Best brawlers for Think Ahead in Knockout

Brawler ranking on Think Ahead

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

🥇Wendy

+0.3 pp79.7%🥈Bolt

+0.5 pp74.7%🥉Ruffs

-0.3 pp69.6%4Byron

+0.2 pp66.1%5Nori

-12.6 pp65.6%6Pam

-1.3 pp65.1%7Buster

+0.1 pp64.7%8Cordelius

-4.8 pp63.6%9Piper

-3.8 pp63.4%10Nani

-5.8 pp63.2%

What the data says about Think Ahead

Think Ahead is one of the Knockout maps with the most recorded battles in our sample: 1,272 high-level games over the last 14 days, with 88 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 1,272 battles in the 14-day window spread that sample across 88 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 Think Ahead is Wendy, with a 79.7% win rate across 93 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.

Wendy performs here practically the same as on the rest of the Knockout maps: it is a consistent pick, the kind that does not depend on a particular rotation showing up. In draft that is worth a lot, because you can commit to it before knowing which map is coming.

The second option is Bolt, with 74.7% across 53 battles, 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.

Ruffs closes the podium at 69.6%. Having three clear options instead of just one makes Think Ahead a comfortable map to draft on: if the first one gets banned, you are not left without a plan.

The most picked brawler on Think Ahead is not necessarily the best: it is Wendy, present in 93 battles, 7.3% 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.

Think Ahead is a polarised map: there are 28.6 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 Think Ahead

Bonnie15 battles51.1%Moe13 battles53.5%Charlie14 battles54.5%

The worst record on the map belongs to Bonnie, who stays at a 51.1% win rate across 15 battles on Think Ahead. 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 Moe at 53.5%, 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 Think Ahead 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 Think Ahead order with that caution in mind.

Think Ahead 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 Think Ahead 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.