Looking at why the original six Avengers all survived a "random" 50/50 universal purge reveals how Doctor Strange actually beat Thanos in Infinity War.
Because Thanos is a fanatic obsessed with proving his ideology is "fair and dispassionate," he refused to manually pick and choose who died, leaving the Snap entirely to a blind cosmic probability wave (with the sole exception of Tony Stark, whose life he explicitly swore to spare in exchange for the Time Stone).
When Strange viewed 14,000,605 possible futures on Titan, he wasn't just looking at how they fought Thanos, he was looking at the randomized outcomes of the Snap across millions of different timestamps.
By stalling Thanos in combat for the exact right number of minutes before surrendering the Time Stone, Strange forced the Snap to occur at the one specific millisecond in history where the random 50/50 algorithm spared Tony, Steve, Thor, Bruce, Natasha, Clint, and Scott Lang simultaneously.
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