What are the chances of unboxing a knife on CS:GO?

Micro-transactions… Love them or hate them, have been a huge part of the gaming industry for many years now and it doesn’t look like they are going anywhere any time soon.

These in-game transactions come in many forms. Some game developers opt to give you an advantage if you are willing to pay for it, whereas others offer purely cosmetic changes in exchange for your dollars.

 Luckily, in the CS:GO world at least, it remains the latter although this hasn’t stopped Valve raking in millions of dollars

Hopeful gamers all over the world continuously sink their hard earned cash into buying keys and cases in hopes of unboxing that ultra rare Karambit Sapphire… And they are sorely disappointed when instead they are greeted with 5 P250 | Sand Dunes and a bad case of ‘Mom, can I borrow $50? I can’t afford food for the rest of the month’

The Odds

Despite knowing the odds are DEFINITELY NOT in our favor, we still do it. I too have fallen victim to the classic ‘Okay, this next one is DEFINITELY a knife’ feeling. But we aren’t here to question the ‘why’ of the situation today, or to feel sorry for ourselves. We are here to investigate once and for all what our odds actually are so that if we continue to indulge ourselves in this gambling, at least we know our chances. 

Luckily we don’t need to spend thousands of dollars buying keys in order to work out the percentages ourselves (though many people have done this previously). This information has been given to us:

In 2018, due to a law in China, CS:GO were forced into making the exact odds public knowledge and they are as follows:

Blue — 79.92%

Purple — 15.98%

Pink —3.2%

Red — 0.64%

Yellow — 0.26%

With the cost of CS:GO case keys currently sitting at $2.34 (If you buy them from the game itself) and the odds of a knife being roughly 1 in 400 (0.25 x 400 = 100. #Quickmaths), this means that you would need to spend, on average, $936 on keys to ‘guarantee’ a knife drop.

This is even more depressing when you think about the percentage of knives that are more valuable than this. Your odds of getting your money’s worth is incredibly slim.

In Conclusion

There is no denying that the dopamine release from partaking in a small risks like this is fun. But the facts are clear in that you are SIGNIFICANTLY more likely to lose money when opening CS:GO cases than profiting.

There is some good news though. There are millions of CS:GO players around the world who frequently open a case or two every so often. And guess what — If 400 people open 1 case each, statistically speaking, there should be AT LEAST 1 lucky Russian kid opening a knife.

So what’s my advice? Do the smart thing — Let other people risk their money and save yourself hundreds of dollars by renting your favourite knife from us instead. I might be slightly biased in this conclusion but I mean, come on… $934 vs. $24.99, It’s a bit of a no brainer.

We hope you enjoyed this blog post. Have you opened any super rare knives? Let us know in the comments.