Everything you need to know about Esports betting

Everything you need to know about Esports betting

Published Date · May 15, 2020 · Last Updated · Dec. 14, 2022 ·Read Time · 3 mins

Despite it being a new part of the gambling industry, esports gambling has seen a massive surge in demand over the last few years. The esports betting industry is estimated to be worth £13.9 billion by the end of 2020. This is a huge number and could even reach higher than this estimate, given that regular sport is currently suspended.

You can tell that esports betting is growing, with instances such as Argyll Entertainment Ag having been acquired by the Maltese-licensed online gambling firm Esports Entertainment Group. We believe this could be the first of many acquisitions of this kind. 

What is Esports?

The first place to start is defining what exactly Esports are. Esports put simply is competitive video game playing. Esports is just the abbreviated version of the Electronic sports.

What is Esports Betting?

Now we have a clear definition of what esports is, we can now look into esports betting.

The term competitive gaming has been a thing ever since the days of Pong and isn’t exactly a new invention. However, gamblers and gambling providers have only recently turned their eyes to the video game world.

Nowadays there is some serious money to be won if you are an upper-echelon player at a particular video game, whether it be Fortnite or PUBG, League of Legends or Dota 2, with prize money running into tens of millions of US Dollars. In this day and age, you can choose from hundreds of esports and casino betting apps to gamble on the go, anywhere at any time.

Esports attracts a huge viewer base, for example, the finale of the 2017 IEM World Championship in Katowice, Poland had a live audience of 173,000 which is more than double the attendance of last year’s Superbowl. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg, as millions of fans are watching esports tournaments around the world on streaming platforms such as Twitch and YouTube. These fans are betting on these tournaments that include games such as Counter-Striker GO, Dota 2, Call Of Duty, League of Legends and many, many others.

Esports Genres

Now we will break down the genres of esports games.

First-person shooters (FPS): named after the view that the players have when they play the game, these are combat games which can be played as an individual or as a team. The most popular ones are Counter-Strike Global offensive, HALO and Call of Duty.

Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA): These are team battle games which pit two teams against each other. Some of the most popular MOBA’s are DOTA 2 and League of Legends.

Sports: This is very much as you would expect it to be. These recreate physical sports such as FIFA and Madden, as well as games that incorporate elements of physical sports like Rocket League.

Fighting: Fighting games include all games centred around virtual combat. Among the most famous examples are Street Fighter, Smash Brothers, Mortal Kombat, and Tekken.

Esports betting

Finally, we are going to go through what are the different types of bet you can place on esports. Also, we will look at how esports betting works.

 In a similar way to normal sports betting, gamblers can place a bet on how a particular team or individual player will perform in a tournament. However, as there are so many categories of esports games, there are variations in what exactly you can bet on as well.  The simplest bet you can do is betting on who you think will win the tournament overall.

Now onto the types of esports bet.

Betting outrights: This one is quite self-explanatory. These are bets, gamblers place before the competition has started. The most popular outright bet is on who is going to win the tournament outright. However, there are bets on individual stages of tournaments too.

Match winner: This is a bet on an individual match within a tournament, like betting on a particular fixture in the Premier League.

Totals: This when people bet on how many or how often something is going to happen in the coursed of a game. Essentially this means people are betting on a particular statistic like total kills or number of field goals and so on.

Hopefully, as esports gets bigger, more bookmakers will feature offers on esports and we will see more representation in the gambling industry.

Author

Matthew Wojciow

Content Writer