Opening Duels

At some point in every round of every match in Valorant, a gunfight will occur between opposing players. The first decisive gunfight (one in which a player dies) in each round is known as the opening duel. Suppose the first combat action of a round is Player A killing Player B. Then, Player A earns a First Blood (FB) and Player B is given a First Death (FD). Exactly one FB and one FD is given in each round.

Naturally, the opening duel of a Valorant round is considered an extremely important event. Which its significance varies depending on the result (whether the attacker or defender wins the duel and/or whether the killer is traded), a team will always hope to get that first kill and create a 5v4 situation. But let's dive deeper into the data and see just how important it is.

First, we'll go through some summary statistics. The term success rate will be used to refer to the proportion of opening duels won by a given team.

Across 547 matches played, the team boasts a 48.99% win rate and 50.06% success rate. The team's success rate in wins is 56.22% versus 44.01% in losses. The team finished with a positive success rate in 259 games (47.35% of games), a negative success rate in 251 games (45.89% of games), and an even success rate in 37 games (6.76% of games).

In games with a positive success rate, the team has a win percentage of 74.13%. In games with a negative success rate, the team has a win percentage of 26.10%. And in games with an even success rate, the team has a win percentage of 28.38%. Overall, the more successful team in opening duels wins 74.02% of games.

We can get more granular by splitting this analysis by map. After all, it's not hard to imagine the opening duel being more important in one map than another. Or that our team may be more successful in opening duels on some maps. Let's take a peek.

At the time of this writing, the team clearly has a high win percentage on the maps that they perform best in opening duels. There is some variance in how often the team that wins more opening duels wins the match, but it's not clear how much of this is just noise. In general, it does seem to hover between 70 and 80 percent.

Another way to assess the importance of the opening duel is through a visualization. The heat map below shows the team's first bloods on the x-axis and first deaths on the y-axis along with color scales for win percentage and match frequency.

While there are some outliers, there are clear "green" and "red" regions when using a color scale on win percentage. It stands to reason that winning more opening duels generally leads to success. Those outliers (matches where a lopsided opening duel success rate does not determine the match outcome) can be found in the raw data below.

Next, we'll take look at the data of individual players. Along with their success rate in opening duels, we will consider their aggression, or the percentage of rounds in which they participated in the opening duel (whether they won it or not).

A necessary caveat here is that a player's role matters. We would obviously expect an entry fragger to be more aggressive than someone playing smokes. Here's the average aggression and success rate of each role.