Every tic tac toe strategy guide tells you the same thing. Take the centre. It is the best square on the board. It sits on four winning lines. Take it first and you have the advantage.

The data from 50,008 real online games played on TicToe.org tells a more complicated story.

The opening move heatmap

We tracked which square the first player chose on their opening move across 50,008 online multiplayer games, then calculated the win rate for that player from each starting position. Here is what the numbers show.

Win / loss / draw rate by opening square · 50,008 online games · first player
W/L/D rate by opening square from 50,008 online multiplayer games on TicToe.org. The centre draws 64% of the time — far higher than any other square.

The centre square is the most popular opening by a wide margin, chosen in 16,090 of the 50,008 games. It is also the one with the lowest win rate at 18%.

Why does the centre have the lowest win rate?

This is the most counterintuitive finding and worth explaining properly.

The centre is genuinely the strongest square strategically. It is involved in more winning lines than any other square. Every serious strategy guide recommends it. Our own guide says the same thing.

But that is exactly the problem. Because everyone knows to take the centre, centre openers disproportionately face opponents who also know the strategy, play defensively, block the fork setups, and force draws. The draw rate tells the story clearly: the centre draws 64% of the time, compared to 42–47% for every other square. A win rate of 18% does not mean the centre is a bad opening. It means centre openers are more likely to be playing against someone who knows what they are doing, which drives the game toward draws rather than wins.

The corners and edges tell the opposite story. Bot-right has the highest win rate at 29% from 5,231 games, a sample large enough to treat with confidence. Top-mid, top-right, mid-left, and bot-left all land at 27%. These openings are chosen far less often, which means the opponent is slightly less likely to know the correct defensive response and slightly more likely to make a mistake that can be converted into a win. Accordingly, their draw rates are lower — corners and edges draw between 42% and 47%, leaving more room for decisive outcomes in both directions.

This is not a reason to stop taking the centre. It is a reason to understand what a win rate actually measures. In a game where the correct outcome with perfect play is a draw, a high draw rate is a sign of strong play on both sides — not a weakness in the opening.

What this means practically

If you go first, the centre remains the highest-percentage choice for setting up winning positions, even if the win rate data looks counterintuitive. The centre's 18% win rate reflects the quality of opposition it attracts, not a weakness in the opening itself. If you want to maximise your win rate specifically, bot-right at 29% from 5,231 games is worth experimenting with.

We looked at the first-mover advantage separately with a larger dataset of 26,776 games. The findings are striking. Read the full first-mover advantage analysis →

Want to see how these strategies play out in practice? You can now play against a simulation of the average tictoe.org player — a bot built directly from the game data described in this article, weighted by how real players actually move. Or try the Hard mode AI, which uses the minimax algorithm to play a mathematically perfect game.

For the Hard mode equivalent of this analysis — how real players actually do against a perfect opponent — see How not to lose to a perfect tic tac toe AI, based on 727 games against Hard mode.

About this data

All figures are drawn from completed online multiplayer games played on TicToe.org. Only games played through to a result are included. Abandoned or disconnected games are not counted. The dataset covers 50,008 completed games.

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