With their eyes full of hope and storage full of Pokémon to trade, Silph Researchers have hit the road to discover just how lucky this Lunar New Year Event will be! During last year’s Lunar New Year Event our Researchers found that lucky trade odds were roughly 9%, nearly double the usual 5% rate. Speculation was that these same lucky odds would return this year, but the data we’ve accumulated thus far tell a very different story…

Data

In the first 24 hours of the event, our Researchers completed 1,413 trades in which both Pokémon were less than one year old, with 72 of these trades becoming lucky. This is a rate of 5.1%, with a 99% confidence interval of 3.7% to 6.7%.

Controls

Investigating rare events can be subject to bias if researchers are more excited to report rare events than uneventful samples. However, this same group of researchers collected data on over 15,000 trades between November and the start of the event, and found a lucky rate of 5.07% (99% CI of 4.62 – 5.54%).

Conclusions

While it is possible that this year’s Lunar New Year Event rates are not as high as last year’s, these data strongly suggest that lucky trade odds have not been boosted for the 2020 Lunar New Year Event. Our results effectively rule out a lucky trade rate for this year’s event as high as 9%, at a likelihood of roughly 1 in 107. It is unclear if these lucky odds are intended. Note that these data are limited to trades between two Pokémon caught less than one year ago, so we cannot rule out an increased lucky rate for older Pokémon.

It is therefore our recommendation to delay completing trades with valuable Pokémon for a few days to see if the issue will be resolved. Thanks for tuning in, travelers.