CS2 Glove Trade-Up: All 4 Pools Priced and What You Get Back (2026)

Short answer: every glove trade-up in CS2 loses money, and unlike knives, not one of them clears break-even even before selling fees. There are only four glove pools in the game, fed by eight cases, and the best of them is the Sealed Dead Hand Terminal at -6.2% expected return: $158.50 of inputs for a $148.67 average pull. The worst is the Glove Case and Operation Hydra pool at -68.9%, where you pay $1,140 to enter a pool with a $117.18 median. All prices below were read on 2 September 2026.

That last number is the one nobody writes about. The pool that holds the two most valuable gloves in Counter-Strike, Sport Gloves Hedge Maze at $2,128 and Sport Gloves Pandora’s Box at $1,889, is also the single worst recipe you can run. The gloves everyone wants sit behind the contract that punishes you hardest for wanting them.

How the glove trade-up actually works

You put in five Covert (red) weapon skins and you get back one pair of gloves, drawn at random from the rare-item pool of one of the collections you fed in. That is the whole mechanic. It arrived in the 22 October 2025 update, which is also the patch that crashed the skin market by making knives and gloves obtainable without a case key.

Three rules matter before you spend anything:

• Every case carries exactly one rare-item pool, and it is either knives or gloves, never both. If you feed in five Coverts from a knife case you cannot receive gloves, and vice versa. We priced all 45 containers for the knife version of this contract, and 23 of them are knife cases against 8 glove cases.
• Gloves have no StatTrak version, as covered in our CS2 gloves guide. Five StatTrak Coverts can produce a StatTrak knife. They cannot produce gloves, because no such item exists. CS.MONEY’s glove guide states the same restriction.
• The output is not tradable for seven days. It lands in your inventory locked, so you cannot flip a lucky pull the same evening.

The Counter-Strike Wiki gives the output float as f = x(y-z) + z, where x is the average float of your five inputs and y and z are the wear caps of the glove you happen to roll. Our trade-up contracts explainer describes the input normalisation slightly differently, and the two versions have not been reconciled. The practical consequence is identical either way and it is covered further down.

There are only four glove pools, not eight

Eight CS2 cases hold glove pools, but they share those pools between them, so there are only four distinct sets of outcomes. Feeding five Glove Case Coverts and feeding five Operation Hydra Coverts give you access to the exact same 24 gloves. We confirmed this by pulling both rare-item pools and diffing them item by item: identical names, identical count.

The pages currently ranking for this query describe three groups, not four. That is because the highest-ranking guide was published on 28 October 2025 and the Sealed Dead Hand Terminal did not exist until 11 March 2026. If you follow a guide written in the week after the patch, you will not know that a fourth pool exists, and it happens to be the only one worth considering.

Pool D is also the only pool with 22 gloves instead of 24. A one-in-22 roll is marginally better odds on any specific pair than one-in-24, which matters if you are chasing a particular finish rather than value.

What each pool costs and what it returns

Pool D, the Sealed Dead Hand Terminal, is the least bad glove recipe in CS2 at -6.2% before fees. Pool A, the Glove Case and Operation Hydra pool, is the worst at -68.9%. Nothing is positive.

Entry cost is five copies of the cheapest Covert available in any case that feeds the pool. Return is the mean floor price across every glove in that pool, since a rare-item roll is equally likely to land on any item in it.

Read the median column, not the average. Pool A’s $354.48 average is produced almost entirely by two items. Its median outcome is $117.18, which is roughly a tenth of what you paid to enter. You are not buying a 31-cents-on-the-dollar lottery ticket, you are buying a 10-cents-on-the-dollar ticket with an 8% chance of something better.

The 15% column applies Steam’s Community Market fee. Third-party marketplaces charge less, and our marketplace comparison covers who charges what, but no fee structure anywhere rescues a -26% contract.

Pool D: Sealed Dead Hand Terminal

This is the recipe to run if you are going to run one. Five Glock-18 Fully Tuned at $31.70 costs $158.50 and returns $148.67 on average, and six of the 22 possible gloves are worth more than you paid. That 27% hit rate is the best in the game for gloves.

The reason this pool reads better than the rest is the floor, not the ceiling. Its cheapest possible outcome is $64.00, which is 40% of your entry cost. In Pool A the cheapest outcome is 5% of entry. A tight pool with a high floor loses you less per contract than a wide pool with a fat tail, because you land on the floor far more often than you land on the tail.

The second-cheapest Covert in this container is AWP Queen’s Gambit at $33.46, so you have two viable input options if one runs dry on the market.

Pool C: Operation Broken Fang, Recoil and Snakebite

Second best, at -26.2%. Five AWP Chromatic Aberration at $23.84 costs $119.20 against an $87.98 average pull, and only four of 24 outcomes beat the entry cost. This is the pool most people actually run, because the inputs are cheap and available.

The prize is Sport Gloves Nocts at $417.00, followed by Driver Gloves Snow Leopard at $196.00. Below those the pool collapses fast: the bottom ten outcomes all sit between $34.95 and $50.71. Median outcome is $66.33, so a coin-flip result here hands back roughly 55 cents on the dollar.

One thing worth knowing about this pool: the three feeder cases price their Coverts within three dollars of each other. Recoil’s AWP Chromatic Aberration is $23.84, Snakebite’s USP-S The Traitor is $26.75, Broken Fang’s Glock-18 Neo-Noir is $26.80. Since they all land in the same pool, there is no reason to pay for the more expensive two. Mixing them changes nothing about your odds and costs you up to $15 across five inputs.

Pool B: Clutch and Revolution

Third, at -32.9%, and it holds the cheapest entry point in the game. Five AK-47 Head Shot at $22.24 costs $111.20, which is the lowest price of admission to any gold item contract in CS2. It returns $74.57 on average.

That cheap door is exactly the problem. AK-47 Head Shot was the cheapest Covert in the game when we swept all 45 containers on 1 September 2026, and a lot of players find it, notice it is red, and run the contract without checking what pool sits behind it. What sits behind it is 24 gloves with a $55.38 median, topping out at Sport Gloves Vice at $244.00 and bottoming out at Hydra Gloves Mangrove at $26.40. Roll the floor and you have turned $111.20 into $26.40.

Four outcomes beat the entry cost: Vice at $244.00, Sport Gloves Amphibious at $191.00, Hand Wraps Cobalt Skulls at $146.00 and Sport Gloves Omega at $125.00. Everything else is a loss, and eleven of the 24 are worth under $45.

Pool A: Glove Case and Operation Hydra, the expensive trap

Avoid this one. At -68.9% it is the worst of the four glove pools by a wide margin, and it costs seven times more to run than the next most expensive glove recipe. Only two of the 23 knife recipes we priced are worse, the Shadow Case at -74.1% and the CS:GO Weapon Case at -85.0%.

The arithmetic is ugly in a specific way. The pool contains the two best gloves in the game, but the cheapest Covert in either feeder case is M4A4 Buzz Kill at $228.00, so entry is $1,140.00. Both cases are long discontinued, the Glove Case from November 2016 and Operation Hydra from May 2017, and their Coverts have appreciated for nearly a decade while the gloves themselves have not kept pace. You are paying 2026 prices for 2016 inputs and rolling for 2016 outputs.

Twenty-two of the 24 outcomes return you less than you spent, and eighteen of them return you under a quarter of it. Two outcomes are wins. That is an 8.3% chance of profit on an $1,140 bet, and the profit when it lands is small: the best outcome in the pool pays back 1.87 times your stake, not 20 or 30 times it. Rare odds without a rare payout is the worst combination available.

If you specifically want Hedge Maze or Pandora’s Box, buy it. At $2,128 and $1,889 you would need to run this contract twelve times on average to see one, at a cost of $13,680.

Why the best gloves sit behind the worst recipe

Because the input price and the output price are set by different markets that stopped talking to each other.

Covert weapon skins from discontinued cases have been climbing since supply stopped, and they climbed again after October 2025 when the trade-up patch turned every Covert into a lottery ticket. Glove prices, meanwhile, took the same beating as knives in the crash and have not recovered. In Pool A those two forces point opposite ways: $228 inputs feeding a pool with a $117 median.

This is the reverse of what we found for knives. There, entry cost and quality of odds moved together: the six knife recipes with an entry cost under $135 averaged -35.4% while eight recipes in the $320 to $370 band averaged -3.9%, so paying more at the door bought better odds. For gloves that relationship inverts completely. The cheapest glove recipe, Pool B at $111.20, returns 67 cents on the dollar. The most expensive, Pool A at $1,140, returns 31 cents. Whatever intuition you carried over from knife crafting does not transfer.

Gloves or knives: which contract is less bad

Knives, by a clear margin at the top end and by almost nothing in the middle.

Exactly one knife recipe in CS2 has positive gross expected value: the Operation Phoenix Weapon Case at +2.7%, which goes to -12.7% once you pay a selling fee. No glove pool reaches break-even even before fees. The best glove recipe is -6.2% gross and -20.3% net, so the single best knife contract still beats the single best glove contract after fees, but only by about eight points.

Where gloves win is consistency. The knife side has two pools that are arithmetically incapable of profit, the Shadow Case and the CS:GO Weapon Case, where the most valuable possible outcome is worth less than the inputs. No glove pool is that broken. The worst glove pool at least has two winning outcomes in it. If a knife is what you are actually after, our guide to the cheapest way to get a CS2 knife covers the direct-buy route.

Float is the only lever you actually control

Buy low-float inputs and you get a low-float glove, which is worth more than the floor price this article quotes. That is the one real edge available, and it is a small one.

The output float is derived from the average float of your five inputs, so five Factory New Coverts produce a glove near the top of its wear range and five Battle-Scarred Coverts produce one near the bottom. Our float explainer covers how to read and check these values before you buy.

The catch is that low-float Coverts cost more, and the premium usually tracks the output premium closely enough that you are not buying an edge, you are buying a different point on the same losing curve. Every entry price quoted here is a floor price, which in practice means a worn copy, and every output price is a floor price too. That is a deliberate apples-to-apples comparison. Pay up for Factory New inputs and both sides of the equation move together.

Gloves also have unusually compressed wear ranges. Several pairs never appear in Factory New at all, so the top of the range is Minimal Wear or worse, which limits how much float shopping can move your result.

What happens if you mix collections

Mixing cases from different pools makes your outcome unpredictable, and there is no published formula for the split.

The Counter-Strike Wiki is explicit that the exact ratio when mixing collections is not known, only that it is assumed to correlate with how many inputs came from each collection. So three Revolution Coverts plus two Recoil Coverts probably weights toward Pool B, but nobody outside Valve can tell you by how much. If you are running these contracts for value, keep all five inputs inside one pool so you at least know which 22 or 24 items you are rolling against.

Mixing inside a pool is free. Glove Case and Operation Hydra Coverts are interchangeable inputs because they lead to the same 24 gloves, so buy whichever is cheaper on the day.

What to do instead

Buy the gloves. Every pool here loses between 6% and 69% of what you put in, and the pair you want is sitting on a marketplace right now at a known price with no seven-day lock on it. Buy it from a source you have checked, because this corner of the market carries real scam risk.

The case for running a contract anyway is not financial. It is that opening one is entertainment, and if you are going to spend $158 on entertainment then Pool D is the version that hands back the most on average. Treat it the way you would treat opening cases, which is worse value again, rather than as an investment. Our post on skins as an investment predates the October 2025 crash and should be read with that in mind.

If you do want to buy directly, where you buy matters more than what you pay, and the spread between marketplaces on a $150 pair of gloves is often larger than the difference between two of these recipes. When you sell, the fee and payout structure is what determines your actual take.

How we priced this

Every number here was read from csgoskins.gg on 2 September 2026, using the container page for input prices and the rare-item pool page for glove prices. We pulled all eight glove containers, both sides, in a single pass.

Entry cost is five copies of the cheapest Covert in the cheapest feeder case for that pool. Expected return is the unweighted mean of the floor price of every glove in the pool, since the rare-item roll is uniform across the pool. We report the median alongside it because three of the four pools are heavily skewed by one or two items, and the mean on its own overstates what you should expect.

Prices moved measurably during the sweep itself. Refetching the Pool C list a few minutes apart returned the same 24 gloves with every price down between 0.1% and 2%. Treat every figure here as a snapshot, not a constant, and recheck before you commit real money. The reason one skin has several different prices is worth understanding before you compare our numbers against another site’s.

Doppler phases, which made 12 knife containers impossible to average honestly, are not a problem here. No glove has phase variants, so all four pools here are clean uniform draws.

Frequently asked questions