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Many North American sports gambling fans have a notion stuck in their head that the NFL season is basically the only time of the year worth wild to make wagers. Surprisingly enough a large part of the North American betting community strictly only bets NFL. Then there is the second group of bettors that bet the other three major sports of NBA, MLB, and NHL. Lastly the third group is the players that bet everything, such as Soccer, Tennis, Golf, NASCAR, UFC, Boxing, WNBA. These players understand that if you like to bet on sports, then these other sports are just as fun or even more exciting to wager on.
A new “sport” has recently been thrown into this third group, which most North Americans are not even aware of. This sport is not like the other physically demanding sports that are mentioned above, but is a new kind of sport entirely, which is called E-Sports. E-Sports stands for Electronic Sports, and is a form of competition that is performed on electronic system, which is more commonly referred to as video games. Sure when you first read that it sounds silly, that there is even a market where people compete to win a particular video game. However, there is nothing silly about this, because this is an extremely popular and serious sport in Asia.
The competitions are real with some of the biggest tournaments in the world known as the The International, the League of Legends World Championship, the Battle.net World Championship Series, the Evolution Championship Series, and the Intel Extreme Masters. All of these tournaments have live broadcasting of the competition, with prize money and individual salaries for the professional competitors. The League of Legends World Championship alone has a grand prize of over $1 million dollars for the winning team, and the players competing in this tournament play an average of 80 hours a week in order to train for a competition of this nature. Just like a professional NFL player, these players spend long hours each week perfecting their craft, and developing a strategy to beat their opponent.
For the League of Legends video game, it estimated that there are already over 75 million people in the world actively playing this game. (That is more people than the entire country of France.) When the League of Legends World Championship Game is contested, it occurs in a Soccer Style stadium in Korea and over 40,000 people come buy tickets to view the main event in person.
The popularity and viewership of E-Sports has been expanding at such an exponential rate, that it is estimated that it will one day surpass all the major sports viewership combined. Yes, that is a mind blowing statement, but it truly shows how large and popular this sport is becoming. As a result some of the best sportsbooks around the world are beginning to offer ways to bet on E-Sports.
A player can bet on a teams odds to win a specific tournament, just as if a player were betting on which NFL team they think will win the Super Bowl. In addition during the specific E-Sports tournament, players can bet specific money line matchups between two teams facing off against each other in the tournament.
There are already predictions that there is going to be more betting action on the DOTA 2 INTERNATIONAL this year, then on the total amount of future bets on the Odds to win Soccer's biggest tournament, in the UEFA Cup Champions League. These numbers are staggering, and can not be ignored. The top sites like AceSportsbook.com are already offering betting on E-Sports, and sooner then later this E-Sports craze is going to finally infiltrate North America, and the people who only bet NFL, will be adding a new sport to their list of wagers.
