock the ring at Great size rather than Excellent, because a missed Excellent wastes a Premier Ball outright while a missed Great usually still lands a Nice.

Practice the lock on a wild Pidgey while the raid lobby loads so muscle memory kicks in by the time the boss appears. Treat the first two Premier Balls as calibration shots — the boss’s idle distance varies between models. Nine out of twelve Great Curveballs on Kyogre is realistic with this approach.

When we tested this during a Kyogre five-star raid, locking the ring at about 40% hit Great range on nearly every throw and converted most of our Great Curveballs. The few misses came early, before we had calibrated the boss’s idle distance.

Hunting a tricky spawn like Ditto in Pokemon Go? Consistent Great Throws stack faster than Rare Candy on random Pokemon.

#AR+ Mode and Throw Accuracy

AR+ mode places the Pokemon on a real-world surface using your phone’s camera. Niantic’s launch notes for AR+ in 2017 added a hidden bonus that grants Excellent Throw points when you sneak close enough without spooking the Pokemon, and that bonus is still live in 2026. The trade-off is that the catch ring shrinks unpredictably as you walk, which can wreck a ring-lock session.

Our testing suggests AR+ is worth turning on for Special Research catches where an Excellent shortcut helps, and worth turning off when you’re grinding streak research or raid bosses.

If you play in busy public spaces, AR+ also drains battery faster because the camera stays active the whole encounter. In our testing, the extra drain with AR+ on versus off was noticeable over a play session. Plan accordingly for a multi-hour Community Day or raid hour. Switch in the bottom-right corner of the catch screen.

#Common Mistakes That Ruin Great Throws

Even seasoned trainers blow Great Throws for avoidable reasons. The four biggest culprits we kept seeing during our testing sessions all trace back to ignoring the rhythm of the catch animation rather than aim itself.

Throwing too early during the attack is the single most common mistake. If you release before the animation passes its halfway mark, the ball lands while the Pokemon is still mid-attack and bounces clean off. Time your release to the last third of the animation.

Spinning too wide kills Curveballs.

Big Curveball spins send the ball off-screen entirely, which counts as a missed throw. Keep your spin tight, almost a wrist twitch, and let the curve trajectory do the rest.

Ignoring distance also costs you Great Throws, because far Pokemon like Zubat need a harder flick to reach the ring while close Pokemon like Snorlax barely need a tap. Adjust throw force based on how the Pokemon sits relative to your screen. Understanding how location affects Pokemon Go spawns helps you find biomes with closer, easier targets so practice sessions feel less punishing.

Finally, skipping Nanab Berries on hyper Pokemon costs streaks. Doduo, Yanma, Aipom, and Tornadus jump and dodge constantly. A Nanab Berry calms them so you can aim without rushing. This single habit saved our Premier Balls on a recent Tornadus raid weekend.

#Bottom Line

Lock the ring at half size, throw with a Curveball during the attack animation, and pair every catch with a berry that fits the situation. That single workflow lifts your Great Throw rate from coin-flip territory into reliable territory within a single afternoon, and it scales from Pidgey on the sidewalk to a Mega raid boss without changing.

For raid bosses specifically, default to Golden Razz plus locked Great Curveball on every Premier Ball. Avoid the temptation to chase Excellent Throws on legendary catches; the wider Great window converts more often when ball count is your bottleneck.

PG

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Pokémon GO Guide

Evergreen pillar · Pokémon GO gameplay, GPS fixes, and tools · Games · updated 2026-05-22

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#Frequently Asked Questions