What is the easiest way to catch a shiny?

[NeoJester]

I've played the pokemon games since red and blue. When they introduced shinies in gold and silver I was like, that's pretty sweet. Next thing I know I got a red gyrados and am pretty psyched about getting some other shinies. To this day I have yet to get any other kind of shiny in any of the other games and I've played them several times before. Is there some catch? Do people just go without seeing shinies ever? I see so many people talk about all the shinies they got and the ones they have for trade and it makes me sad that I've never even seen one. So is there any way that is easier to make it happen? I've tried breeding, poke radar, soft resetting legendaries and nothing has worked. What gives guys?

[lilliwn]

Spontaneous encounters are rare, with a chance of 8/65536 (or 1/8192).
In a typical single time play through (all trainers, gym, elite, some wild Pokemon) of the generation 3/4 story line will yield ~2500-3500 Pokemon encountered and defeated. Which means it's highly probable for one to never encounter any alternative colour Pokemon while playing through the games.

The single most warrant way would be chaining with Pokeradar. Which yields a ~1/200 chance of an alternative colour encounter after a chain of 40.

Reseting the game is easier with 4th generation games. Due to a faulty random number generator used in the third generation games, following the same sequence will actually yield you the exact same generated number (i.e. encountered Pokemon). Thus a round of 100 reset may infact only result you 20-30 distinct Pokemon encounters, highly increasing the number of times one needs to reset for an alternative colour encounter.

[cyanide]

PokeRadar is the only way I've heard of to make it easier, but I can't get a good chain going. I just happened to hatch a shiny Riolu by luck, but that's the only shiny I've ever seen. Kinda doubt I'll ever run into another one.

[WTFaRabbit]

Poke Radar is the easiest way in my opinion, unless you really want to soft reset over and over...

[MetalSilver]

Yea poke raders the best way....

[joe45727]

there really is no easy way of getting shinies because even chaining can get a bit time consuming, but chaining is definitely the best way.

[ShayminGirl]

PokeRadar is the best way.
The only shiny pokemon I've gotten is a shiny shinx /=

[Pokemonrock]

I caught a random shiny Krabby in LeafGreen, and a Shiny Dustox in Pearl. Both random, too. So I don't think Poke Radar makes a difference. I think it's random luck.