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How FACEIT ELO is calculated: gains, losses and the elo calculator

Why you got +18 one game and +31 the next, what decides your ELO change, and how to see the stake before the match starts.

By begi ·

Two wins in a row, and one gave you +18 while the other gave +31. That isn’t a bug. FACEIT ELO is built on expected results: the more surprising your win, the more you get for it.

The core idea

Before every match, FACEIT compares the two teams’ average ELO and works out how likely each side is to win. Then:

  • Win as the favourite and you gain less, because you were supposed to win.
  • Win as the underdog and you gain more, because you beat the odds.
  • Lose as the favourite and you lose more.
  • Lose as the underdog and you lose less.

When the teams are evenly matched, a match is worth about ±25. The further apart the teams are, the more lopsided the stake gets.

A simple ELO calculator

You can estimate the stake yourself with the classic ELO formula:

  1. Take the ELO difference: your team’s average − their team’s average.
  2. Your win chance is 1 / (1 + 10^(−difference / 400)).
  3. Win gain ≈ 50 × (1 − win chance). Loss ≈ 50 × win chance.

Example: your team averages 1,640 and theirs 1,680. The difference is −40, so your win chance is about 44%. You’d gain around +28 for a win and lose around −22 for a loss.

You don’t need to do this by hand. Prefire shows the exact stake on both team bars in every match room, for example +26 / −25, along with its own win chance, which also counts recent form and map history.

Do you lose ELO for dodging or leaving?

  • Leaving or going AFK in a live match costs ELO and can earn a cooldown or ban. FACEIT treats it as a loss and more.
  • Not accepting a found match doesn’t cost ELO, but repeated declines can earn a short queue cooldown. That’s one reason auto-accept is popular.

Why your ELO feels stuck

If you win and lose at almost exactly 50%, the gains and losses cancel out and you’ll hover around the same number for weeks. The fix isn’t the formula. It’s nudging your win rate up a few percent: better map choices, better servers and fewer tilted games.

Prefire puts the stake, the win chance and the map matchup in front of you before every match, so you know which games really matter.

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