Kai Cenat: Four Nominations, Zero for Streamer of the Year

Kai Cenat is all over the 2026 Streamer Awards ballot. He is just not in the race that made him.

When QTCinderella revealed the nominees during an October 16 livestream, the Streamer of the Year category — announced at the three-hour mark of the broadcast — came out with five names: IShowSpeed, CaseOh, Jynxzi, Stable Ronaldo and Joe Bartolozzi. Cenat, who won the award back-to-back before IShowSpeed took it over, was not one of them.

And yet nobody goes into the November 12 ceremony in Los Angeles with more nominations than he has. Cenat holds four — tied for the most on the ballot with IShowSpeed and Jynxzi. The split is the story: he is nominated in League of Their Own; in Best Mainstream Collab, for his pairing with Tyla; in Best Marathon Stream, for the Minecraft Marathon he ran with IShowSpeed; and in Best Streamed Event, for Streamer University, his own creator bootcamp. The man shut out of Streamer of the Year is, on the same ballot, co-nominated with the category's defending champion.

That champion is the other half of the tension. IShowSpeed won Streamer of the Year for the second straight year in December 2025, and a third straight win would make him the first streamer ever to take the prize three years running. Cenat owned this category before him — back-to-back wins, the face of the show's first era. The 2026 ballot is the first one that treats him as part of the show's past instead of its present.

So why did the flagship door close? The receipts are in the calendar, and FanVault's nominations analysis lays them out. On January 13, Cenat posted a 23-minute YouTube video titled “I Quit,” launched his clothing brand Vivet and stepped back from regular streaming. By April, his active Twitch subscribers had fallen to just under 25,000. He came back enormous — his July 6 return simulcast peaked at 708,563 concurrent viewers on Twitch with more than 400,000 more watching on YouTube — but one giant night is not a year of nights. Jynxzi, by contrast, logged 223.8 hours on Twitch in October alone. CaseOh is averaging more than 57,000 viewers a night. The nominees were live while Cenat was building a fashion label, and the ballot noticed.

One of the five said the quiet part out loud. Joe Bartolozzi, himself a Streamer of the Year nominee, argued — in comments reported by NetInfluencer — that IShowSpeed has grown too big for a category that should measure day-to-day streaming — and that frequency should count, a standard he admitted neither CaseOh nor he himself fully meets. It is the argument now running under the whole ballot: does the flagship prize reward the biggest year, or the most consistent grind?

Cenat's is not the only fight the category started. Within hours of the reveal, viewers on X were asking why no woman made the five-person field — one fan's version, “streamer of the year and they couldn't even put a single female nominee?”, became the backlash's refrain, and — as GenZ NewZ reported — the argument was still growing a week later as the voting deadline closed in. The separate Esports Awards, notably, did put Cenat in its own Streamer of the Year field in August — and took backlash of its own for the choice.

Two mechanics matter before anyone calls this a pure popularity verdict. The show changed its rules this year: winners are now decided by a weighted blend — 70% fan vote, 30% industry panel — rather than the straight fan count that decided it before. And nominees had to opt in to accept their nominations, so an absence is not automatically an oversight. Voting runs at thestreamerawards.com/vote and closes October 31 at 11:59 PM PT. The ceremony follows on November 12 in Los Angeles, hosted by QTCinderella and streaming live on Twitch and YouTube — where Cenat could plausibly win four awards in one night and still leave without the one that used to have his name on it.

Previously's Take: This ballot is not really about whether Kai Cenat is the biggest streamer alive — on his biggest night, nobody touches him. It is about what the crown now measures. The Streamer Awards just told the whole industry that the flagship prize belongs to the calendar, not the tentpole: Jynxzi's 223 hours in a single month beat a quit video, a fashion launch and one record return night. Cenat's four nominations prove the show still honors what he builds. The empty fifth slot says the price of the top prize is the one thing he stopped paying this year — being live.