The Stuber wins Crab Week 5

Crab Week 5 settled at 2026-06-08 00:00 UTC. The Stuber banked $132,370.00, up from a week-open carry of $111,117.94 — a clean +19.13% on the week and back in possession of the Crab belt. No champion was crowned in Week 4. One was crowned now.

Two days earlier we wrote Smooth doesn't mean lucky about the suspiciously clean staircase shape of his mid-week equity curve. The week settled with the staircase completed. The shape was the bot, and the bot is what won.

Markets don't reward noise. They reward positioning.

Every figure above is the banked DB read at settle, not an intra-tournament display value. Stuber finished flat — no position carried into Week 6 — and his entire week is represented by fourteen fills across five round-trips, all short, all BTC-USDT.

Five round-trips, all short, all run identically: open the full size, scale 25% off at the first take-profit rung, let the runner work until either the next rung lands a full exit or the strategy's own logic flattens it. The 1R breakeven trail sat behind every runner. The same four lines of code, five times in a row.

BTC drifted from the mid-$71K range down through $61K across the same five days. The strategy's pullback-shorts caught the move, the 1R management mechanism banked rung by rung, and the runners finished the job each time. No trade required the breakeven trail to bail it out — every position that scaled at 1R also closed in profit. That's as clean as the strategy is supposed to look when the regime cooperates.

Two things. The market, and the slot the platform put him in.

The market. Week 4 was chop with shallow pullbacks that filled the entry and then reversed; Week 5 was a sustained directional drift that honoured every short entry. The strategy is the same; STRATEGY.md hasn't changed since the conformance fix. The difference is what the tape was doing. STRATEGY.md is honest about that asymmetry up front: when the regime cooperates with pullback entries, you get this; when it doesn't, you get Week 4. Both are real outcomes of one strategy. The mechanism didn't change between them.

The slot. Week 4 settled with a one-way thin-field gate that tried to relegate Stuber to Shrimp on a zero-eligible field. An operational SQL restore moved him back to Crab the same morning; commit 5e328a1 shipped the symmetric thin-field rule into lib/league/settle.ts so the protection runs both ways — a field that can't earn a promotion also can't trigger a relegation. Without that fix the bot that just printed +19.13% in Crab would have been doing it in Shrimp, and the week would have read as a different story for reasons unrelated to the trading. The rule held this week. So did the belt.

The mid-week piece argued the shape of the equity curve tells you what kind of bot you're watching before the percentage does. The Stuber's curve was a staircase by construction: open, partial-close at the rung, runner exits, flat, repeat. Five times. The settled chart is the same shape, finished.

That matters because the next thing copy-traders and sponsors will ask, looking at a +19% week, is whether it was a strategy or a streak. The fills tape is the answer. Every round-trip used the same two-stage exit. Every entry fit the same pullback-after-structure-break setup the public STRATEGY.md describes. There is no trade in the week that the published rules don't explain. The number is big because the regime cooperated. The shape is the same as it always is.

In a less cooperative tape, the same shape would have produced a flat or modestly negative staircase — same cadence, same legs, smaller or downward. The shape is durable. The number isn't. Read the shape.

Stuber holds Crab for Week 6. His career equity reads $132,370.00 against his original $100,000 Shrimp entry from late April — +32.37% lifetime. That's the highest it has read since the Week 2 drawdown began, but it's still about 8% short of his all-time peak of $144,167. One good week recovers two-thirds of the lost ground. The peak is the next target, not the back-pocket fact.

Crab is still a thin field. The Unknown Man finished Week 5 flat — the gold-momentum bot had no qualifying setups for the second tournament running — so for a fifth week the tier's real depth is one bot trading and one bot waiting. The promotion ladder needs a second qualified bot in Crab to make any of Stuber's wins formally count for promotion. The path runs through /build and Shrimp. Win Shrimp Week 6 and you meet Stuber in Crab for Week 7. His source is public. Read what won. Decide whether you can beat it.

The current state of Crab Week 6 is on the live leaderboard.