The share of bets on eSports is steadily growing from year to year for all bookmakers. This type of entertainment has become incredibly popular all over the world, and the prize funds of some cyber tournaments (primarily The International in Dota 2) exceed many sports tournaments.
How eSports betting works
Bookmakers offer a wide range of eSports bets. Among the disciplines: Dota 2, CS:GO, League of Legends, FIFA, PES, PUBG, Fortnite, Overwatch, Valorant and many others.
Despite the large selection, there are three main disciplines in bookmaker lines: Dota 2, CS:GO and League of Legends. These games host a lot of tournaments with solid prize funds. For example, in 2021, 40 million dollars were raffled off at The International Dota 2 tournament, of which the winner, the Russian Team Spirit, took 18 million!
Esports betting has its own features and advantages:
- the complexity of bookmakers when setting odds. To draw up a line, betting shops keep entire staffs of analysts, in which there is not always a specialist in cyber games. Often different bookmakers offer completely different odds for the same event. This is what an experienced bettor can use. If he is well versed in esports;
- convenience of analysis. For example, in Dota, you can see the game through the eyes of any gamer using the Dota TV tool, and numerous broadcasts are also available on streaming sites like Twitch;
- good selection of events. Every day there are more and more cyber disciplines, tournaments and matches in the lines.
The most common types of eSports betting
Most bookmakers only offer lines on major disciplines such as Dota 2, League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Most of the esports events take place in the FIFA simulator – hundreds of fights are played every day at various levels, from regional to global. In addition to the main outcomes (the victory of one of the opponents), you can bet on team odds, card totals, on the statistics of individual players, there are also a lot of special bets that are offered only in a specific discipline (for example, who will be the first to kill Roshan in Dota 2).
Long-term and special rates
There are a large number of special bets in esports. Since the discipline is different from ordinary sports, some markets in it can cause frank surprise for a novice bettor. Below we list the most interesting special bets on eSports:
Betting on Roshan (Dota 2). Roshan is a neutral and the most powerful monster, for killing which the team receives additional gold, experience and a special artifact that gives its owner a second life for the next 5 minutes. Usually bookmakers offer to bet on the team that will kill Roshan first; by the number of Roshan’s deaths per map or by the time of his first kill.
Betting on a courier (Dota 2). Very similar to the previous category, only here the object is a courier. The list in this market is usually limited to the team that will kill the enemy chicken first, and the total number of couriers’ deaths.Also, different bookmakers can offer bets on whether Divine rapier (one of the strongest artifacts in the game that increases character damage) will be acquired, whether one of the players will have a Godlike streak (a series of 9 or more kills without death) and even on individual players (for example, how many times a particular player per card will die).
As for special bets on CS:GO, everything is a bit simpler here. There are no such number of special bets, but there are always interesting options:
- on the winner of the pistol rounds on the map;
- the first kill (killing an opponent’s character) in a particular round;
- whether the murder will be committed with a knife;
- one of the players will also make an ace (killing all five opponents) in the round, etc.
Long-term eSports bets are placed before the start of the tournament. In another way they are called outrights. Most often, bookmakers offer to bet on the winner of the competition or on the team’s progress to a certain stage (playoffs, semifinals, finals).
