Ludwig came out on the wrong side of one of the closest finishes Minecraft speedrunning has ever produced. During a showmatch at the MCSR Ranked World Championship, he lost a roughly 58-minute race against a fan by about one second, with both players killing the Ender Dragon almost at the same moment.
Both players were running the standard “Any% Glitchless” goal: spawn in, scramble for tools, dive into the Nether, farm blaze rods, barter pearls off Piglins, find a stronghold, light up the End portal, and bomb the dragon with beds. On paper, runners at this level usually clear it in 15-20 minutes.
This one didn’t go to plan. Both players were rusty, setups misbehaved, and the race spiraled into one of the messiest high-profile runs in recent memory. Viewers described moments where each side essentially had to reroute on the fly after losing huge chunks of time. The fan reportedly suffered from misconfigured F3 pie chart settings affecting entity distance, but that ended up being one of the smaller mistakes in a race full of them.
Despite all that, both runners stumbled into The End within seconds of each other. The dragon fight then played out almost in sync, with the final hit landing for the fan roughly a second before Ludwig’s.
Ludwig has been pushing the MCSR Ranked scene for a while, helping fund travel and lodging for competitors to give the championship a proper in-person stage. The showmatch was part of that promotional push, even if his own run didn’t end the way he wanted.
