Everyone Is Keeping Score
This magazine ranks fifty channels an issue, scores five categories to two digits, and prints a table with movement arrows. We are in no position to pretend we're above keeping score. So this issue we stopped pretending and went to look at the scoreboard itself — at what happened when actual competition, the kind with winners, moved onto a platform that was already one.
YouTube is a scoreboard-shaped medium. It always was. Every video ships with its result stapled underneath it in public — views, likes, the brutal arithmetic of the subscriber counter — and every creator on the platform is in a ranked match whether they entered one or not. The algorithm does not have taste; it has standings. Which makes it strange, when you think about it, how long it took us to do this issue: a magazine obsessed with rankings, on a platform that is one, has never once looked squarely at the people whose actual subject is competition. The speedrunners. The chess people. The breakdown artists. The trick-shot industrialists. The man in Spain who invented a boxing league out of nothing and broke the concurrent-viewership record for the entire internet doing it.
And here is what we found, and it is genuinely the opposite of what the money believed. For most of the last decade, the smartest capital in entertainment was betting that competition on the internet would look like television — franchised leagues, city teams, ten-million-dollar slots, a Sunday broadcast with a desk. That bet is now a smoking crater, and our Special Feature walks the whole debris field: the Overwatch League voting itself out of existence, franchise slots bought for $33 million and sold for $10 million, a $725 million esports company delisting its way to a fire sale. The esports winter was real. But the viewers never left — they just walked across the street to where a streamer was organising a boxing night, and nine million of them watched it at once.
That's the thesis, and every section this issue tests it from a different corner. Our Player Profiles run the full spread: the return of Summoning Salt, whose speedrun histories we dropped from the Top 50 in a displacement three years of work has made indefensible; Jomboy Media, the lip-reading baseball desk that a ninety-billion-dollar league eventually decided to buy into rather than out-compete; Ibai Llanos, who invents competitions the way other channels invent thumbnails; and Dude Perfect, where this issue's negative review asks the uncomfortable question of what remains of a competition when the losing has been edited out. The Boss Fight is chess — the archivist who kept the game's flame alight against the broadcaster who caught fire when the boom came. Time Capsule opens a new shelf entirely: five people who lived and died by the scoreboard, from Pelé to Bobby Fischer, shown what became of the arena. And Yob, at last, pays a debt the letters page has owed a reader in Birmingham since Issue #016.
One honesty before you start. A competition issue written by a magazine that publishes a Top 50 is a mirror held up to a mirror, and we know it. When we say Dude Perfect removed the stakes, someone will say our rankings have none either — nobody gets relegated from YouTube for losing our table. Fair. The difference, we'd argue, is the one this whole issue keeps finding: a real competition is legible. You can see the attempts, the failures, the record before this one. Our scores print their working; the reviews are the attempts, in public, on the record, arguable. That is the only kind of authority this magazine has ever claimed — the kind you can check. The scoreboard is open. Argue with it.
— The Editor
September 2026
▶ PRESS START ◀
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Six dispatches from the arena. The facts are real; the tone is ours. Where we're joking, you'll be able to tell — and the trust legend at the foot of the page confirms it.
In June 2024 Riot announced that three regional League of Legends leagues — the LCS, Brazil's CBLOL, and Latin America's LLA — would merge into one pan-American super-league, the LTA, launching 2025. On September 28, 2025, Riot discontinued the LTA after exactly one season, reviving the standalone LCS and CBLOL for 2026 and citing what fans had said from day one: you cannot merge away regional pride and call it strategy. Read that timeline again. The premier esport on Earth restructured its American operation, watched it fail, and restructured it back, inside eighteen months. Our Special Feature this issue is about the decade-long unravelling of the franchised-league dream, and the LTA is its perfect miniature — a model so unsure of itself it now reorganises faster than its audience can learn the new acronym. The games are fine. The viewers are fine. The org chart is the thing that keeps dying.
On July 25, 2026, Ibai Llanos ran the sixth edition of La Velada del Año, and for the first time simulcast it across Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok — with reported viewership north of thirty million devices across the three platforms (the organisers' own aggregate claims run far higher; we cite the platform-split figure because it is the one you can actually reason about). For context: edition five, in 2025, peaked above nine million concurrent viewers on a single channel — the biggest single-channel livestream ever recorded, on any platform, for anything. A streamer's amateur boxing night now outdraws most professional sport in Europe. We review the man responsible in Player Profiles this issue, and the feature explains why his invented competitions thrived through the exact years the franchised leagues were liquidating. Short version: he never once tried to be television.
Awesome Games Done Quick 2026 closed in January having raised $2,443,414 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation — following SGDQ 2025's $2,436,614 for Doctors Without Borders. Steady, unglamorous, metronomic: roughly two and a half million dollars per event, twice a year, going on two decades of marathon. Here is the thing worth sitting with. Speedrunning has no franchise slots, no city teams, no venture capital, and no league office — and it is the one corner of competitive gaming that has never had a crash, because there is nothing financialised enough to crash. The couch, the timer, the donation counter. While the feature this issue counts the bodies from the esports winter, hold this number in the other hand: the most durable competitive institution on the platform is a charity marathon run by volunteers. It was never a business. That turns out to be the moat.
In mid-2025, Major League Baseball took a strategic equity stake in Jomboy Media — by most accounts the first time the league has put actual ownership money into a creator company, after a negotiation Jimmy O'Brien has said took four years and started from terms he called a non-starter. Sit with the shape of that story. In 2019, O'Brien was a guy with editing software who proved the Astros were banging a trash can while the sport's official media apparatus was still clearing its throat. Six years later the league concluded that the correct response to independent scrutiny it couldn't control was to buy a piece of it. We profile Jomboy this issue — the review takes the deal seriously as both a triumph and a question. When the institution you fact-check becomes your shareholder, the fact-checking has a new conflict to disclose. The breakdowns are still great. The cap table got complicated.
The 2025 Esports World Cup ran in Riyadh from July to August with a $71.5 million prize pool across 24 games — up ten million on 2024's edition, which was already the largest in esports history. If the franchised-league era is dead, somebody forgot to tell the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, whose Public Investment Fund has poured a reported $38 billion into gaming and esports through Savvy Games Group — which also now operates the circuit that replaced the Overwatch League. This is the complicating fact our feature refuses to look away from: the league model didn't just collapse into creator spectacle, it also consolidated into sovereign-wealth spectacle, and "the prize pool is the message" is a sentence with more than one meaning. The winter is real. So is the space heater. Who's paying for the heating, and why, is a question esports has mostly decided not to ask out loud.
Housekeeping from the letters desk, where the numbers are in and they are perfect: two issues since the Save Point inbox went real, and the running total of genuine reader letters stands at zero. Yob — who this issue watched five hours of speedrunning footage "for professional reasons" — has begun describing the situation in competitive terms: he is, he says, in a ranked match against an empty mailbox, and the mailbox is winning on consistency. The promise from #017 stands exactly as printed, un-kept and un-broken: the first real letter to arrive gets printed, badged like a relic, rated with suspicious generosity. The current world record for Fastest Genuine Letter to yob@ctrl-watch.xyz remains unset. It is, and we cannot stress this enough, an any% category. There are no other runners. The leaderboard is empty. Write in and set it.
Time Capsule
Five people who lived and died by the scoreboard, shown what became of the arena. This issue opens the athletes-and-arena-voices shelf: the most joyful footballer who ever lived, the chess champion who threw the cameras out, the man who invented the sporting brag, the driver who narrated the limit, and the broadcaster who told it like it was before "it" became a format. They see YouTube from inside their own eras. The irony does the rest.
Player Profiles
Four ways to make competition into content, scored on the five axes. The speedrun historian whose displacement we finally reverse, the lip-reading baseball desk a whole league decided to buy into, the Spaniard who invents competitions from thin air, and this issue's negative review — the trick-shot empire that took the one thing that makes competition mean anything and edited it out.
Summoning Salt — ~2.1M subs
Speedrun history documentary · feature-length, months apart · RE-EVALUATION · 82 → 88 · NEW ★ Top 50 #23
Start with an admission, because the readers who remember Issue #011 have earned it: we dropped this channel for a crime it didn't commit. Summoning Salt left our Top 50 at 82, reason logged as "displaced" — not a quality complaint, just crowding at the bottom of the table in a busy issue. Three years of accumulated evidence have made that displacement indefensible, and the Competition Issue is the only honest place to say so. Nobody on this platform — nobody — documents competition itself better than a man you almost never see, narrating the decades-long wars over hundredths of a second in games older than most of the people fighting them.
The format has not changed, which is precisely the point; it has deepened. A World Record Progression video takes one game — Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, Super Mario Bros., last year's "The History of Minus World Speedruns" (December 2024) or "The History of 120 Star's Early Era" (April 2025) — and tells the history of its record the way a war historian tells a campaign: era by era, runner by runner, heartbreak by heartbreak, over the synth swell of HOME's "We're Finally Landing," an intro so ritualised the first chord now functions as a starting pistol. What has changed is scale. The early videos ran twenty minutes; the recent work runs feature-length, closer to two hours, each one effectively a documentary film researched from forum archives, dead YouTube accounts and Twitch VODs that this channel is often the only institution bothering to preserve. This is the connective tissue between the magazine's history shelf and its competition shelf: he is not a gaming channel that mentions history. He is a sports historian whose sport happens to be Nintendo.
And then there is the thing that separates the chronicler from the commentator: he plays. In February 2025, after five years and by his own count roughly seventy-five thousand attempts, he broke the two-minute barrier on Punch-Out!!'s final fight — a record he had spent years narrating other people's failures to reach. Read that again. The historian of the impossible spent half a decade inside his own genre's plot and emerged holding the record. It is as if Herodotus, mid-chronicle, had put down the stylus and won the battle of Marathon. The Content Quality at 93 and Replay Value at 94 price the craft — these are films you rewatch the way you rewatch documentaries, because the records fall but the stories don't — and the X-Factor at 93 prices the fact that this entire genre, now widely imitated, has exactly one canonical voice.
The honest ceiling is the calendar, and we've been here before with Clickspring and Fall of Civilizations: Consistency at 62, videos arriving like comets, months of silence between uploads that are each two hours long. The one public glimpse of the man himself — a June 2025 face reveal, after eight years, staged to sell a limited-run VHS tape of his own video, an artifact for the archive about archives — tells you everything about the pace: this is a person who would rather be right than frequent. Fine. The re-evaluation moves him 82 to 88, six points, and back into the table at #23. The apology is the ranking.
Jomboy Media — Jimmy O'Brien — ~2.3M subs
Baseball breakdowns / lip-reading · relentless daily output · NEW ★ Top 50 #50
In November 2019, within hours of The Athletic's report on the Houston Astros, a Yankees fan with editing software posted a video that did what the sport's entire credentialed press corps had not: it showed you the cheating. Bang. Bang. Jimmy O'Brien synced the dugout trash-can audio to the pitches, on screen, checkably, and the sign-stealing scandal stopped being an allegation and became a thing you had heard with your own ears. ESPN later credited the internet with helping crack the case; the internet, in this instance, was one guy. That video is the channel's founding myth and also its thesis: modern sport generates more evidence than its institutions are willing to look at, and a stranger with patience and a timeline can be the most trusted analyst in the room.
The signature format is the breakdown — and the lip-read is the invention. An umpire ejects a manager; the broadcast gives you thirty seconds of distant shouting; Jomboy gives you the screenplay, reconstructed word by word from the mouths, annotated, paced like a two-hander. It is equal parts forensics and comedy, and it created a genre now imitated across every sport. Around it, O'Brien and co-founder Jake Storiale have built an actual media company since 2017 — Talkin' Baseball, Talkin' Yanks, The Warehouse Games, a bench of shows deep enough that the Consistency 96 is simply a description of the machine. And in 2025 came the plot twist that makes this a Competition Issue story: Major League Baseball itself took an equity stake in the company, a negotiation O'Brien says ran four years. The league that got caught by a breakdown video decided the correct long-term response was to own a piece of the desk.
The review has to hold two things honestly. The work is superb: the Astros file, the ump-show taxonomy, a decade of receipts — and a fan-first warmth that keeps the forensics from curdling into gotcha content. But the record isn't spotless, and we grade the record: the "buzzer" theory the channel amplified in the scandal's aftermath was never substantiated, and this summer a Dodgers prospect pushed back publicly on being breakdown fodder — a fair glimpse of the format's unpriced cost, which is that the people in the clips never volunteered. And the MLB stake cuts both ways forever now. Independence was the product; the shareholder register says otherwise; every future controversy will be read through it. The Replay Value at 70 is the other honest number — breakdowns are news, and news expires.
X-Factor 92, though, because the thing at the centre is irreplaceable: a voice that treats sport's pettiest moments — a balk dispute, a bat-flip feud — as the grand human theatre they secretly are. EXCELLENT, 85, and into the Top 50 at #50, where the arithmetic this issue is unusually bloody. See High Scores for the body count.
Ibai — Ibai Llanos — ~16–17M subs 🇪🇸 SPANISH-LANGUAGE
Streaming / invented competition · Spanish-language · EXCELLENT · 81 · does not enter
Every so often the non-English column of this magazine gets to file a report the Anglosphere genuinely needs, and this is one: the most important competition organiser on the modern internet is not a league, a federation, or a platform. He is a thirty-one-year-old from Bilbao who started as a League of Legends caster in Spain's LVP in 2014, went independent in early 2021, and has since invented more successful competitive formats from scratch than the entire franchised-esports industry managed in a decade of burning venture capital. La Velada del Año — an amateur boxing card where streamers and creators train for months and fight in front of actual stadiums — grew in five editions from a Barcelona club night to the single biggest livestream any individual channel has ever produced: the 2025 edition peaked above nine million concurrent viewers. Nine million people, watching one channel, at once. There are World Cup broadcasts that would take that number.
And La Velada is only the flagship. The Kings League, co-founded in 2022 with Gerard Piqué, took seven-a-side football and rebuilt it with game-design logic — secret weapons, penalty roulettes, streamer-owned teams broadcasting their own matches — and is now expanding across the Americas with nine-figure ambitions. The Balloon World Cup — yes, keeping a balloon off the floor, as an international televised sport — was a one-joke format that half a million people watched sincerely. The pattern is the point: where esports tried to imitate the NBA and died of the overheads, Ibai starts from the other end. What would be joyful to watch? What can a community feel it owns? The competition is designed as content from the first whistle, and it turns out that is not a corruption of sport. It is a return to what sport was before television dressed it in a league office.
Now the honest platform arithmetic, because this is a YouTube magazine and Ibai is not primarily a YouTube phenomenon. He is the second-most-followed channel on all of Twitch; YouTube — sixteen to seventeen million subscribers, depending which tracker you squint at — is his archive and his overflow car park. The channel's daily output is streaming culture's: reactions, food tours, event VODs, a torrent of Consistency-88 material with the shelf life of fruit. Replay Value 58 is the price of living live; almost nothing here is built to be watched twice, La Velada excepted. And the review must note what a profile of a one-man broadcasting nation always must: the occasional flare-up (a botched chilaquiles, a World Cup remark that annoyed Argentina) is the cost of talking on camera eight hours a day, and none of it rises above weather.
The 81 will look low to his fans and high to anyone who only counts YouTube, and both readings miss the point of the exercise. Community 93 and X-Factor 96 are as high as this magazine has scored either axis for a non-English creator, because the intangible here is genuinely singular: he is the proof, at civilisational scale, that one person with a community can out-organise an industry. He does not enter the Top 50 — the table below now cuts at 85, and a YouTube channel that is 60% archive can't argue past that on this platform's terms. The standing non-English commitment — Nota Bene in #018, Dot CSV in #017 — continues here, and continues because of channels like this, not as a quota.
Dude Perfect — ~62M subs
Trick shots / family sports entertainment · MEDIOCRE · 58 · the negative review, on schedule
Let's establish what this review is not, because sixty-two million subscribers include a lot of eight-year-olds we have no interest in wounding. Dude Perfect is not a scam, not slop, not cynical. Five Texas A&M roommates turned backyard basketball wagers into the biggest sports channel on the platform through seventeen years of genuine skill, genuine friendship, and a family-safe register that is rarer and harder than the internet admits. The trick shots are real; the work ethic is real; the 30 for 30 documentary ESPN gave them in 2024 was earned. When we score this channel 58, we are not saying the men failed. We are saying the format did — and that its failure is the single most instructive one in this entire issue.
Here is the case, and it fits in one sentence: Dude Perfect built an empire on competition with the losing removed. The trick shot is an edit — hundreds of attempts, one make, and unlike the twelve-year-old in our Pelé interview, the misses stay on the cutting-room floor, because the brand is effortlessness. The "battles" are competitions with nothing at stake, no standings, no consequence, a rotating Rage Monster sketch where even the anger is scheduled. Watch a decade of it back to back and the pattern becomes unmissable: every element that makes competition mean something (an opponent who wants you to fail, a cost to losing, an outcome you can't reshoot) has been surgically excised, because meaning is risk and risk is off-brand. What remains is astonishingly polished, completely pleasant, and hollow in a way you can hear if you knock on it. Babe Ruth, three tabs over, says it better than we can: no pitcher in the frame, no brag — just talking.
The corporate chapter turned the format's quiet flaw into its explicit strategy. Since 2024 the group has taken a nine-figure investment from Highmount Capital, hired its first-ever CEO out of the NBA's content operation, and pressed on with plans for a $100M-plus theme park outside Dallas, complete with a 330-foot "Impossible Shot" tower. This is a channel becoming a diversified family-entertainment conglomerate, and it explains the scores: main-channel output has thinned toward event-scale Overtime episodes while the machine builds toys, parks, and platforms. Consistency 74 reflects a schedule that now serves a portfolio, not an audience. And their own documentary, to its credit, shows the cost of the smile: the 2012 equity fight, a member saying on camera, "I remember feeling undervalued." The one genuinely high-stakes competition in Dude Perfect history — five friends versus a cap table — is the one they never filmed.
Replay Value 45, because a resolved trick has no tension the second time; X-Factor 50, because the personality long ago merged into the brand and brands do not have X-Factor, they have guidelines. MEDIOCRE, 58 — watchable, professional, safe, and a warning label for everything else in this issue: the audience for competition is enormous, but what it actually pays for is stakes, and stakes are the one thing you cannot manufacture in post. This fulfils the negative-review mandate, on schedule, with respect and without apology.
Boss Fight
Before October 2020, chess YouTube had a king, and it was a soft-spoken Croatian named Antonio Radić who filmed a chessboard, a captured-pieces tray, and nothing else. agadmator was the first chess channel to a million subscribers, the biggest in the world from 2018 onward, built one daily historical game at a time. Then Netflix aired The Queen's Gambit, a pandemic-bored planet discovered that chess.com existed — a million new accounts a month, at the peak — and the boom needed something the archive could not supply: a broadcaster. It found Levy Rozman, an International Master from New York who could make a tournament recap feel like a heavyweight presser, and by late 2021 GothamChess had taken the crown. Today Levy sits near eight million subscribers; agadmator holds around 1.35 million, roughly where the boom left him. The market has spoken. The market, however, does not get to write this magazine, which is why the fight is worth staging.
Because this is the cleanest possible test of a question the whole Competition Issue circles: when a game becomes a spectator sport, what actually gets rewarded — the game, or the coverage of the game? agadmator is the archivist: Morphy, Tal, Fischer, the immortal games, narrated with the same layout and the same gentle cadence since 2016, a museum that happens to upload daily. GothamChess is the broadcaster: recaps, drama, Guess the Elo, the Carlsen–Niemann scandal called like a title fight days after it broke. One of them kept the flame. One of them caught the fire. Only one wins.
The chess is not in question on either side; the craft around it is where they split. Levy is a credentialed teacher — International Master, a decade of coaching before the boom, a structured course platform, and a beginners' book good enough to hit the bestseller lists — and it shows in the best of the work: a Gotham opening breakdown teaches a middlegame plan, not just a trap. But the daily engine also ships a lot of content that is news first and chess second, dressed in packaging that has been a running community complaint for years. agadmator's quality curve is flatter and calmer: a great historical game, clearly narrated, the "completely different game" of it allowed to be the star. What he lacks is Levy's instructional depth — you learn what happened, less often how to do it yourself. Teaching beats witnessing, narrowly, and the sharper production wins the round while taking a warning about the thumbnails with it.
Here we simply stand back and applaud both corners, because these are two of the most reliable publishing operations on the entire platform, in any genre. agadmator has uploaded near-daily — often twice daily — for the better part of a decade, through the boom, through the plateau, through the loss of Medo, the chess dog the whole internet mourned with him. Levy's cadence through the boom years was just as unrelenting, at vastly higher production cost per video, while also writing books and running a course business. One is a metronome by temperament, the other a metronome by will. Choosing between a 96 and a 97 here would be false precision, and the fight doesn't need it.
Now the archive gets its revenge. Ask the brutal question of both catalogues: what is a three-year-old video worth today? A 2022 GothamChess tournament recap is a newspaper — brilliant on the morning it mattered, trivia by Christmas. The Carlsen–Niemann videos are historical documents of a scandal, but you revisit them the way you revisit old headlines, not old friends. Now open agadmator's back catalogue: Morphy's Opera Game, Tal dismantling grandmasters like a man late for a bus, Fischer's Game of the Century — these were evergreen when he filmed them because they had already been evergreen for a hundred years. He didn't build a news desk; he built a library, and libraries appreciate. It is the same split this magazine found in Fall of Civilizations versus the factories, replayed on sixty-four squares: the recap serves the moment, the archive serves forever.
Levy's community is enormous, participatory, and load-bearing — Guess the Elo literally runs on viewer-submitted games, which makes the audience a co-author of the format, and the sheer scale of Gotham comment culture (the roasts, the "sacrifices THE ROOOOK" liturgy) is a real achievement. But it has the temperature of a stadium: loud, fun, transient. agadmator's comment section is one of the internet's quiet miracles — a decade-old congregation that shows up daily, knows the liturgy ("pause the video and find the winning move"), grieved a dog together like a village, and treats the channel less like content than like a local. Per capita, there is nothing in chess YouTube — arguably nothing in this magazine's whole coverage area — with more accumulated warmth. Scale is a real argument, and it loses to belonging.
Two rounds each, one draw, and so the fight comes down to the axis it was always coming down to: which of these channels is irreplaceable? The case for agadmator is real and touching — he is chess YouTube's founding institution, the proof that a man, a board, and sincerity could build the genre before there was a boom to surf. But here is the hard truth the scorecard has to metabolise: the format he pioneered is, precisely because of its beautiful simplicity, imitable. There are now dozens of one-game-per-video channels, and while none have his congregation, the format survives him. Levy is the opposite case. When the biggest scandal in chess history broke in September 2022, an entire sport — players, press, twelve-year-olds, your uncle — went to one place to find out what had happened, and that place was a YouTube channel run by an IM from New York. That is not a format. That is a position: chess's answer to the evening news, self-appointed, boom-forged, and currently without a plausible substitute. He turned the game's biggest moments into broadcast events, and the sport now behaves as if it has a broadcaster, because it does. You can clone a board layout. You cannot clone being the place everyone already goes. The record should also show what Levy's fiercest critics concede: chess is measurably, massively bigger because he made it legible to people the game had never once tried to talk to.
| CATEGORY | GOTHAMCHESS | AGADMATOR |
|---|---|---|
| CONTENT QUALITY | 80 | 78 |
| CONSISTENCY | 97 | 96 |
| REPLAY VALUE | 66 | 74 |
| COMMUNITY | 84 | 88 |
| X-FACTOR | 88 | 82 |
| OVERALL | 83 | 80 |
THE DECISION
GothamChess wins, 83 to 80, and the margin is honest: this was two rounds apiece with a draw, settled on the axes this magazine weights hardest. But read the decision carefully, because it is not the decision the subscriber counts already made. Levy does not win because he is six times bigger. He wins because the boom created a job — chess's broadcaster, the voice an entire sport turns to when something happens — and he is the only person on the platform actually holding it. That is X-Factor in its purest form: not "good at the format," but "the format would have a hole shaped exactly like him."
And yet the loser leaves this ring holding the thing the winner should envy. agadmator's 74 Replay Value against Levy's 66 is the quiet headline of the whole fight: when the news cycle finally slows — and it always slows — the library outlasts the broadcast. Twenty years from now, a kid discovering Tal will still land on that same unchanged board layout, and it will not have aged, because it was never fashionable to begin with. Levy won the boom. Antonio built the thing the boom was standing on. Both sentences are true; only one of them wins a Boss Fight; the other one wins something slower.
POST-FIGHT — TOP 50 IMPLICATIONS
Neither channel enters. GothamChess's 83 lands one point under the old 84 cutline, and this issue's bloodbath at the bottom of the table (see High Scores) raises the effective bar to 85 — he joins Eddy Burback in the 83-tier waiting room, a genuine future entrant if the instructional side keeps gaining on the news side. agadmator's 80 is an EXCELLENT that was never going to argue with the arithmetic. Both scores are now the official record; the pairing is retired.
High Scores
The master ranking, updated for Issue #019. Two entries, two exits, and a piece of magazine history: the first time a displacement has been formally reversed. The entry threshold climbs to 85. This is a snapshot; the live, always-current ranking lives at /top50/.
| Rank | Channel | Score | Genre | Move |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3Blue1Brown | 96 | Mathematics / Education | — |
| 2 | Kurzgesagt | 94 | Science / Animation | — |
| 3 | Every Frame a Painting | 92 | Film Analysis | — |
| 4 | Primitive Technology | 91 | Maker / Survival | — |
| 5 | Jacob Geller | 91 | Video Games × Philosophy × Art | — |
| 6 | Adam Neely | 91 | Music Theory / Jazz Bass | — |
| 7 | CGP Grey | 91 | Education / Explainer | — |
| 8 | Lemmino | 91 | Documentary / Mystery | — |
| 9 | Jenny Nicholson | 91 | Long-form comic essay | — |
| 10 | Fireship | 90 | Technology / Programming | — |
| 11 | Dan Carlin's Hardcore History | 90 | History / Long-Form | — |
| 12 | Townsends | 90 | Historical Living / Cooking | — |
| 13 | Mark Rober | 89 | Engineering / Entertainment | — |
| 14 | Veritasium | 89 | Science / Education | — |
| 15 | Vsauce | 89 | Science / Philosophy | — |
| 16 | Fall of Civilizations | 89 | Narrative History / Documentary | — |
| 17 | Technology Connections | 88 | Technology / History | — |
| 18 | Conan O'Brien / Team Coco | 88 | Comedy / Talk | — |
| 19 | Contrapoints | 88 | Political Essay / Trans Studies | — |
| 20 | exurb1a | 88 | Philosophy / Existential | — |
| 21 | Clickspring | 88 | Clockmaking / Machining | — |
| 22 | Game Maker's Toolkit | 88 | Game Design Criticism | — |
| 23 | Summoning Salt | 88 | Speedrun History / Documentary | NEW |
| 24 | Internet Historian | 87 | Internet Culture / Documentary | ↓1 |
| 25 | Theo Von | 87 | Comedy / Podcast | ↓1 |
| 26 | Good Mythical Morning | 87 | Entertainment / Variety | ↓1 |
| 27 | Caspian Report | 87 | Geopolitics / Analysis | ↓1 |
| 28 | Historia Civilis | 87 | Ancient History | ↓1 |
| 29 | JCS — Criminal Psychology | 86 | True Crime / Analysis | ↓1 |
| 30 | Tasting History with Max Miller | 86 | History × Cooking | ↓1 |
| 31 | Breaking Points | 86 | Political Analysis / Podcast | ↓1 |
| 32 | 12tone | 86 | Music Theory / Analysis | ↓1 |
| 33 | Like Stories of Old | 86 | Philosophy / Video Essay | ↓1 |
| 34 | Nerdwriter1 | 86 | Art / Film Analysis | ↓1 |
| 35 | NileRed | 86 | Chemistry | ↓1 |
| 36 | Stuff Made Here | 86 | Engineering / Maker | ↓1 |
| 37 | J. Kenji López-Alt | 86 | Food Science / Cooking | ↓1 |
| 38 | Scott The Woz | 86 | Retro Gaming / Comedy | ↓1 |
| 39 | Drew Gooden | 86 | Deadpan Comedy Commentary | ↓1 |
| 40 | Noclip | 86 | Games Documentary | ↓1 |
| 41 | Binging with Babish | 85 | Cooking / Entertainment | ↓1 |
| 42 | Tantacrul | 85 | Music Software / Comedy Essay | ↓1 |
| 43 | Philosophy Tube | 85 | Political Philosophy / Theatre | ↓1 |
| 44 | Real Engineering | 85 | Engineering / Education | ↓1 |
| 45 | Chinese Cooking Demystified | 85 | Regional Chinese Cooking | ↓1 |
| 46 | The Slow Mo Guys | 85 | Science / Entertainment | ↓1 |
| 47 | Map Men (Jay and Mark) | 85 | Geography / Comedy | ↓1 |
| 48 | Smarter Every Day | 85 | Science / Curiosity | ↓1 |
| 49 | TED-Ed | 85 | Animated Education / Global | ↓1 |
| 50 | Jomboy Media | 85 | Baseball / Sports Breakdown | NEW |
NOTABLE MOVEMENTS — ISSUE #019
Summoning Salt — NEW at #23 (88), re-evaluated 82→88. A first in magazine history: a displacement formally reversed. We dropped him in #011 with the reason logged as "displaced" — not a quality verdict, a crowding one — and three years of feature-length work later, holding that line would have been indefensible. The +6 re-evaluation is earned on the merits (see the full profile), and there's a precedent worth naming: like Clickspring at 88 with Consistency 62, this is the table doing the thing it was built to do — letting transcendent Content Quality and X-Factor outvote a slow calendar. He re-enters at the bottom of the 88-tier, one seat under the channel he most resembles in structure, Game Maker's Toolkit. Full profile at /reviews/summoning-salt/.
Jomboy Media — NEW at #50 (85). The lip-reading baseball desk enters at the bottom of a compressed 85-tier on the strength of Consistency 96 and an X-Factor the genre now orbits. Within the tier, the tie-break goes against him on trajectory-versus-tenure — a brand-new entrant starts at the bottom of his band — but make no mistake about the direction: this channel invented a format an entire sport's coverage now imitates, and a league literally bought in. Full profile at /reviews/jomboy-media/.
Dropped: Coffeezilla (84) and AI Explained (84). Both after a single issue of tenure, and we're not going to dress it up: this is the revolving door at the bottom of the table, and it revolved. Two entries at 88 and 85 mean two exits at the bottom, and the bottom was the 84-tier — all of it. There is precedent (Some More News in #012, Answer in Progress in #013 — one-issue tenures both), and there is also a lesson the table keeps teaching: entering at exactly the threshold is a lease, not a deed. Neither drop is a quality verdict. Coffeezilla's work remains the platform's immune system and AI Explained's SimpleBench remains an actual original contribution — both re-enter the moment the maths allows. But the maths this issue did not allow, and we print the maths.
The new threshold is 85 — and the waiting room is now a crowd. With the 84-tier emptied, entry now requires 85, the highest bar in the ranking's history. The queue outside: Videogamedunkey (84, dropped #018), Coffeezilla (84), AI Explained (84), Whang! (84), Ryan George (84), Abroad in Japan (84), Danny Gonzalez (84) — plus GothamChess arriving this issue at 83 from the Boss Fight and Eddy Burback still at 83. Ranks 1–22 didn't move a single seat, for the third consecutive issue at the top. The table is calm above and carnivorous below, which — for a Competition Issue — is exactly the standings you'd want. The live ranking, always current, is at /top50/.
The Esports Winter
How the franchised-league dream froze to death, who ate its lunch, and why the couch outlived the stadium. Every number below is documented; the obituary is ours.
For about seven years, the smartest money in entertainment believed competitive gaming was about to become the next NBA, and it priced that belief in public. City-branded teams. Franchise slots selling for eight figures — Evil Geniuses paid a reported $33 million to buy into the LCS in 2020. A $725 million SPAC valuation for FaZe Clan. Overwatch League teams committing tens of millions for the right to exist. The theory was coherent, even elegant: esports had young audiences legacy sport would kill for, so build the legacy-sport container around them — leagues, seasons, media rights, a desk show — and wait for the television money to arrive. The television money did not arrive. And between 2023 and 2025, the container collapsed with a speed that traditional sport, whose failures take generations, has never experienced in its history.
The Body Count
Run the ledger, because the ledger is the story. The Overwatch League — Activision Blizzard's flagship experiment in city franchising — ended after its 2023 season, with roughly two-thirds of its twenty teams voting to take a $6 million exit payment rather than continue; the publisher paid out on the order of $120 million to wind down the thing it had spent years selling as the future. The LCS, North America's League of Legends franchise league, shrank from ten teams to eight in 2024. TSM — one of the region's founding dynasties — had already sold its slot to Shopify Rebellion for around $10 million, roughly a third of what Evil Geniuses had paid for theirs three years earlier; EG itself walked away the following season. The 2023 players' walkout over cut Challengers rosters cost dozens of jobs and delayed a split. FaZe Clan, the SPAC era's poster child, rode its stock from $24.69 to under a dollar inside five months, got its delisting warning, and was eventually acquired for a reported fourteen-to-seventeen million dollars — call it a ninety-seven percent discount on the dream. And in 2024 Riot tried one more reorganisation, merging the LCS with Brazil's and Latin America's leagues into a pan-American "LTA" — which it then dissolved after exactly one season, reviving the leagues it had just merged. The org chart reorganised faster than the audience could learn the acronyms. That is not a downturn. That is a business model politely admitting it never existed.
What Never Died
Here is the part the obituaries kept missing: through every year of that collapse, the underlying numbers — people playing, people watching people play — stayed enormous. The winter killed a corporate container, not an appetite. You can prove it with a control group, and the control group is this magazine's favourite kind of institution: speedrunning. Games Done Quick has run its charity marathons since 2010 — a couch, a timer, a donation counter — and in the exact years the franchise leagues were liquidating, it just kept metronoming along: roughly two and a half million dollars raised per event, event after event, through 2025 and into 2026. No slots, no city brands, no venture round, and therefore nothing to collapse. Speedrunning never had a winter for the same reason your local pub quiz never had one: it was never financialised enough to freeze. The couch outlived the stadium, and the couch wasn't even trying.
The Ones Who Ate the Lunch
Meanwhile, the audience the leagues were built to capture showed up somewhere else entirely — at competitions run by the entertainers themselves. The case study is Ibai Llanos, reviewed in full this issue: La Velada del Año, an amateur boxing card for streamers, grew in five editions from a Barcelona club night into the single most-watched individual livestream in the history of the internet — a peak above nine million concurrent viewers in 2025, with the 2026 edition simulcast across three platforms. The Kings League, Piqué and Ibai's game-designed seven-a-side football, drew nation-scale audiences to a competition that was born as content. The Sidemen sold out Wembley — ninety thousand seats — for a charity football match that peaked at 2.7 million concurrent viewers and raised £4.7 million. Note what these events did not have: franchises, media-rights decks, a league office. Note what they did have: creators the audience already loved, stakes the audience could feel, and a broadcast that belonged to the people in it. The franchised leagues spent a decade trying to bolt an audience onto a structure. The creators bolted a structure onto an audience. Only one of those directions works, and everyone now knows which. Honesty requires the counterexample, so here it is: Creator Clash 2 halved its predecessor's buys, paid none of its pledged charity money, and lost a quarter of a million dollars. Creator-run is a direction, not a guarantee — the events that thrive are the ones where the community was real before the ring was.
The Complicating Space Heater
And now the fact that ruins the tidy narrative, which is why it gets its own section. While the Western league model froze, the biggest prize pools in esports history were being written — in Riyadh. The Esports World Cup paid out $62.5 million in 2024 and $71.5 million in 2025, bankrolled by a Saudi sovereign-wealth apparatus that has put a reported $38 billion into gaming through Savvy Games Group — which, for good measure, also owns the operator now running Overwatch's replacement circuit. So the honest map of post-winter esports has two continents: a creator-carnival economy that runs on communities, and a sovereign-spectacle economy that runs on strategic budgets and does not especially need an audience economics to close. Between them, the old middle — the venture-funded, city-franchised, television-shaped league — is simply gone. What that second continent buys, and what it costs a competitive scene to be someone's national strategy, is a question esports has mostly declined to ask out loud, and this magazine notes — for the record — that the silence is itself an answer of sorts.
What the Winter Teaches
Strip it to the mechanism and the lesson is the same one running through every section of this issue. Competition is not a format; it is a relationship — somebody sets a challenge, somebody swears they can beat it, and a crowd gathers that cares about the somebodies. The franchise era failed because it tried to sell the crowd a structure before it had given them anyone to care about; it built the stadium and assumed the belonging would follow the seating chart. Everything that survived the winter — the speedrun marathon, the streamer boxing night, the chess boom the Boss Fight tab is arguing about right now — got the order right: community first, competition grown out of it, structure last and lightly. This magazine, a scoreboard-shaped publication on a scoreboard-shaped platform, would only add: the audience was never confused. Nine million people did not misunderstand what they wanted when they watched a streamer's boxing night instead of a franchise final. They wanted stakes carried by people they knew. They always did. The only ones who misunderstood were the ones holding the spreadsheets — and the spreadsheet, this issue keeps finding, is where competition goes to die. This feature closes a debt, by the way: a reader named Devraj S. asked for the esports issue back in #016. The Save Point has the receipt.
Game Over
Five ways competition got turned into retention bait. The format is the corpse — never the audience. Autopsies below.
Every fanbase now has one: the daily apocalypse channel, thumbnail face mid-scream, announcing that the club is FINISHED, the manager is a FRAUD, and the transfer window was a BETRAYAL — twenty-four hours after announcing the identical collapse from the opposite direction. It exists because sports fandom is the most reliable outrage reservoir ever discovered: the games arrive on a schedule, half the audience is guaranteed to be furious after each one, and the algorithm cannot tell the difference between analysis and a man burning his own jersey for the fourth consecutive Tuesday. The tragedy is what it displaces. Actual fan analysis — tactics, context, the long view — exists on the platform and is routinely out-recommended by a grown adult screaming at a badge. The rage merchant doesn't cover the competition. He is one: a daily contest to be angriest first, and the standings reset at midnight.
The thumbnail is a star athlete in grayscale. The title promises the UNTOLD, TRAGIC, or HEARTBREAKING story. The video is a Wikipedia career summary read by a synthetic baritone over licensed highlight scraps and slow zooms on press photos, at a volume of dozens per week per channel, for every athlete with a name worth searching. This is the slop wave the Machine Issue mapped, arrived at the stadium: the past of sport is infinite, public-domain-adjacent, and emotionally pre-loaded, which makes it perfect strip-mining territory — no expert to consult, no fan who was there to object, no claim precise enough to be falsified. The tell is the grief without the knowledge: the "tragic story" that cannot name the injury, the "untold story" told identically by nine channels the same week. Real sports documentary — the kind Jomboy or a 30 for 30 does with receipts — requires knowing something. This requires only that you once existed and can be searched.
Downstream of the trick-shot empires came the counterfeiters: channels whose impossible shots are not improbable-but-earned, they are edited — reversed footage, hidden cuts, compositing, physics that would make a ping-pong ball file a complaint. The format thrives because the feed rewards the reaction, not the verification: a fake make and a real make produce the same three seconds of dopamine, and only one of them costs four hundred attempts. This is the trend that makes our Dude Perfect review look almost heroic by contrast — they, at least, genuinely make the shots they show you. But the counterfeiters are also the format's logical conclusion, and that's the autopsy finding worth keeping: once a genre establishes that the attempts don't matter and only the make gets shown, it has already taught its audience that the process is disposable. Faking the make is just the next efficiency. A competition where you can't see the trying was always one edit away from a competition where nobody tried at all.
It walks like analysis. It talks like analysis — form guides, matchup stats, a confident man with a screen. And every road in it leads to a promo code. The betting-pick channel is the most cynical format on this page because it borrows the entire costume of sports expertise to do the opposite of expertise's job: the analysis exists to generate the pick, the pick exists to generate the deposit, and the channel's actual customer is not the viewer but the sportsbook whose sign-up bonus lives in the description. The record of past picks — the one piece of accountability that would make the format honest — is curated, deleted, or simply never mentioned; wins are pinned, losses evaporate; the highlight reel logic of the trick-shot channel applied to your rent money. Sport spent a century building an audience's trust in the person with the statistics. This format spends that trust at the window and keeps the vig.
Ranking EVERY champion. EVERY stadium. EVERY season, kit, mascot, goal celebration. The tier-list mill is what happens when the shape of competition gets harvested and the substance composted: a format that produces the feeling of standings — S through F, the little draggable icons, the pleasant finality of placement — without a single argued criterion underneath. It exists because ranking is the cheapest possible content to generate (opinions are free, grids are free, the catalogue is pre-made) and the most reliable to engage, since every placement is a tiny outrage machine addressed personally to someone's childhood. We are aware, thank you, of the glass house this magazine ranks from. The difference is the working: a ranking is criticism only if each placement is an argument that could be wrong — with reasons stated, evidence named, and the record kept. Strip the arguments and a tier list is just fifty small provocations in a trench coat, and the mill strips the arguments first, because arguments take time and the grid doesn't.
Yob's Save Point
▌ SET THE RECORD ▌
Competition Issue housekeeping, and Yob will use the language of the theme: there is a world record standing open on this page, and nobody has attempted the run. Category: Fastest Genuine Letter to a Magazine Inbox, any%. Current holder: nobody. Current time: infinity. The route is trivial — one email, no tricks, no glitches, the door's not even locked.
yob@ctrl-watch.xyz
Defend Dude Perfect better than Tammy did. Tell Yob the chess fight was rigged by the algorithm. Bring Devraj a rival debt to plant. Submit your own loss column and dare Yob to print it. The magazine spent this whole issue arguing that a competition is just a challenge, a claimant, and a crowd — well, there's the challenge, you're the claimant, and Yob, refreshing the inbox like a man who has forgotten what else hands are for, is the crowd. Any%. The timer's running. It has, in fact, been running since July, and Yob would like it on the record that he finds that genuinely hilarious and only a little bit sad.
— Yob
Retro Ads
Brought to you by the competition-content economy, which has generated these products to solve problems it also invented.
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