Best Of

G'day everyone!

I have decided to not join the fifth stage until the very last day. I will be provided with the 10m UFO pass from the Ads Quest, but nothing more. I will also not be provided any other passes. My starting booster inventory is almost empty, meaning I have to purchase the affordable colour bomb pass.

Preliminary

I have made a post that references all of my previous posts concerning my All Stars progress.

After a gruelling all-nighter slog that ended in an unfortunate fate, plus a much more hectic software development schedule next week, I have made the decision to take this week up to Good Friday as a bye week to replenish on my ads. I have decided to not start All Stars until Holy Saturday 00:00 Zulu Time.

Thus, my session will last at most thirteen hours. Assuming I can crush 3.5 episodes in an hour, with each episode scoring 2000 points on average, I should finish with 91000 points. However, it would not protect me from the hex0rs.

Tournament

I entered the tournament on the very last minute of that Friday in Zulu Time. I missed the window to obtaining two Daily Stamps in one day; hence Daily Stamps are collected upon the completion of a level, not when you are starting a level.

I will start with a Double Candy Royale (Tier 2) alongside a Double Candy Bomb.

First Sitting (8:00pm)

I entered the tournament with just thirteen hours to spare. My leaderboard was remarkably small, at seventeen players including me.

At the end of the first sitting, the top player was Ashlie, at 27115 points, but she played nineteen hours ago with eleven hours remaining, is a relative non-threat. Éole, a French player, played six hours ago. The most concerning player at that time was Peanut, who was playing now.

Kim and Éole had high winstreaks at the time I checked up, at 59 and 61 respectively. From the levels won in the last seven days, it is evident Éole is a hex0r. Since the start of the last phase is only seven days ago, it is consistent that Kim is also a hex0r.

Second Sitting (3:00am)

I decided to take a short nap so I won't start my week badly.

There is no large-scale hexing, but I still have to cover a 25k point deficit within five hours. I have climed from twelfth place to sixth place with less than four hours to go, and I am moderately confident I have enough time to overtake Éole for the entire night (it is already afternoon in his zone). The number of screenshots I have is relatively limited as my focus is solely on completing the slog, keeping watch of Éole.

Kim is repelled (6:30am)

Much of my time in the five-hour second sitting involves me chasing Kim, playing now from 3:00am at the earliest until 6:30am under a 8k point deficit relative to her. It is evident Kim is attempting to overtake Éole.

Éole returned to the game for a short time. Eventually, Kim left the game, One down, one to go. I also passed Peanut and Sahid, both at the 20k range. Kim has a final win streak of 238; she did not lose her win streak in the run. However, Éole did.

I have roughly two hours to cover a 12k deficit. Best case is of Éole did not return. Worst case is if Éole returns and deploys another hex to secure the lead.

Second Hex (8:00am)

With one hour remaining and just barely enough for my projected progress to overtake the hex0r, I saw the "playing now" on him with a 8k deficit (requiring five episodes to catch). I am now time-bound, as the time remaining is not enough for me to hex up my All Stars run. If I lose, I lose all my hexes. I immediately pressed the nuke button, and made a 33k run out of it. Éole was vanquished with forty-eight minutes to spare, with a score of 42k.

He completed an episode, and score 7834 points in this run. It is evident that he had to hex after being overtaken, but eventually he relented.

Next phase

The run was quite negative, at a net loss of 250 gold bars, rounded up, across twenty episodes. The slog is thus comparable in length to the previous slog, which was actually gold positive. I had to spend around 55 gold per episode. Unfortunately, I had to use another hex, this time in a trailing position to overtake a French player who returned to the game in the very last hour.

I will have to replenish gold for the rest of the weekend. I will still be able to start with the Daily Stamps pass, but only for the second half of the run. I should also start the very last stage with a Double Colour Bomb.

Anyways, with only four out of six hexes left, and also that the very day conflicts with my schedule, I will again likely decide to join late. This could also mean I will not be able to become a ffinalist even if I finished first in the finals.

Projected score

Assuming I can crush four episodes per hour, with each episode averaging 2000 points, and I have four hexes:

• 40000 points per hex
• 160000 points during hextime

Assuming I can crush three-and-a-half episodes per hour, with each episode averaging 2000 points, for the rest of the hours (22 to spare):

• 56000 points per eight hours
• 112000 points per sixteen hours (if I played continuously after my workday)
• 154000 points if I use up all twenty-two hours, in theory

This means, a score of 250000 points is very attainable, provided that I kept my Double Colour Bomb throughout (and did not lose to losing a life or through unusual methods). I have already lost 80000 points from the hex0rs at the end of the slog; if I had all of the tokens, I would score 240000 points during hextime, and possibly 400000 points if I use up all twenty-two hours.

As a reference, last year, we saw a score of 6453823. However, this tournament did not feature hex tokens, and the tournament is semi-farmable. Purple candies collected from new level wins scored thirty points instead of one point. His score would be 215127, which is still outrageous as that equates to 8964 candies per hour, or 4.5 episodes per hour! You have just thirteen minutes to complete an episode, meaning on average, you have just 53 seconds to complete a level including the unskippable transition cutscenes! Therefore, your crushing average per level is just forty seconds! Maintained over all twenty-four hours!

last year I believe I was in the final knockout with a bot too. It seemed easier to score points then because I remember we both had over 1M (we didn’t need to activate multipliers that year) and I lost to first place with 10K candies difference in the last hour . I showed my boyfriend who is now my fiancé and he strongly believe it wasn’t a real player for the reason the player also never stopped playing, if he did it was 10 mins at a time. He never slept too. This year my Fiancé was cheering me on so hard and if he knew how to play like me he would have taken over when I slept but he doesn’t play and I wouldn’t feel right cheating to make it. The inconsistence scoring just doesn’t sit right with me and I hope something is done to discover the actual all stars instead of softwares or bots to help them get there. 😊

Thank you for the support

Candy Crush Saga in 2026 is a resource management game featuring match-3 challenges. You are expected to budget your gold and boosters and spend your resources sparingly. Figure out how the game's systems interact with each other to maximize your resources and power through the hardest levels without spending much.

This is extremely different from Candy Crush Saga in 2013, which was a match-3 game.

Did you both get through, @GiggzZz?

Jay is probably 2023 All Stars winner.

In this late rounds you must expect very good players who play alot of time, because they are playing for the crown.

Huge congratulations to everyone who made it!

@christinewupp, very well done! Your nerves must be in tatters after that. And @MannyFae, @Nobody1, @sweetcandyline and @Big_Dave, yours must be the same. It was nervewracking even just reading about your experiences.

Good luck to you all in Round 3. I do hope you have a go @MannyFae, if only out of curiosity. At the risk of tempting fate, it’s hard to imagine it could be much more brutal than that last round. At least, when it comes to playing the cursed tokens, it will only be a question of when and not if.

@Alienscar and @Jejsta123, commiserations. If it wasn’t for the tokens it could have been very different. Hopefully we will never see them again.

So I won my 5 of 6 rounds but it ended in an absolute blood bath. I mean I had to use a ton of saved party boosters combined with x10 boosters. I would have definately lost had I not used them. A friend was in a group where they had completed over 2500 levels in 7 days. There were lots if early level players doing well and it took everything I had to beat them. I feel totally wounded and emotionally scared how hardcore the ending was. I am NiceTryBye. The person that almost beat me was pretending to be amateurish good and at the end opened up a can of whoop—- that only a very seasoned player could defeat. There seemed to a final showdown between 2 final players in many of the events. How much the final 2 players left kicking and scratching was how many boosters you needed to pull it out.. definitely hardcore play at the end.

I will probably receive haters/ annoyed people by posting my leaderboard. 

First and foremost last year I entered stage 5 (90 hours) a few minutes after it started and played the 24hours non stop. Created a sizeable lead, but became complacent and didn’t qualify.

This year I used a later strategy joining a leaderboard with only 5 people, which eventually went up to 10 people. Yes I was also surprised and expecting it to raise to 50. 

I took 1st place and sat back, eventually Vanessa went ahead. I couldn’t resist playing cat and mouse with her. I would go ahead a couple hundred points and then log out, and then she would go back ahead by 1 thousand points. This happened multiple times. 

Then it was time for me to test my speed with different strategies. 

I took a random screenshot (above) and must have finished 1 or 2 more levels and oops I fell asleep…

Back in 2nd but at least I woke up (without alarm) with 1 hour 52 minutes remaining. So it was time to continue playing and see stage 5 out. Vanessa reappeared with maybe 14 minutes remaining. At 11/12minutes I become suspicious and knew something wasn’t right.

8 minutes 25 seconds remaining ….

7 minutes 11 seconds remaining….

So within the space of 74 seconds;
I gain 21 points 
Vanessa gets 1,630 points

Yes I had to use a token. Let’s call it Karma for me playing cat and mouse and falling asleep for 3 hours 25 minutes

As for my best strategy going into stage 6?
I have no idea maybe try not to make the game freeze at the end of the level. It happened maybe 4/5 times within the space of 2 hours. Today I have seen others experience the same problem. At least I have learned from others to refresh the app. I didn’t use my head and rebooted my iPhone on each occasion. 
That aside it  also seems slower than last year in regard to going from 1 level to another. 

This is exactly the kind of response that keeps missing the point.Nobody here is arguing about “life not being fair” or comparing a mobile game to the Olympics or Harvard. That’s not even relevant to what people are actually experiencing in this tournament.The issue being raised is very clear:Players are seeing score jumps that do not match the number of levels played  even when multipliers are considered.If someone plays 30–60 levels and somehow jumps thousands of points ahead of players grinding hundreds of levels, that’s not about “strategy” or “saving tokens.” That’s a mismatch in how the scoring is working, and people have every right to question it.Also, saying “everyone got the same multipliers” doesn’t automatically make the system fair. Fairness isn’t just about giving the same tools  it’s about how those tools function in practice and whether the results make sense.And dismissing people’s concerns by telling them to “get a grip” or blaming “Google or ChatGPT” doesn’t change the fact that multiple players are reporting the same inconsistencies.At the end of the day, this isn’t about complaining  it’s about asking for transparency and a system that actually reflects what players are putting into the game.If everything is truly fair, then there should be no issue explaining how these scoring gaps are happening.