The Stuber wins Crab Week 7

Crab Week 7 settled at 2026-06-22 00:00 UTC. The Stuber banked $141,895.05, up from a week-open carry of $117,042.88 — a clean +21.27% on the week and the strongest single week of the bot's career so far.

The week before, we wrote about a chop regime that fired the strategy thirteen times in four hours into a $62K–$63K range and stopped the bot out every time. We argued the mechanism was working; the regime wasn't cooperating. Both pictures are real — and this week proves the second sentence on the win side.

All figures verified against the settled DB read and the full fills tape. Position flat at settle. No carry into Week 8.

Two extra facts worth pinning down. First, the championship was formally crowned this time — no_winner_reason = NULL on the settled tournament row, the thin-field gate didn't fire, and the belt sits on Stuber's shoulder by the rules. Crab Week 3 and Crab Week 5 wins came with an asterisk for thin-field reasons; this one doesn't. Second, the week's close puts the bot's career equity at $141,895.05 against an all-time peak of $144,167.25 — within 1.58% of the high. The recovery from the Week 2 / Week 4 / Week 6 drawdowns is nearly complete.

Seven round-trips. Five winners, two losers. The pattern is the same one the Week 5 piece described and the Week 6 piece argued would still be there waiting when the regime cooperated:

Every winner used the same two-stage exit the platform's close_pct field exists for: 25% partial off at the first take-profit rung, breakeven trail installed on the runner, runner exits when its full close fires. The same four lines of code, five times across the week. The one losing long (Wednesday, opened at $65,247 and stopped out twenty minutes later at $64,567) cost roughly the planned-loss size — the stop fired exactly as the structure-break-invalidation rule prescribes.

The week's biggest winner was the last trade. The Stuber opened a 18.92 BTC short at $64,347 on Sunday late morning and held it for nine hours through BTC's continued drift, closing the runner at $63,698. That single round-trip banked roughly $12,000 — almost half the week's gain on its own.

BTC drifted from the mid-$65K range into the low $63s across the seven days, with a brief retrace mid-week that gave the bot one long-side stop on Wednesday before the directional move resumed. Pullback shorts caught the resumption. The mechanism is now boring. That's what makes it work.

Two weeks ago, Smooth doesn't mean lucky argued that the shape of a bot's equity curve tells you what kind of strategy you're watching before the percentage does. The Stuber's curve in a friendly week is a staircase by construction: open, partial at the rung, runner exits, flat, repeat.

Week 5 was that staircase climbing to +19.13%. Week 6 was the same shape inverted into a jagged scatter cluster when the regime stopped honouring entries. Week 7 is the staircase back, climbing seven rungs to +21.27%. The shape is durable. The number is the weather. Both sentences keep being true.

The thing the equity-curve essay couldn't claim until now was the before/after side-by-side. Week 5 was a friendly staircase. Week 6 was its hostile-regime equivalent. Week 7 is the proof that the same mechanism, given another friendly regime, produces the same staircase as before. Three settled weeks, three different regime conditions, one consistent fingerprint. That's the strategy. That's all that the chart should ever be reading for.

The platform's settle code computes a fully eligible set per tournament: bots that aren't disqualified, that have ≥3 round-trips, and that finished with positive return. When that set has fewer than two members, the thin-field gate fires and the belt is withheld. That gate withheld Stuber's Crab Week 3 win (lone qualifier) and Crab Week 5 win (still lone qualifier — The Unknown Man wasn't trading).

Crab Week 7 cleared the gate. The Stuber qualified on the merits — seven closed round-trips, +21.27% return, no DQ chip, well above the floors. The settle code recorded no_winner_reason = NULL, which is the database value for a champion was crowned. The first such record on Stuber's Crab career.

The Crab field is still thin in the structural sense — most weeks it's a one-bot tier — but the gate's symmetry, shipped in the symmetric thin-field rule fix after the Week 4 wrong-relegation, held in both directions this week. Stuber wasn't withheld a deserved win and he wasn't relegated on a thin one. The leaderboard tells the truth.

Stuber's career equity reads $141,895.05 against his original $100,000 Shrimp entry from late April — +41.90% lifetime, which is the highest it has ever read. It is, also, still $2,272 short of his all-time peak of $144,167.25 from the Wk2 high. 1.58% from the high after a three-week recovery from a 13% drawdown. The chart will close that gap or it will pause around it; either is honest.

Watch what comes next live on the leaderboard. Or read what won on the public bot.py, fork it, decide whether you can beat it, and meet him in Crab.