October 2026 · currently reading
The Most Dangerous Games
A secret competition. 100 players. $1 billion. Are you the One?
MrBeast and James Patterson
HarperCollins · 480 pp
The Curve
69%
Past halfway
127 readersstill counting
Bring someone
Pass the figure on.
It travels better than a review, because it is not one. Send it to somebody who had an opinion about this book and never opened it.
“127 of us read The Most Dangerous Games at The Ironic Book Club and got 69% of the way through, on average. The one book statistic nobody else publishes:”
The selection note
A thriller about a competition, written by the world's largest maker of competitions and the world's most published novelist, released alongside an actual competition. We are not going to pretend we can resist that. Whether it is any good is a separate question, and one we would like you to answer rather than us.
Where everybody stopped
- 127
- Readers logged
- 85%
- Still going at halfway
- 330
- Median page
- 16%
- Finished it
of 480
The biggest single fall was between 70% and 80% — around page 336.
What it was made of
Pages
Roughly nine days at fifty pages a day, which is more than most book clubs manage in a month.
480
Credited authors
2
Prize money in the plot
$1,000,000,000
Prize money in real life
A tie-in contest with weekly clues drawn from the book.
$1,000,000
Days the competition began before the book did
Contest launched 17 July 2026. Publication 1 September 2026.
46
Reported pre-orders
As reported by The Hollywood Reporter three weeks before publication.
Four digits
Debut position, New York Times bestseller list
Both of the two rows above are true. We find that the most interesting fact about modern publishing we have read all year.
No. 3
What we guessed, and what it was
How many chapters are there?
How many times does the word “suddenly” appear?
On what page does the competition actually begin?
How many chapters end on a single-line cliffhanger?
Still worth reading it yourself
Where
What it is
What they get
We get
Your local library
Free, and the authors are still paid per borrow. There is no catch here.
Free
They getA loan recorded against the authors under Public Lending Right
We getNothing
Your actual local bookshop
Walk in and ask. They will order it by Tuesday.
The high street
They getAll of it
We getNothing
Bookshop.org UK
The rare link where the good option and the lucrative option are the same option. We would love to claim credit for that.
Independent
They getA matching 10% into the independent bookshop pool
We get10%
Hive
Online, and an independent shop still gets paid. Name one at the checkout.
Independent
They getA cut to an independent bookshop you choose
We getNothing
Waterstones
Click and collect from the one on your high street, if it is still there.
A chain of bookshops
They getA chain, but a chain of bookshops
We getNothing
Blackwell's
Oxford's own. Reliably has the odd edition the others do not.
A chain of bookshops
They getFree UK delivery, since 1879
We getNothing
Kobo
Log the page your reader shows and the last page of your edition. The figure copes.
Ebook
They getAn ebook, readable on anything that is not a Kindle
We getNothing
Audible
An audiobook. Log where you stopped in hours; the Curve counts those too.
Audiobook
They getThe rest, to Amazon, by another door
We getNothing
World of Books
Second-hand. Nobody involved in publishing it earns a penny.
Second-hand
They getA second-hand copy stays out of a skip
We getNothing
AbeBooks
Second-hand, from an actual bookseller. Owned by Amazon, which it would rather you did not dwell on.
Second-hand
They getA second-hand bookseller somewhere in the country
We getNothing
eBay
Second-hand, from somebody who already stopped on a page. There is a joke in there.
Second-hand
They getWhoever finished it, or gave up on it
We getNothing
Amazon
Listed because pretending you have not considered it would be silly.
The big one
They getThe rest, to the second-largest company on earth
We getUp to 4.5%