When the fun stops, stop – learn more about responsible gambling here.
Professional video gaming, or “eSports,” have become for many an accepted fixture of professional sports in general. Once considered strictly a game (or even a waste of time!), eSports have followed the familiar arc of all sports from pastime to competition to marketization and professionalization – be they physical, table-top, or now electronic games. And in some places like South Korea, this professionalized status is not even really new and has been going on since 2002.
This professionalization is a rapidly growing front. One estimate published by Bloomberg in early 2019 expects $1 billion worth of revenues will be generated in 2019 by the popular new profession and its fanbase — and it is important to emphasize that this figure only represents a thin slice of total revenues generated by the global video-gaming industry in general, recently estimated at nearly $44 billion.
Being an electronic sport, with origins of being played on the internet with players far away, it is only fitting that a betting industry is forming around pro gaming and eSports using the internet’s own currency, Bitcoin. And in line with the permissionless ethos of crypto, betting on eSports matches using Bitcoin or other open-blockchain cryptos need not defer to local jurisdictions’ laws on gambling – for better or worse!
Bitcoin Casino Kings
We have not too long ago introduced you to Bitcoin Casino Kings (BCK), a high quality review platform dedicated to evaluating, ranking, and collating as many Bitcoin gambling websites as possible. They are evaluated in terms of user experience, bonuses offered, customer support, and even the jurisdiction of the domain, among other criteria.
Now, eSports betting has been added to BCK’s rapporteur, with eSports betting options now incorporated into the ranking information.
Almost without exception, the websites that offer eSports betting also offer a large range of betting options with payment in Bitcoin; for example betting on physical sports, racing, or pure online gambling. This means that there are no new reviews of eSports-only betting websites, but the existing reviews apply.
The list covers websites offering betting on all of the most popular, professionally-played computer games today. These include Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a popular military-themed first-person-shooter game; Defense of the Ancients 2, a team-based top-down tactical-control kind of game where players and teams try to strike a perfect balance of attributes for their players; League of Legends, which is pretty much the same thing; and StarCraft/StarCraft II, a military-themed real-time strategy/tactics game where two players face off to deploy a perfectly balanced army with perfectly executed tactics, while managing a resource system.
Betting with Bitcoin
As mentioned above, one of the perks of using Bitcoin as a means of online gambling and betting is the uncensor-ability of the Internet’s Own Money. No one can stop the transfer of bitcoin from person to person for any reason (although they can usually see the transfer — of course this may change as Bitcoin gains new fungibility upgrades).
Gambling and betting is illegal in many places, and using the currency of those places for gambling is inevitably going to run into a lot of red tape. And although Bitcoin is being slowly regulated into (or outlawed from) the legal financial systems of many countries, it still remains far easier to simply use Bitcoin or another leading cryptocurrency to make these transactions.
After all, servers and businesses can be registered anywhere in the world in order to take advantage of “regulatory arbitrage” — or using more liberal financial regulatory regimes in some countries.
In sum, this expanding of Bitcoin Casino Kings’ content coverage is natural and welcome. Professional gaming and eSports are rapidly growing content categories with rapidly growing income streams and viewer bases.
They are following the normal arc of all sports from game to competition to professionalization — and now, to betting on their outcomes. If that’s something that interests you, Bitcoin Casino Kings can be a one-stop-shop for picking your broker.
