Crucial tips to help improve your esports betting skills

William Davis Published 08/01/2023

These esports betting tips will help new and experienced bettors make smarter bets to bring in the big bucks.

Esports betting may seem like a solitary hobby at first, but experienced gamblers know that no man is an island. Tips from knowledgeable bettors can help newer esports fans find their fitting in the sportsbook. With so many different games and bets, it can be difficult to find valuable advice for your favorite types of bets. However, these five tips can help anyone improve their decision-making when betting on esports.

Reputable betting sites are the way to go

First off, it’s important to pick a good website to bet on. This may seem obvious, but selecting one is more complicated than it may seem. There are hundreds of options to pick from, and the factors to consider when choosing include games offered, odds quality, payment features, viewing options, and more.

On top of all that, the most critical factor is legality. There are plenty of betting sites in the UK to pick from, but bettors in other countries may not have nearly as many options. Regardless of where you live, it’s important to check a site’s licensing and ensure they operate legally.

Odds are the second-most important thing to check. Counterintuitively, you want to find sites that you disagree with the most. If you check a sportsbook and strongly disagree with the odds offered, that’s a signal that you would make more money betting there than on more normalized odds. Spotting when betting sites have it wrong is one of the least-shared tips for making more money through esports betting.

Learn to recognize the value in playing the odds

When looking for esports betting opportunities, players should look for the weirdest, most incorrect odds they can. That’s because the more inaccurate the site is, the higher the chances of earning money from a stilted matchup.

This isn’t just exclusive to even matchups that the odds claim are favored towards one particular team. Let’s say a very strong team and a middling squad are scheduled to play in a tournament, and the site puts 3.60 odds for the lesser but still strong team to win. If you think the odds should be much more even, it makes sense to place a small bet at those sky-high odds. It’s not a significant loss if things go as expected, but a win could lead to a massive potential payout.

Of course, it’s important to heavily research a bet like that before you decide to take that risk. Bookmakers aren’t random, and odds like that will still go in the stronger teams’ favor the majority of the time. However, there are other tools you can use to find good bets beyond just intuition.

Use esports statistics to your advantage

Just like in traditional sports, precedence is king in esports. Odds tabulators take hundreds, if not thousands, of stats into account to predict the outcome of matches. However, fans can use the same tools to beat the computer and their own game. They’re a little harder to find than their traditional sports counterparts, but esports stats sites are a significant resource for serious bettors.

The best site to use varies by esports, but in the case of Dota 2, fans can use Liquipedia to check matchup history and Dotabuff to examine individual players’ performance. For League of Legends, the game’s Fandom functions as a massive community-created encyclopedia for players and teams. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players can spend days looking through HLTV stats to determine which bets to make.

These stats are a great way to zoom out on players and teams to see how they consistently perform across multiple major events or leagues. Esports teams often build rivalries against each other, leading to less-accomplished teams always defeating top contenders. Stats sites are the best way to figure out who beats who, when, and how in esports.

Specialize in your favorite games and teams

The decentralized nature of competitive gaming can make it challenging to monitor multiple games at once, so for players new to esports betting, one of our biggest tips is to pick one game and stick with it. Researching stats and players is much easier that way, and committing to a single game allows you to make smarter bets unclouded by other potential betting opportunities. In addition, it’s easy to get confused in sportsbooks since multiple games across different titles can share the same name.

It’s possible to set up alerts on esports streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube to help keep up with events. Smaller tournaments are a great way to get bets between major tournaments, and many esports sites offer odds on regional and national events for many games. It’s almost impossible to watch every single game of every event, but keeping in tune with the scene can help you bet with confidence.

Keeping up with the companies and games themselves also helps. Riot Games, which recently became the biggest streamer on Twitch, often posts updates for League of Legends and Valorant on social media and official websites. Both games are also free to download and play, so there’s little opportunity cost for learning to play the game yourself.

Check out match discussions on the internet

Just searching upcoming matches on the internet can be a great way to learn more about their eventual outcome. Esports take palace almost entirely online, so it’s no surprise that fans flock to the web to share their thoughts, predictions, and opinions on which teams will win and which will flounder.

The aforementioned stats sites like Dotabuff and HLTV have discussion sections where fans can discuss a match. It can sometimes be difficult to tell which commenters are just joking around and which are conducting actual analysis, but there are plenty of resources beyond just the comment section.

Esports analysis is a big industry, and there are dozens of accomplished analysts in nearly every game. In addition, casters and commentators often offer their opinions on social media for free. When it comes to predicting the outcome of matches, there’s no better person to listen to than the people who will comment. Even other pro players sometimes weigh in, giving new esports bettors even more analysis without spending a dime on advice or a minute on research.

William Davis

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