I've been watching the pokemon world championships despite not knowing anything about how competitive pokemon works and I don't understand why the three divisions are separated by age.

In most sports there are age divisions because of physical differences. You obviously can't make a kid go up against a grown ass man in wrestling for example. Or, in another sport a kid's smaller size might be an unfair advantage.

Age does not seem to provide any kind of advantage or disadvantage in Pokemon. Pokemon is a turn based game. It does not require fast reflexes or anything remotely physical from what I can tell? It seems more akin to rock,paper scissors or chess. I follow chess fairly closely and in chess there are no age divisions. It is common for kid prodigies to go up against adults in tournaments.

The only explanations I've found online when I trying to find the answer to this was that it would be unsafe to subject kids to adults?? Like geeze, are pokemon fans really that messed up we can't trust any of them to be around kids?

It makes even less sense to me that they have a teen division. Why not at least allow 16/17 year olds to compete against the adults