CS2 weapon box probabilities: Get knife from box

Most people who have ever played Counter Strike have probably also opened crates in Counter Strike. But how high is the probability of pulling out a good item, such as a knife?

What can you get from a box? (categories)

To understand the probabilities of a Counter Strike box, you first need to know which Categories of items you can draw from a crate at all. You can get skins with five different rarity levels from a normal crate:

• Blue - Mil-Spec (military standard)
• Purple - Restricted (Limited)
• Pink - Classified (Confidential)
• Red - Covert (concealed)
• Gold - Rare Special Item (★, Hidden)

Blue is the worst category and gold the best. In the vast majority of cases, blue skins are worth significantly less than the opened crate and the key combined. Naturally, a blue item has the highest probability of being drawn and a gold item such as a knife or gloves has an incredibly low chance of being unboxed. In the next section, we will look at exactly how high the probabilities are for the individual categories.

What is the probability for each category?

For a long time, the probabilities of Counter Strike were only estimates or projections of large case openings. Since the release of Counter Strike in China, this has changed, as Valve (the company behind CS) had to disclose the probabilities due to the legal situation. 

As a result, we now know the exact probabilities, which you can see in the following graph:

As you can easily see, the probability of drawing a knife is vanishingly low at just 0.26%. At the same time, the probability of drawing the worst level, i.e. blue, is almost 80%. Even a red skin is still incredibly rare and only has a probability of 0.64%. 

This means that if you open 5 crates, you will most likely draw 4 blue skins. At the same time, you have a 1 in 156 chance of getting a red item and a 1 in 385 chance of getting a gold item.

What is the probability that a skin is StatTrak?

The probabilities that a Skin StatTrak are quite simple. Every skin that is pulled out of a box has a 10 percent chance of being StatTrak. This means that every tenth item that is unboxed is StatTrak.

This results in a table with the following probabilities:

Summary

To revisit the question from the introduction, the chance of getting a knife from a box is just 0.26%, if this knife is also supposed to be StatTrak, the probability is 0.026%.

So it's quite clear: opening boxes is pure gambling and you will always make a loss. 

If you would like to have a skin to play with, we strongly recommend that you buy the skin from a trustworthy skin marketplace, such as Skinportto buy. There you can choose exactly the skin you want and it's even cheaper than the Steam marketplace.

Frequently asked questions about Counter Strike crates (FAQ)