The latest Esports gambling trends

With this newfound attention, gambling has been on the rise in the Esports world. In this text we are going to run through the start of the gambling and betting scene in Esports, what the latest trends are, what games are the most popular to bet on, and much more. Today a large majority of big sportsbook companies such as gamblersUSA.com and many more like it have started offering odds. 

The beginning of betting on Esports 

When modern Esports, and betting, were in their infancy a couple of programmers got a clever idea. During this time Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was seeing a massive rise in popularity and the Esport side of things was gaining a lot of traction. In CS:GO they are something called skins. 

These are digital items that change the appearance of one's weapon in the game, but don’t come with any other benefits aside from the cosmetic part. These can be bought and sold from player to player through an open marketplace and therefore they have an inherent value.  

So these programmers set up a rudimentary gambling website where players and users could bet on the outcome of games using these in game items. This quickly became wildly popular and several similar sites started popping up.  

However, these glory days wouldn’t last long. This market was completely unrelated and scams and people losing money due to no fault of their own were not uncommon. Add to this the potential legal trouble that the producer of the game could face in regard to underage gambling, they soon pulled the plug. It became forbidden to bet on anything using in game items.  

Betting on Esports is starting to look like betting on traditional sports 

But it didn’t take long for the gambling companies to pick up the slack. They had realized the massive potential that could be gained in offering betting solutions for interested Esport fans. 

Today, the most popular form of betting is betting on which team is going to win a specific game. But with the general interest on the rise, more and more gambling companies are starting to offer more interesting ways of betting as a way to draw in more customers. 

Therefore one can today make up different parlays about which players are going to play well and which are going to have worse performance. Bettors today want to be able to control everything about their bets, and Esport fans are no exception.  

Something that is being beta tested at several different gambling companies are live bets. These are bets that one can place while the game is being played,and adds a whole new level of involvement and excitement to a bet. 

These games are the most popular to bet on 

When it comes to betting on Esports, Counter-Strike is still the unrivalled king. A lot of this has to do with the massive interest that the game has in Europe, where gambling companies were very quick to quickly adapt to this new interest. Many gambling companies in Europe have offered the ability to bet on Esports for a very long time, and CS:GO is by far the most popular option.  

But there is also a rising interest in betting on the other two really big Esports: League of Legends and DotA 2. These games don’t have the same tradition of betting, but with the large interest, that big tournaments gather it’s only natural that these games also draw in a fair bit of betting interest.

Betting on Esports in the future  

Esports is continuing to grow exponentially, and more and more people are starting to pick up an interest in it. With this more opportunities for gambling are going to arise. As we said previously, more forms of gambling are starting to pop up and more gambling companies are starting to offer it in their catalogue of odds.