Best brawlers for Opening Move in Knockout

Brawler ranking on Opening Move

Bayesian-adjusted win rate. The points column compares each brawler against itself on the rest of the Knockout maps.

🥇Nani

+8.3 pp77.3%🥈Nori

-1.4 pp76.8%🥉Leon

+4.4 pp76.6%4Ruffs

+3.9 pp73.8%5Gus

+0.5 pp71.3%6Juju

-3.8 pp70%7R-T

-8.2 pp69.8%8Sprout

+2.7 pp69.7%9Angelo

+1.7 pp68.6%10Najia

-5 pp67.7%

What the data says about Opening Move

Opening Move is one of the Knockout maps with the most recorded battles in our sample: 1,340 high-level games over the last 14 days, with 86 different brawlers seen on it. This page ranks those brawlers by their real win rate on this specific map, not by their average performance across the game, which is the figure that usually leads to bad picks.

The 1,340 battles in the 14-day window spread that sample across 86 brawlers, so the top of the ranking is backed by dozens of games each rather than by a handful of isolated cases. Every row shows its own count so you can judge how reliable the figure is without leaving the page.

The best picks on this map

The best brawler on Opening Move is Nani, with a 77.3% win rate across 36 battles recorded on this map. It is the first option to consider when this rotation comes around, and also the pick most worth banning or countering if the enemy team gets there first.

What is interesting about Nani here is not the absolute number but the gap: across the rest of the Knockout maps it sits at 69%, so Opening Move adds 8.3 percentage points. That jump is the sign that the map specifically favours its kit, not that it is a strong brawler in general.

The second option is Nori, with 76.8% across 52 battles, 0.5 points behind the leader. When the distance between the first and second pick is that short, the choice depends more on the enemy composition and on the rest of your team than on the map itself.

Leon closes the podium at 76.6%. Having three clear options instead of just one makes Opening Move a comfortable map to draft on: if the first one gets banned, you are not left without a plan.

The most picked brawler on Opening Move is not necessarily the best: it is Wendy, present in 420 battles, 31.3% of every game recorded on the map. The distance between what is most picked and what actually works is usually where the edge is, because most players repeat a pick out of habit rather than out of data.

Opening Move is a polarised map: there are 29.7 percentage points between the best and the worst brawler in the ranking. On a map like this the draft matters more than mechanics, and bringing a pick from the bottom of the table is giving away an advantage before the game starts.

Brawlers that perform worse on Opening Move

Pierce12 battles47.6%Mina13 battles48.8%Gray14 battles52.3%

The worst record on the map belongs to Pierce, who stays at a 47.6% win rate across 12 battles on Opening Move. It is not a bad brawler: this ground neutralises what it usually excels at, so there are better options almost every time.

Just above it comes Mina at 48.8%, so it is worth keeping on the radar too before confirming your pick.

These bottom placements are as useful as the top ones: knowing what not to bring to Opening Move avoids more losses than nailing the best pick, especially in Knockout, where a bad selection is paid for across the whole game and not just in the first fight.

How Knockout is played

In Knockout there is no respawn: every death is final within the round, so the value of information and of the first shot goes through the roof. Brawlers with long range and with tools to reveal positions dominate, and risking a badly judged push costs the whole round. Read the Opening Move order with that caution in mind.

Opening Move rotates in and out of the official Knockout rotation every few days. This page does not depend on it being active right now: the ranking is computed over recent history, so it remains the best reference available the day the map shows up again.

Every percentage comes from real high-level battles sampled continuously, aggregated over a rolling 14-day window and adjusted with Bayesian smoothing. That adjustment avoids the classic false positive: a brawler with three games and three wins does not show up at 100%, but close to the average, until it builds up the sample to back it.

If you want to compare Opening Move with the rest of the Knockout maps, the links are at the bottom of the page. And if what you are after is what to pick in today's rotation, the picks page filters the maps that are active right now.