How to actually win at PUBG

The most common mistake people make in PUBG is to assume getting kills increases your chance of winning. It really doesn't.

The intuition that getting kills is a good idea for winning, is a relic from traditional shooters. In deathmatch, getting kills increases your score. In esports like CS, getting kills greatly increases your team's chance of winning the game.

But in a battle royale game where the objective is to be the last person standing among 100 people, getting into a firefight is a losing situation for all parties involved, even the survivors. Whether you are reducing the player population from 50 to 49, or from 4 to 3, it is not a good thing that everyone around you is now aware of your presence due to fired shots. Instead of killing them yourself, it would be better to let someone else kill them. In a perfect ideal play, you'd get literally 1 kill: The 2nd-to-last person other than yourself. (In practice, of course one will have a few forced encounters and have to kill some people out of self-defense).

My current strategy is called the "early-bird camper". It has consistently landed me in #2 or #1 in one-man-squad and solo modes: Each phase, run into a building near the center of the safe zone circle as early as possible. Being early minimizes my chance of encountering someone already there. Being near the center minimizes my chance of having to move during the next phase (in terms of math, a circle within a circle is much more likely to include the center than an edge, and depending on the relative sizes of the circles, it could even be guaranteed to include the center).

Granted this assumes you are actually playing to win. Many players have stressed that they enjoy running around and racking up kills in PUBG as their preferred way of playing and thus aren't all that focused about getting the Chicken Dinner victory. But if you want the Chicken Dinner, being a cowardly camper is the way.

P.S.

I recently stumbled across an article on medium which contains a lot of data about what kind of behaviors are most likely to result in victory. As you can see from my responses to that article, I'm really happy about how much data is available for us to analyze, but I believe two of the author's interpretations of the data is flawed.

• First, there is a finding that higher # of kills is strongly correlated with longer survival times. But the causation is reversed, because people who survive longer are more likely to encounter more people, even if everyone is using the same avoidance strategy. This is a typical example of survivorship bias. 
• Another criticism I had is the article's conclusion that being a total camper is a losing strategy, because the distance traveled was positively correlated with amount of time surviving. Again, there is an obvious survivorship bias at play, because the people who survive longer are obviously going to have greater travel distances than people who died early (in fact my "early bird camper" strategy would've been measured as "high travel distance" even though I'm being a camper)