Esports is quickly becoming one of the great frontiers for the future of sports betting. The Esports realm is all about competitive gaming and playing in tournaments while getting paid a crazy amount of money participating.
There are tons of games to choose from when looking into esports such as League of Legends, Overwatch, Starcraft 2, Dota 2, and COD World War 2. The great thing about the Esports industry is spectators can go online and make bets on some of the games being played. In this piece, we’ll go over Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS: GO).
What is CS:GO
CS:GO is a first-person shooter game available. The game’s available in multiplayer and was developed by Hidden Path Entertainment and Value Software, both American based games developers. CS:GO is an expanded version of the original Counter-Strike game developed in 1999 and supports new maps, weapons, characters. It also involves updated versions of older maps such as Nuke, Train, Inferno and Dust. Alongside this, new game modes are available for players. These involve:
- Arms Race
- Wingman
- Flying Scoutsman
- Competitive
- Casual
- Death Match
- Demolition
The game is so popular there were more than 20M unique players last month, with approximately 1M users playing on a daily basis.
The Role Of CS:GO in Esports
This game is arguably one of the most popular esports games in the world. It peaked with an all-time user base of 1.3M users at one time during the day. Esports tournaments for this game began in 2013 and were available for 16 teams until 2017. Then allowed for 24 teams from 2018 till the present time giving a larger range of players to join in and play competitively. Teams have the opportunity to win massive sums of $1 million-plus for major tournaments and $250k for smaller tournaments.
CS:GO Tournaments & Teams
There are several tournaments available to watch, bet, and play on. CS:GO has both free to join tournaments which any user can join. Then they have tournaments users can pay to join where they have the chance to win small prize winnings. Then comes the major tournaments that have massive prize funds and lots of viewers such as:
- IEM Katowice: 1,200,000 viewers
- StarLadder Berlin 838,000 viewers
- ESL One Cologne 506,000 viewers
Past tournaments such as the world electronic sports games gave a massive prize-winning of $1.5M, while the IEM katowice gave the winners $500k. Upcoming tournaments for CS:GO are:
- Blast Premier Global Finals 2020: Jan 18th — 24th: $1,000,000
- Black Premier Global Spring Series 2021: Feb 4th — 14th: $150,000
- IEM Katowice 2021: Feb 18th — 28th: $1,000,000
- ELS Pro League Season 13: Mar 10th — Apr 18th: $750,000
- Blast Premier spring 2021 showdown: Apr 13 — 18th: $162,500
More esports tournaments have been scheduled across the year, and have prize funds of similar values. Scheduled events can be found at HLTV where dates and prize money for these events can be located. The official top 10 CS:GO ranks are as follows:
- Team Vitality
- Astralis
- Heroic
- Natus Vincere
- BIG
- FURIA Esports
- Mousesports
- Complexity
- G2 Esports
- OG
Ranking outside of the Top 10 can be found at CS:GO world rankings
Betting on CS:GO
To start betting on CS:GO you’ll need to join an online sportsbook that offers the option to place a bet on esports. Most of the big online sportsbooks offer this option so you won’t need to worry. You can find a list of sportsbooks that offer esports betting here on our site. There are lots of things you can bet on in CS:GO. The go to bet is picking a match winner from the two teams as it’s one of the easier bets to place. Other bets include:
- Map round winner
- Maps total
- Maps handicap
- Total rounds per map
- Total round per map for each team
Compared to normal sports betting, esports betting is exactly the same in terms of having markets to place bets on. You’re still placing a bet on the teams alongside different betting options to do with the rounds and players. You’ll find it easy to place bets and make money winning on esports. Some of the better sportsbooks will allow you to cash out during games and watch a stream of the game.
Final Thoughts
Esports is an industry that’s gained a lot of traction during 2020. Sports such as football, soccer, basketball, baseball and many others were put to a halt during the pandemic. Esports was the only one running for pundits to place bets on and now its popularity has gone through the roof. The winners will start winning more and the entire esports betting industry will start getting bigger and bigger.
