Hello, dear reader! We at Prima Games wish you, an avid skin collector, a warm welcome to our CS:GO Case Opening guide for 2022. In it, we’ll go through some case opening theories, and we’ll offer a breakdown of the best cases that you can try opening in hopes to get valuable skins in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
Which CS:GO Cases Should I Open in 2022?
Before we proceed with the advice on which case(s) you should try opening, we need to start off with a big disclaimer.
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In most cases, it might be a better idea to directly purchase the skin you want to have from the Steam Market (or from a trusted third-party website, if any even exist nowadays since buying skins for real money outside of the Steam Market is a violation of Valve’s ToS) rather than opening cases. The truth of the matter is that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (Valve) had to publicly release the odds for getting each and every class of items when it got released in China due to local laws and this gives us invaluable insight into how those case rolls go.
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Reddit users joined forces, translated the Perfect World press release from Chinese, and did the math which is approximately something like this:
Out of 125 cases that you purchase and open, you would get:
- 79.92% of Blue items
- 15.98% of Purple items
- 3.2% of Pink items
- 0.64% of Red items
- 0.26% of Yellow items – so not even a single knife! You’d need 500 cases to “guarantee” a knife (quotation marks because it’s still NOT guaranteed).
In addition to these percentages, when you roll an item, there’s a 10% chance that it will be a StatTrak variant.
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There was an Anomaly stream in which he invested $10,000 to open 4,000 cases over the course of 24 hours, and based on our findings, the odds are eerily similar (Law of Large Numbers and all that jazz). He reportedly pulled 12 knives out of 4,000 cases – odds of 0.3% (he got lucky for that +0.04% margin).
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Basically, as with any slot machine, the odds are always rigged in the house’s favor. If you hear about someone getting something outrageous as two knives from 10 boxes, yes, that is plausible, but it’s also plausible that hundreds or even thousands of people won’t roll a single one from their 10-box investment. If you’re in for a dopamine rush and casino-like sounds, and can, with clarity in your mind, decide to say goodbye to a certain amount of dollar bills without expecting any profit, by all means, have all the fun – our moral duty was to warn you about the potential downsides. If you want to earn money, start learning about stock markets or anything that can bring reasonably stable profits.
If you do manage to pull a knife early, for example, it’s always possible to quit while you’re ahead and enjoy your profits, or to keep opening until you have invested the same or less money in cases and keys than what the knife’s worth, to at least break even.
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Most Profitable CS:GO Cases in 2022
Another disclaimer (yeah, yeah, we’re boring you, but for good reason because we genuinely care about your well-being) is that the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive skin market is volatile and is constantly changing, so you should double-check the prices of the skins that you can get in the box before deciding to invest a lot of money in the cases.
There is a brilliant page, Canes.Jonesy.Moe, that does the number crunching and can allow you to sort cases by “Return on Investment” which of course, indicates which cases have the best odds of netting you a profit. It, however, is not a magic formula.
We’ll pick the current top 5 with their ROI rates:
- Snakebite Case (64.79%)
- Dreams & Nightmares Case (64.69%)
- CS:GO Weapon Case 3 (64.02%)
- Operation Phoenix Weapon Case (63.43%)
- Shadow Case (62.85%)
Keep in mind that some of these cases are VERY rare since they cannot be generated anymore, and this is one of the reasons those cases (and the content that comes out of them) are worth more on the market and why they will progressively increase in price. It’s a simple Supply and Demand rule in action.
We found a decent Case Opening Simulator online that can simulate most of the cases and automatically calculates the approximate net profit/loss.
Also, keep the Law of Large Numbers in mind and the key sentence from the linked article which we will quote:
“Any winning streak by a player will eventually be overcome by the parameters of the game.”
That’s it for this guide, and we sincerely hope that you’ll open great stuff should you decide on this business venture.
