Does time of day affect your K/D? 35,051 FACEIT matches by hour

“Don't queue after midnight” is standard CS advice. You're tired, your aim is off, everyone in the lobby is tilted. We wanted to see whether the numbers back it up, so we took the last 100 CS2 matches of every player tracked with dodged.it and looked at K/D by the hour each match ended.

Why evenings look better

On the raw numbers there is a gentle pattern: K/D drifts down through the early morning, bottoms out at 08:00 (0.98), and climbs to its best around 22:00 (1.08). It would be easy to read that as “people play better in the evening”.

It isn't. The players online at 22:00 aren't the same people who are online at 10:00. Stronger players, the ones with a higher K/D in general, make up more of the evening and late-night queue. To remove that effect we compared each match with the same player's overall K/D. If someone averages 1.20 and goes 1.20 at 03:00, that hour counts as normal for them.

Measured that way the curve flattens out. Between midnight and 04:00, the hours people warn you about, players were within 1.8% of their usual K/D. Evening hours, where 22:00 alone had 2,638 matches, sit right on the line.

The morning dip

The one hour that stands out is 08:00: −4.0% against players' own average, with a 95% range of −6.9% to −0.8%. It's also the quietest hour of the day, with only 413 matches, about a sixth of the evening peak.

Treat it as a hint, not a rule. We tested 24 hours, and at that many one or two will land outside their range by chance. 01:00 (+1.8%) also did, in the other direction. Still, a morning game right after waking up, or at the end of an all-nighter, being a bit worse is not a surprising result.

Win rate tells the same story

Win rate by hour moved between 47% and 55%, lowest at 08:00 (47%) and highest late in the evening. It has the same cause as the K/D curve: who is in the queue changes more than how well anyone plays. The hourly table under each chart has the full numbers.

So when should you play?

• When you're fresh, not when the clock says so. The hour itself barely changes how people perform.
• If you want full lobbies, evenings from 18:00 to midnight CET hold most of the games. Here's the full activity heatmap.
• If you want to avoid someone, the time of day matters less than when their last match ended. Most players requeue within 15 minutes.

How we measured this

For each of the 359 players tracked with dodged.it we pulled their last 100 CS2 matches from the FACEIT Data API, with kills, deaths and the time the match finished. That's 35,051 matches; 82% are from the last three months, and quieter players' histories reach back further. Each match is counted in the hour it ended, in Central European time. K/D per hour is total kills divided by total deaths. The “own average” view compares kills in each hour with what each player's overall K/D predicts for the deaths they had. The 95% ranges come from resampling players, so one player with a big night can't move an hour on their own.