Esports betting grew from a niche among Counter-Strike fans into a regular part of sportsbook menus. Today you can find odds on Counter-Strike 2, League of Legends, Dota 2 and Valorant almost every day of the year. Indie and browser titles are a different story: many have lively competitive scenes, but few have betting markets. Here is how the market works, what went wrong in its early years and why the size of a game matters so much.
How esports markets work
Esports betting borrows its structure from traditional sport.
- Match winner: who wins the series.
- Map handicap: a team starts with a virtual lead or deficit in maps, like a point spread.
- Totals: over or under a number of maps, rounds or kills.
- Props: first blood, first tower, a player's kill count and other in-game events.
- Live betting: odds that change between rounds or during a map.
Odds are set by traders using team ratings, recent form, map pools and roster news, then moved by the money that comes in. As in any sport, the bookmaker's margin is built into the prices, so the implied probabilities of all outcomes add up to more than 100 percent.
The skins era
Esports betting first boomed outside regulated sportsbooks. After Counter-Strike: Global Offensive added weapon skins in 2013, fans began staking skins on matches through third-party sites, which were cheap to use, open to anyone with a Steam account and largely unregulated. The risks soon became obvious. In 2014, players from the North American team iBUYPOWER were found to have deliberately lost a match on which skins had been bet; Valve banned the players involved from its tournaments in early 2015. In 2016, amid public pressure and lawsuits, Valve told skin-gambling sites to stop using Steam for gambling. Our article on loot boxes versus gambling covers how those skins are produced in the first place.
Regulation and integrity
As licensed bookmakers moved in, the industry built integrity systems similar to those in traditional sport. The Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC) was set up in 2016 to investigate match-fixing and cheating and to share suspicious-betting alerts. US states that legalised sports betting have handled esports in different ways; Nevada began approving wagers on selected esports events in the late 2010s, and New Jersey allows them with restrictions. In Britain, esports betting is offered by licensed operators under the same rules as other sports.
Indie esports: small studios, big scenes
Not every esport comes from a major publisher. Rocket League grew from Psyonix, an independent studio, before Epic Games bought it in 2019; it now has a large professional circuit and regular betting markets. Brawlhalla, a free-to-play fighting game, runs a long-standing championship series. Trackmania, osu! and many fighting games have dedicated competitive communities. Some of these get odds at larger sportsbooks around big events; many do not.
Why browser games rarely get odds
Browser shooters such as Krunker and Shell Shockers have had competitive leagues and community tournaments, and our browser shooter guide covers how they play. But regulated bookmakers rarely list them, for practical reasons:
- Integrity risk. Small prize pools and part-time players make it cheaper to fix a match than in a big league.
- Data. Traders need reliable live data and official results. Small events often lack an official data provider.
- Liquidity. If few people want to bet, a market is not worth the risk of mispricing it.
- Fair play controls. Browser games can be harder to secure against cheating tools and account sharing.
The same caution applies to speedrunning, where informal bets between fans are common but organised markets are rare, because a single person controls the result.
What to know before betting on esports
- Know the patch. Balance changes can reshape a game between tournaments; old form may mean less than in traditional sport.
- Check rosters. Substitutes and late changes are common, especially in smaller teams.
- Mind the format. A best-of-one is far more random than a best-of-five.
- Use licensed operators. Skin sites and unlicensed books offer no protection if something goes wrong.
If you are curious about where skill ends and luck begins in competitive play, read skill games versus games of chance.
