Introduction

I’ve been organizing and running these types of events for more than 5 years now, and I wrote about it here already. In October 2025, I got a message from someone called Pancks, asking if I could help him organize a tournament called Corrida Dos Bobos.

The concept was inspired by Midoffs, an online Minecraft speedrunning tournament where all the players are streamers and YouTubers who have never done speedrunning before. They would get a week to train, paired with a coach who actually speedruns, to help them prepare.

A month passed and the idea started to take shape. Pancks’ team reached out to all the content creators, explained the event, and asked if they wanted to join. Meanwhile, me, Alexandre, and Ferrer would work on the technical side: brackets, stream setup, overlays, and everything in between, but Ferrer was also a coach, so his contributions were very limited.

The event was scheduled to start Jan 31 and end Feb 1.

Organizing the Event

Overall, we didn’t have a lot of time, there was other events and tournaments going on at the same time that I was also organizing, so it could have been better, but I’m happy with what we made with such a small team.

Format

Since this was based on Midoffs, we started by copying their format:

• Best of 1, finals Best of 3
• 2 players per coach
• 1 week of training
• Coaches in the same call to guide their player during matches
• All matches over a single weekend
• Losers bracket (Removed later on)
• Seeding based on skill

For the seeds, I wrote a small document with guidelines. The gist of it:

• No Buried Treasure seeds, too hard for beginners
• All seeds will have accessible Nether spawns, and good terrain for both structures and the End
• All seeds will have iron pickaxes and good trades, no need for obscure backups
• All seeds will have gold in the overworld, or an easy way to get it before entering the bastion
• Fortresses will be visible from spawn or from the bastion, so players don’t need to learn Pie Ray

For the bracket, we made one deliberate choice: if both players on the same team were strong enough to potentially reach the finals, we’d place them on the same side of the bracket.

With them in the same side, they’d have to face each other in the semifinals instead of the finals. The reason for that is that coaches stay in the call with their player during matches, so if two players from the same coach face off, the coach can’t be with either of them. Better to have that problem in the semis than the grand finals.

We actually had a match from 2 players with the same coach, BRTT vs WendyJr, they were both coached by Lucas, so we called in Sanjinhu as a backup coach for BRTT, since he had already talked to and helped him before the event.

Choosing the Coaches

We needed 8 coaches, each training 2 players. We initially thought about having 1 per player, 16 in total, but finding 16 speedrunners who were skilled enough, trustworthy, and had the free time was unrealistic. The more we added, the worse the average quality got. So we settled for 8.

We put together a list of about 14 speedrunners we trusted, reached out to them, and asked if they were interested and available during training week. Most said yes. We kept them on a shortlist until we finalized the pairings.

As weeks went by and the date got closer, some decided to drop out.

A few thought they wouldn’t have the time

Others felt they wouldn’t be good teachers

Some just lost interest

That left us with 10 coaches, so 2 coaches were not chosen at the end.

Substitutions weren’t a big deal since we had backups ready. If someone dropped, we just asked the next person on the list. One team went through three coaches: the first quit, the backup had scheduling issues, and the third was actually one of the original coaches who had quit a month earlier but decided to come back.

There was a case where someone got mad they didn’t get selected as an option and messaged a staff members saying some bad things about the event and the community, but we choose people who we trusted, since we were dealing with people who stream for a living, and this runner had a past of saying weird and bad things, publicly and privately.

Pairing the Coaches

I don’t remember exactly everything we discussed. It was me, Xande, and Pancks on a call. Here’s the reasoning behind some of the pairings:

• Hange is very patient and easygoing, but not super competitive. We put him with a team of 2 very new players who didn’t even know Minecraft that well.
• Sylv joked about being the “DEI coach,” so we paired her with Malena and Celinett. Unfortunately, Sylv had some complications in her personal life and had to step back, so Reeiper and Xande took over coaching that team. It worked out fine.
• Ferrer is a very skilled player, but he has a short fuse and is very competitive. We didn’t think he’d be a good fit for most teams, so we put him with Ljoga and Meiaum, who were more experienced with Minecraft.
• Booster is also very skilled, can be competitive, but is way more laid back. We paired him with Guaxinim and JVNQ, mainly because Booster is a funny guy and the energy would work. The only other team we’d have considered for him was Ferrer’s. Later, JVNQ quit and was replaced by the content creator Pecanha.
• Luc4szin could fit in any team, but we put him with BRTT and NickLink since he was already coaching BRTT and knew who NickLink was. Even if we didn’t put him here, he’d still be coaching BRTT outside the tournament, so it just made sense.
• AeroAstroid was another flexible pick, so we placed him with Didito and Bolhasuco. Not a lot of thought went into it honestly, we just knew he was a good teacher and Bolhasuco was very inexperienced.
• Reeiper was originally placed with Amelie and OrionG, but then got replaced by Tiger, who then got replaced by Epik. In the end, our initial pairing didn’t even matter for this team.

Original list before substitutions:

All in all, the coaching side went smoothly. Everyone in this group knows each other, so by the time training week started, we had more than enough people ready to step in if anything went wrong.

Problems with Content Creators

I’m not a YouTuber or streamer. I don’t know any of them personally, a lot of them had other problems and things that are more important than this, but some just didn’t want to play, some of them just wouldn’t answer any DMs, wouldn’t schedule calls to train, wouldn’t watch the videos we sent. Nothing.

Not all of them were like this, but the ones who were got me stressing a lot. Speedrunning isn’t something you pick up in a day, and I was worried that the event wouldn’t be fun, because they wouldn’t be able to actually play it. So I suggested we delay the event by 1 week to give everyone more time to train and make the broadcast more entertaining. The rest of the team agreed.

The delay came with a side effect. The new start date was Feb 7, and NickLink, one of the streamers, was going on vacation that day. He wouldn’t be able to participate. But honestly, he hadn’t answered any DMs from his coach and was a no-show for the original training week anyway, so he left the event. We needed a replacement.

The best option was WendyJr, a streamer I already had contact with who makes speedrunning content for a variety of games. She was already familiar with speedrunning, which was perfect since she would only have 4 days to train instead of the 2 to 3 weeks the others had.

In the end, some streamers trained a lot, some barely did, but they all had fun. That’s what mattered.

Setting Up the Stream

Once the coaching and player logistics were sorted, most of the remaining work fell on me. I was already doing heavy lifting on another event, COPA BR 4, so my time was split between both.

An artist was hired to design the live overlay. After that, it was on me to set everything up.

Scenes Setup

I wanted the overlay to be as engaging as possible. The Starting Soon, Talking, Seed Choice, and Interview scenes were all live views into a Minecraft server running on 1.16.1 that anyone could join. The server had minigames to keep people around, so even when the stream was quiet while we set things up, you could still see 10+ players running around, fishing, PvPing, and just hanging out.

Starting Soon scene

For the Seed Choice, we built a spinning wheel inside the Minecraft server that would randomly pick the seed type. We didn’t let participants choose it themselves. People watching in the server could walk over and see it happen live.

The wheel was a custom plugin I built for the server the night before the event. It didn’t actually spin randomly like people imagined. You’d add all the seed options, then run /spinwheel spin INDEX, and it would land on that index. It was rigged.

The way it worked: whatever landed on the green block was the chosen seed type. When you ran the command, say rigged to “Vila,” it would reposition the wheel so that “Vila” started on the green block. Then the wheel spun exactly 5 times, gradually slowing down, and landed on the seed type we had chosen.

We did it this way so we could have some control over which seeds got played. Since the whole point was entertainment, we could save the more fun seeds for certain matchups.

Spinning Wheel

The Interview scene had a special room where both participants sat on a “couch”, with everyone else visible behind a barrier in the background. You could see the interview happening with some fans behind it. It made the whole thing feel alive, and everyone loved it.

Interview scene

At the End we just let everyone join in to have some fun

End celebration

We pulled this off by having a friend act as our Cameragirl. She streamed her POV on Twitch, and our main broadcast was just her feed with extra components overlaid on top, like the chat and other info.

The Match Stream itself was simpler: both player streams side by side, their names, MC heads, coach names, a timer, the chat, and a panel showing the casters. For the caster display, we used Discord WebKit with custom CSS to show our Minecraft heads animating when we talked. It looked clean.

The Splits Screen was straightforward too. We used a tool to automatically fetch data from the API and update the text sources. The same tool handled pulling in the players’ MC head images.

The flow of each match on stream went like this:

1. Starting Soon screen stays up until everything is ready
2. Ask Lena (our Cameragirl) to move to the presentation area
3. We introduce ourselves, announce the upcoming match, answer any questions, then say we’re spinning the wheel
4. Lena flies to the seed choice area, and I “spin the wheel”
5. Explain anything necessary about the seed, then switch to the match overlay (no Minecraft background)
6. Lena flies back to the presentation area, ready for the post-match interview
7. After the match ends, we show a splits screen with both players and break down the run. Meanwhile, coaches are telling the runners to join the server for the interview
8. Switch to the interview scene, talk about the match, then go back to the Starting Soon screen for about 5 minutes while we set up the next one

More Technical Stuff

For this event, I used a tool I built called rOBS. It lets me, or anyone I give access to, control OBS remotely from another window. It’s powerful on its own, but this time I mainly used it alongside OBS Studio mode since I didn’t have enough time to configure everything to be easily manageable from rOBS alone.

rOBS supports plugins, which are just JS files that fetch data from the MCSR Ranked API and MC Heads API, then update text and image sources in OBS directly. We used it for a lot:

• Stream control: changing participant stream volume, muting, easily switching channels
• Music: swapping tracks using a built-in music player
• Scoreboard: updating point totals, toggling the timer
• Splits: auto-populating the splits screen via a plugin
• Player heads: automatically setting MC heads based on a configuration text source with their IGN

Basically, it let us automate enough to keep the downtime between matches minimal. Most of the time we were working with just 2 staff members, and for some matches it was only me.

Link to rOBS GitHub repo

I also dealt with 3 stream crashes during the event. I still can’t reliably reproduce the bug, but it always happens when I’m editing a text source in OBS Studio mode. The stream itself doesn’t actually go down, it’s the OBS UI that freezes. I can still control everything through rOBS while it’s frozen, but eventually OBS crashes entirely and I have to restart it.

The Day of the Event

2 days. Around 15 hours of livestreaming. I barely slept between Friday and Sunday. Both days I went to sleep at 5 AM after wrapping up whatever still needed to be done, woke up at 11 AM to finish the rest, and by 3 PM the event was live.

Casters and Commentators

I commentated every single match. All 15 hours of it. Overall I think it went well, but looking back, there were clear areas to improve:

• Dead air. Sometimes we just went silent. I get it, there wasn’t always something to talk about. The players are beginners, things move slower, not a lot is happening on screen. But we need to always have something going on: pull up their stats, talk about their previous match, mention their coach, compare times, anything.
• Going off topic. At one point people started talking about a CS tournament happening at the same time. Just talk about Minecraft. I called them out a few times, but I’ll admit I wasn’t always on top of it either.
• Niche community jokes. There were at least 1k+ people watching, and maybe 20 of them would get the joke. A small reference here and there is fine if it doesn’t break the flow, but when you start saying “only the old heads will know,” you’ve lost the audience. There are no old heads in this stream. We’re introducing people to the community, and we need to keep it accessible.
• It’s exhausting. Watching back the VODs, by the end I was stumbling over my words, my throat hurt, my voice was raspy. I was just not used to talking for that long.

Matches

We had a schedule for when each match would start, but we knew delays were likely if any match ran long. Those delays stacked up, and by the end we were off by about 1 hour and 10 minutes. Funny enough, that actually worked out, since the last 2 players had both asked to play as late into the night as possible.

Most matches went smoothly, but 3 had notable issues:

• Bad Shipwreck seed. The intended Magma Ravine only had 1 “L-Shape”, which made it much harder to play because there was zero room for mistakes.

• Bad RNG seed. After using all the gold in the bastion, you still didn’t get a fire resistance potion. This match dragged on for over an hour, the longest in the entire event by far.

• Bad Ruined Portal seed. In the guidelines I wrote for the coaches, I said all seeds would come from MCSR Ranked. That’s important because Ranked seeds always guarantee 3 iron somewhere accessible, either in an overworld chest or in the bastion. This particular seed only had 2 iron in the ruined portal, and since the Nether portion wasn’t from Ranked, there was no extra iron in the bastion either.

  The overworld did have a village where you could kill a golem for the missing iron, and one team figured that out. But the other team assumed they could skip the golem and find iron in the bastion like usual. They didn’t, and it cost them a lot of time.

This last one was mostly a communication error on my part. I didn’t make it clear enough to the seed finders that every seed needed to come from Ranked. They were finding seeds live as the tournament ran, so I didn’t have time to explain the requirement properly.

Stream Stats

On our main channel, we peaked at 700 concurrent viewers. When you combine all the streamers who were co-streaming and the participants’ own channels, we hit 3k+ viewers at our peak.

These are the most viewed matches of the tournament, using the average viewers of each source at the time of the match.

Twitch stream summary: Day 1: Day 2:

Other Small Problems

Im just bitter

Miscommunication about coach selection. One staff member told a coach that he’d be able to choose which players he would train. That was never decided, and it’s pretty much impossible anyway, since multiple coaches would pick the same player. The coach was understandably frustrated when he found out he wouldn’t actually get to choose.

Contacting a content creator. I was messaging a content creator to ask if she wanted to join the event. I had already been in contact with her before, when I invited her to our community. A few hours later, the same staff member also messaged her, said the same things I did, but explained the format incorrectly. She replied to me saying, “Another guy from MCSR messaged me, should I continue the conversation here or with him?” I just told her to continue with me and explained how things would actually work. Completely avoidable confusion.

Changing the format without explaining it. I wasn’t able to join a call where Pancks and another staff member were discussing the match format. I had been the one who decided most of the tournament structure and guidelines, so I just asked for a summary afterward. The summary I got was: “Nothing changed, I just explained it better to Pancks.” A week later, I found out they had changed the format from double elimination to single elimination, which is a pretty significant change. The staff member didn’t ask anyone about it and didn’t tell anyone either. The message he claims explains it literally starts with “Nothing changed,” and he still talks about having 2 brackets, because he thought the left and right sides of a bracket are separate brackets. They’re not. They’re just two sides of the same one.

Conclusion

I loved being part of this. It was stressful, I wasn’t used to talking that much or juggling that many things in a single day, but it was genuinely fun. I’m proud of the quality we delivered and everything I managed to pull off.

I don’t know if we’ll do something like this again, but if we do, I’ll make it even better.

This was the biggest event where I’ve ever taken a leadership role. I’m grateful to have had so many talented people helping me make it a reality, because I couldn’t have done it without them.

Vods links:

• CORRIDA DOS BOBOS