Kai and Speed's Minecraft Marathon Gets Its Verdict Tomorrow Night

The hardest fight Kai Cenat and IShowSpeed have left this year is standing still in a nice outfit while somebody reads out a name.

The Streamer Awards take over Los Angeles tomorrow, Thursday, November 12. QTCinderella hosts, with Caroline Kwan joining her as co-host, and the show streams live on QTCinderella's Twitch and YouTube channels — red carpet at 2:30 p.m. PT, main show at 5:30 p.m. PT. Thirty-seven categories are on the ballot. One of them has Kai and Speed's names on it together: Best Marathon Stream, for the Minecraft run that ate five days of their August and pulled in more than 30 million hours of watch time.

The marathon started on August 7 with a simple, stupid rule. Kai and Speed would play Minecraft on Hardcore, where death is permanent, and they would not stop until four bosses were dead — the Ender Dragon, the Wither, the Elder Guardian and the Warden. Every death wiped the slate. They died 42 times.

What that looked like in practice was two of the biggest streamers on earth getting humbled by a block game for 121 straight hours. Eight hours of work on a raid farm vanished because Kai died holding a shield while the Totem of Undying that would have saved him sat unused in his inventory. Speed lost his mind about it on camera, which is part of why people watched. Speedrunner Feinberg eventually had to be brought in to coach them into proper enchanted armour and a plan. On August 12, a little over five days in — 5 days, 1 hour and 2 minutes by WIN.gg's clock — the last boss fell, and they closed the run out with a 1v1 against each other, which Speed lost.

The audience never really left. Streams Charts put the total just over 30 million hours watched across Twitch and YouTube. Speed's YouTube channel did the heaviest lifting, more than 13.5 million hours with a peak of about 459,700 concurrent viewers. Kai's Twitch channel added 7.77 million hours of its own. For scale, that combined number beat most of the Esports World Cup events running the same summer. Their first Minecraft marathon, back in 2024, took 105 hours and drew 18.88 million hours watched. This one was bigger in every direction.

Tomorrow's category is not a coronation, though. Five streams are nominated. Cinna's Cinnathon turned her into one of the most-subscribed women on Twitch. DDG's Hit-A-Thon is in. JasonTheWeen's 7 Days Stranded is in. And then there is Chained Together, the Jynxzi, Stable Ronaldo and LosPollosTV run that kept three chained characters climbing for more than 48 hours — the closest thing to a real rival, and the result of two of its stars openly copying the Kai and Speed formula with their own Minecraft marathon afterwards.

The traders lean hard the other way. Kalshi, via WIN.gg, prices Kai and Speed's Minecraft marathon as the category favourite at a 54% implied chance of winning, ahead of Chained Together at 31%. That is a market snapshot from WIN.gg's November 9 reporting, not a promise, and prices on a market like that move. But it matches the obvious read: nobody else in the category put up 30 million hours.

Whatever happens, both men walk in loaded. Kai holds four nominations at this year's awards, tied for the most by anyone — IShowSpeed and Jynxzi are the other two on four. Speed is also defending Streamer of the Year, a title he has won two years running, and Kai's Streamer University is nominated for Best Streamed Event. The marathon nod is the one they share, and shared is the whole point of it. Neither man's solo streams produced the biggest streaming event of the summer. The two of them locked in a house built to look like a Minecraft set did.

The votes are already in. Fan voting ran from October 16 to October 31, with the public worth 70% of the result and an industry panel the other 30%, so this has been decided for nearly two weeks. Nobody outside the count knows the answer. There is one more thing the night has to solve: the trophies themselves were stolen off a producer's front porch on October 29, and QTCinderella had to ask Los Angeles to keep an eye on pawn shops. Win or lose, Kai and Speed may be handed a replacement.

The dragon took five days. The envelope takes about five seconds.