The Traitors: Who will win?
Contains some spoilers for previous Traitor seasons
Would you rather be a faithful or a traitor? At the start of each season, Claudia Winkleman asks each player this question. Some say Traitor, either to have more control or just because it’s fun. Others say Faithful to hunt down Traitors, or because they are just bad liars. Each season gives us many psychological tactics, alliances, and betrayals. A common theme is the group of Faithfuls clutching at wild theories to banish a traitor, whilst each night one of them is murdered by the traitors and removed from the game.
Typically, Traitors must make it to the end of the game without being detected, and if they do, they take the prize. The Faithfuls win if they banish all traitors before the end, and then they split the prize.
This leads to an interesting dilemma: Is there an advantage to being a traitor or faithful? Who is more likely to win? The traitors have a lot more power within the game, but one slip-up could mean the Faithfuls, or even fellow traitors, voting you out.
Given the rise in popularity and multiple seasons around the world, we have a fair amount of data to understand who has the real advantage.
In total, there have been over 60 completed seasons of The Traitors. As the UK’s fourth season finishes this week, gathering data from each season can give us insight into who has the best odds to win.
The first question that comes to mind: Who are more likely to win, Traitors or Faithfuls?
There are two seasons that are a bit odd, the first ever season (Netherlands Season 1) had a faithful and traitor win, classed as ‘Shared’. Another season, Australia season 2, had 3 traitors in the final, but they chose to steal, so there was no winner, which is classed here as a ‘Traitor win’.
From the 64 seasons collected here, the Traitors win nearly 60% of the time. There is a clear advantage, especially when you take into account that at the start of each season, only a few traitors are chosen and are outnumbered by faithfuls.
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Each season can have a different number of starting traitors; perhaps this has an effect on the outcome:
The most common number of starting traitors is 3, with less frequent scenarios of 2 or 4. Proportionally, a pattern can be seen, although in a fairly low sample size, to be certain.
There is another factor to consider over the course of the game. Traitors can be found out and banished by a vote. When this occurs, the Traitors get a choice to recruit a faithful to become a traitor. So, given all the seasons, what type of traitor is more likely to win?:
Here, the “mixed” category is Traitors with original and recruited (and 1st season Traitor and Faithful anomaly). This also shows the role that won, not the final count of winners.
Traitors (Original, Recruit, Mixed) have more wins overall, but Original Traitors take the majority. This could be because recruiting a Traitor may not happen in every season, so there is not always an opportunity to win. We can view the number of recruited against the number of starting traitors to see if there is a particular advantage for either group.
The most common number of Original and Recruited Traitors is 3 and 1, respectively, which has a clear Traitor win advantage. Interestingly, the next most frequent is 3 Original and 2 Recruited, which has an even split of Faithful/Traitor wins. In this case, it’s likely the Faithfuls are good at banishing, and so the Traitors require more recruitment. The same can be seen for seasons with 2 original traitors, with more Faithful wins seen proportionally.
So what are the chances of winning depending on the original role? If we were to look at the average mean probability of winning based on the starting role, Faithfuls 7% vs Traitors 26% chance. That is more than 3 times more likely that Traitors will win.
For the current season on BBC, there are no recruited traitors (yet), and of the four original traitors, only 2 remain. It’s likely that at least one of the traitors wins.
My money is on Rachel, but anything can happen in this game!
