The online bookmakers Bwin said that in the first 66 days of this year the bets it took on which team will win the 2016 League of Legends World Championship were more than those placed on the outcome of this year’s UEFA Champions’ League. On current trends it is predicting the volume of gambling on the e-gaming tournament will surpass the football tournament’s total by 60%.
Bwin is an Austrian-based operator with over 20 million customers in 25 core markets. Last June it started offering bets on e-gaming contests and since then turnover has exploded, with two-thirds of the total since then taken in the last two months alone. Tournaments in League of Legends, which is a multiplayer online fantasy battle game, have been the most popular object of e-gaming wagers, making up 69% of Bwin’s total. Second are tournaments in the shoot-em-up game Counter Strike, which get about 10% of all the bookmaker’s e-gaming bets, followed by the games Dota and Starcraft.
E-gaming has surged in popularity over the past decade. Thousands of tournaments are now staged worldwide each year, with final contests filling the world’s largest stadia to capacity. Professional e-gamers earn seven-figure salaries and are granted athlete visas to enter some countries. Some universities even award e-gaming scholarships. League of Legends is currently the world’s most popular e-game, with more than 27 million people playing it daily.
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