Second chance knockouts

No, you won't play the second chance knockout round.

But I am somewhat confused by your term "to keep my lead". It sounds like there is still some confusion about the rounds here @rjXgray so let me try to explain.

Firstly, purple candies do not carry over from one round to the next, so each leaderboard starts again at zero. Each player who ends in one of the top five places of their leaderboard currently playing goes on to the next leaderboard round. Each round starts with a clean slate, at a score of zero and a random allocation of players. If you are first in your group now or if you finish in fifth place, there is no difference for the next round. All the millions of players still in the event after this round start the next round with zero points

This current round will finish in 32 hours time. If you are in the top five you proceed to the next round:

Stage 3 starts on 12th April. You need to finish in the top 3 positions of your leaderboard.

Those top 3 players then go on to:

Stage 4 "First Final Knockout" 20th April. Only the one top finishing player of each leaderboard goes on to the next round.

The next round is:

Stage 5 "Second Final Knockout". starts only 6 hours after the finish of Stage 4 on April 24th. Only the top player of each leaderboard goes on the next round

The last round is:

Stage 6 "Third Final Knockout". There will only be ten groups by this point and the ten finalists who will be invited to the cash prize final at Los Angeles will be picked by King from those players in one of the top places of those ten groups. This will not necessarily be the leader because at this point King will verify that all the Terms and Conditions were met and that the travel documents are valid. (Last year, if I remember this correctly, not one of the final group winners made it to the live final, they were all replaced by other players from their group)

Hello again @rjXgray Firstly I would like to wish you the best of health and progress with your treatment, which is so much more important than Candy Crush! If the game helps you relax then keep going, but if it starts to frustrate you, then please stop and think of your health. Don't lose sleep over it as sleep helps you towards your recovery (I used to work as a nurse before I retired, so I understand this well).

Secondly I love all your questions and I love answering them!

No, you don't have the make millions of points per episode, that is not possible!!. To win you must be able to score several million in a 24 hour period, so it's about how fast you play through each episode, and you seem to be doing very well at that!

About playing offline, yes you do need an internet connection to collect the gold from the champions races and if you need to buy anything, but of course players can buy all the boosters before starting the competition. It is possible to play entirely offline but I also don't enjoy this. Also, if you do you will not see the leaderboard, so you do have to log in at intervals to check up on what your opponents are doing!

You misread something because I was not in the final rounds of last year's competition at all, but I was reading all the posts during last years' event. There were lots of angry complaints accusing King of fraud and players of cheating, and I do remember those angry players posting screenshots of most of the final ten leaderboards here in the community. The ten finalists who went to London, where last year's finals were held, were all different players to the ones topping the final leaderboards, that is how I remember it. I also know of three players who posted here recently stating that they did get invited to the finals but either could not go for personal reasons or because it turned out they would have needed a visa to enter the UK. So there was a mixture of reasons why players were excluded at the final hurdle. This does also mean that there is hope for any honest and hard crushing player in those final ten leaderboards to get to the final in LA, even if some cheater drives the scores up to 10 million like they did last year.