CS2 Knife Trade Up Guide

Short answer: a CS2 knife trade up turns five Covert (red) skins into one knife or pair of gloves from the rare pool of one of your inputs' cases. All five must be StatTrak or all normal. Five StatTrak Coverts always give a StatTrak knife. You can't pick the exact knife, only the cases whose pools you draw from.

How the knife trade up works

Put five Covert skins into a trade up contract and you get one knife or pair of gloves. Before October 2025 Covert was the top of the ladder: the only way to get a knife was to unbox one (about a 0.26% chance per case) or buy one.

The key rule: the result comes from the rare "gold" pool of the case your Covert skin belongs to. The full list of cases and their knife pools shows what each case can give. A Covert from a case whose rare pool is, say, the Chroma-finish Bayonet, Flip Knife, Gut Knife, Karambit and M9 Bayonet can only give one of those. A Covert from a glove case can only give gloves. Covert skins from collections without a knife or glove pool, such as the map, operation and Armory collections on our collections list, don't work in this contract.

StatTrak: five StatTrak Coverts give a StatTrak knife. Gloves have no StatTrak version, so a StatTrak contract can't give gloves, and StatTrak Coverts from glove cases can't be used in this contract at all.

Knife trade up odds

Valve doesn't publish the exact odds. Calculators and most guides use the same model as for normal trade ups: each input is a ticket for its own case's pool, and each item in that pool shares the case's share equally:

Rare pools are big. One case can hold several knife types, each in many finishes. With all five inputs from one case, one specific finish is about 7.7% in a 13-item pool (Operation Breakout: one knife, the vanilla version plus 12 finishes), 3.3% in a 30-item pool (Chroma 2: five knives, six finishes each) and 1.9% in a 52-item pool (Fracture: four knives, 13 versions each). That is why the average value of the whole pool matters far more than the one knife you hope to hit.

Worked example: mixing two cases

Say you use three Coverts from the Kilowatt Case (AK-47 | Inheritance or AWP | Chrome Cannon) and two from the Operation Breakout Weapon Case (P90 | Asiimov or M4A1-S | Cyrex). The Kilowatt pool is 13 Kukri Knife items; the Breakout pool is 13 Butterfly Knife items.

• Any Kukri Knife: 3/5 = 60%, so each Kukri finish is 60% ÷ 13 ≈ 4.6%
• Any Butterfly Knife: 2/5 = 40%, so each Butterfly finish (Fade, Slaughter, Crimson Web ...) is 40% ÷ 13 ≈ 3.1%

Swap one Kilowatt input for a Breakout one and the split becomes 40% / 60%. This is how you steer a contract toward the pool you want. Each extra input from the better pool costs whatever that case's Coverts cost.

Kilowatt Case prices right now

Lowest listing across up to 11 marketplaces in the CS2TradeUp.gg price feed, without StatTrak or Souvenir, checked on 2026-11-11. Prices change every day, so open a skin for live prices.

Why the pool average is everything

Knife finishes vary enormously in price. In the same pool, a Doppler or Fade can be worth many times a Safari Mesh, Boreal Forest or Scorched version of the same knife. A trade up aimed at a Karambit can easily land on a cheap finish of a less popular knife.

1. List every item in the pool of each case you're using.
2. Price each item at the wear it will realistically come out at.
3. Weight by probability to get the expected value (EV).
4. Compare EV (after selling fees) with the cost of your five Covert inputs.

Since the update, demand for Covert skins as knife-trade-up fuel has pushed their prices up. Knife and glove prices fell at the same time. Many "obvious" contracts are now roughly break-even, and good ones come and go as prices move.

Float in knife trade ups

The output float follows the same idea as normal trade ups. The average of your inputs' normalized floats is mapped onto the knife finish's own float range. Low-float Coverts cost more but push the knife toward Factory New or Minimal Wear, which can be worth a lot more. Some finishes (Doppler, Fade, Marble Fade) only exist in the low wear tiers anyway. Details: trade up float guide.

One set of inputs gives a different wear on every finish. With an average normalized float of 0.20 (for example M4A1-S | Cyrex at 0.10, whose range is 0.00–0.50), the Breakout pool gives:

• Butterfly Knife | Fade (0.00–0.08): 0.016, Factory New
• Butterfly Knife | Slaughter (0.01–0.26): 0.060, Factory New
• Butterfly Knife | Crimson Web (0.06–0.80): 0.208, Field-Tested

Finding the cheapest knife trade up

• Start from cheap Covert skins in cases that do have a knife or glove pool. Cases opened in very large numbers usually have the cheapest Coverts; check prices rather than case age.
• Look at the pool floor, not the ceiling. A pool where even the worst result is worth close to your input cost is safer than one with a jackpot and lots of duds.
• Mixing cases changes your odds between the two pools. You can use it to steer toward the better pool.
• Use Field-Tested/Well-Worn inputs when the knife finishes you're targeting don't gain much from low wear. Pay for low float only when it moves the result into a pricier wear tier.

How to do a knife trade up

1. Pick the case pools. Check which knives or gloves each case holds on its case page, and skip Coverts from map, operation-reward (such as Cobblestone) and Armory collections: they have no pool.
2. Price the whole pool, at the wear each finish will come out at, and compare the expected value with the cost of five inputs.
3. Buy five Coverts, all StatTrak or all normal. Skins received in a trade can't go into a contract until their 7-day trade protection ends.
4. Open the Trade Up Contract from your inventory, add the five Coverts, check them, then sign and submit.

Common mistakes

• Using StatTrak Coverts from a glove case. They can't be used, because there are no StatTrak gloves.
• Pricing only the knife you want. In a 30-item pool your dream finish is a 1-in-30 shot even with all five inputs from that case.
• Ignoring float on wide-range finishes. Fade and Doppler come out low either way, but Crimson Web, Safari Mesh and similar finishes can land in Field-Tested or worse.
• Mixing in one Covert from a glove case when you want a knife. It gives a 20% chance at gloves instead.

Things to keep in mind

• Positive EV is an average over many contracts. On a single contract you'll usually get a mid- or low-value result.
• Knife and Covert prices are volatile, and big updates can move them sharply.
• Only spend what you can afford to lose. A trade up is a random outcome, like opening a case.

Frequently asked questions