Are the Esports really the next big thing in betting?
Everyone have heard about it, the new gambling product that will allow operators to engage the new digital native generations.
Who has not seen the Eilers & Krejcik prediction about the bet amount size on Esports by 2020?
And that without including Skin Betting.
We are already in mid 2018 and now we can see that the 10bn$ amount was quite optimistic.
I am not going to make any prediction at this moment, but I am going to tell you how much money moves Esports betting in Spain.
First of all, let’s start for the begining.
The Spanish Government regulated online gambling in 2012. Some operators that were operating in Spain with a .com url asked for a license and migrated their spanish users to the new .es url.
Some big operators like Bet365, Bwin, Betfair, William Hill,… got their spanish license. Another famous brands simply refused to continue accepting spanish users, like Pinnacle.
In that context, the spanish bettting market has been growing strongly, at this moment the online gambling is the first sector in Spain with the biggest number of transactions.
The regulator created various sublicenses depending the type of product (Sports Betting, Casino, Bingo, Poker,…).
Inside the Sports Betting license created different licenses like: exchange bets, mutual bets, against the house bets, horse racing,… and a container license called “Otras apuestas de Contrapartida”, from now OAC.
This OAC license (Other Against the House Bets) serves to include all type of bets about non sport events. The operators that wanted to include special bets like Eurovision, Oscars, Political bets or similar should ask for this license.
The Regulator decided that playing in a computer was not a real sport and included the Esports in the OAC license.
The Esports started appearing everywhere (E-Sports, eSports,…) and some operators decided to include in their betting porfolio. In Spain the first companies including prematch betting for esports were Kirolbet and Luckia in October of 2015 with the World Championship of League of Legends.
The live bets started in June of 2016. By then more companies were offering esports in their catalogue.
These are the companies with OAC license in Spain.
- Betfair
- Codere
- Bet365
- Luckia
- Betsson
- Marca Apuestas
- Kirolbet
- William Hill
- Retabet
- BetStars
- PAF
- Pastón
- Sportium
But not all of them are including Esports Betting. These are the companies including esports:
- Betfair
- Codere
- Bet365
- Luckia
- Betsson
- Kirolbet
- BetStars
- Pastón (with a special site for Esports)
- Sportium
*William Hill is offering Esports in UK but not in Spain
But how much money are spanish users betting in Esports?
Ok, we can not guess the exact number but we can make an accurate estimation.
Until October 2015, the total amount wagered in the events inside the OAC license was about 300k€ per month. When the operators started including esports, this number increased by 6-8 times the next year.
At this moment, the average is about 3,6M€ wagered per month, with a GGR of 281K€, which means a 7,81% margin.
The average for the same period in sports betting is of 453M€ wagered, 25M€ of GGR and a margin of 5,59%.
So Esports betting is less than the 1% of total wagered in Betting (0,79%).
Please note that all the amount of the OAC license is not of Esports, I think that 3M€ is a more accurate number.
There were months with 4M€ and 5M€, but after massive winning users limitation from part of many operators these number stopped increasing.
Now there are some esports tipsters in Spain wth good numbers that after limitations are betting in .com brands as Pinnacle using a VPN, so as I told in the begining of the article, this is just an estimation.
Alex Zubizarreta
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