Does the higher Elo team win on FACEIT? We checked 5,672 matches

Every FACEIT match room shows each team's average Elo and a win percentage before the game starts. If your side is 40 Elo lower, it's easy to feel the match is lost before the knife round. So does that number actually decide games?

We took 5,672 recent matchmaking games played by players tracked with dodged.it and pulled the match details from the FACEIT API: both teams' average Elo, FACEIT's own win prediction, and who won.

FACEIT keeps teams very close

The first surprise is how small the gaps are. 74% of games had less than 25 Elo between the two teams' averages, and 90% were within 59 Elo. For scale, a single win is usually worth around 25 Elo to one player.

At those gaps the higher team won 51% and 50.1% of games. That's a coin flip, and FACEIT agrees: its own prediction for those games averaged 50% and 50.5%. The map, the veto, who is having a good day and who tilts after the pistol round matter far more than a few Elo.

When the gap starts to matter

With 25 to 99 Elo between the teams, the higher side won 56.7% and 54.8% of games. That's a real edge, but a small one: out of 20 games like that, the favourite wins about 11.

Past 100 Elo it changes. Those games are rare, only 3.5% of the sample. But when they happen, the higher team won 66.5% of 200 games, about two out of three.

FACEIT's prediction vs. what actually happened

FACEIT's pre-match win chance is right where it counts most: in close games it says about 50%, and the results come out at about 50%. For big gaps it is too cautious. At 100+ Elo it gave the higher team 56.5% on average, and they won 66.5%. Across all games, FACEIT predicted 50.9% for the higher team and the real figure was 52.5%.

What about the highest-rated player?

A fair follow-up is whether the team with the best single player wins more, not the one with the higher average. The match data FACEIT publishes gives each team's average Elo and each player's skill level, not every player's Elo at the time of the match, so we can't answer that one cleanly yet. It's on the list.

What this means when you queue

• Ignore small gaps. A 20 or 30 Elo deficit on the match screen is noise. It isn't a reason to tilt before the game starts.
• Respect big ones. Down 100+ Elo, you're the underdog by more than the percentage on screen suggests.
• The teammates matter more than the number. What decides most games isn't the average, it's who you're stuck with. If you keep getting the same griefer, here's how fast players requeue and what you can do about it.

How we measured this

We took the 5,910 most recent FACEIT matchmaking games (Elo-counted, 2026-09-20 to 2026-09-28) played by anyone tracked with dodged.it, and fetched each match from the FACEIT Data API. For every match it lists each team's average Elo, FACEIT's win probability for each team, and the winner. 4,906 were on the Europe 5v5 queue and 758 on North America. We left out the 238 games where both teams had exactly the same average. The ranges are 95% Wilson intervals.