The gambling industry thinks esports are sports -- even if you don't

You can bet on esports just like you can bet on football, baseball or basketball. You can’t go to Vegas to do it (yet), but you can place your bets online just as easily as you can for other sports.

While leagues like the NFL are just opening up to the idea of gambling after years of decring it as an evil that has no place in their sport, no such animosity exists in esports.

"From what we see in that industry, they welcome it with open arms," says Scott Cooley of bookmaker.eu, an online gambling site. "I can’t speak for some of the parent entities in the United States, but as far as Europe and Asia, they’re absolutely all for esports gambling because much like every single sport is aware, whether it’s the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball, they know that gambling helps grow their fan base."

There’s no governmental body that oversees esports worldwide, although former NFL player Chris Kluwe has pleaded for one. This means there’s no organization that could be united against gambling. But in such an international and widespread game, banning gambling in esports wouldn’t be as easy as banning gambling in the NFL anyway.

Oversight could be necessary as match fixing has been a major problem in esports, with players receiving lifetime bans for fixing Starcraft 2 matches in October.

Without an organization overseeing play, it’s not easy to detect cheaters. If a basketball player tanks a game on purpose, his or her lack of effort would probably be noticed by people watching on TV. It’s a lot harder to tell if an esports player is tanking a game because all he or she would have to do is click a mouse just a second too late, where it’s hard to differentiate between honest mistake and intentional action.

"I know there’s some umbrellas out there, but we would love to see a united one fully encapsulate the whole league or really get some more rigidity I guess among the parent companies," Cooley said.

Live-betting is a form of wagering that has taken off in recent years, and Cooley says it’s one of the main forms of esports betting. In the same way someone can bet during a football game that Ezekiel Elliot will score three touchdowns in the second half, someone may be able to bet which team secures a certain objective, or which player will get the next kill.

"Nowadays, the past five years, live-betting platforms have really taken over traditional sports betting," he said. "You can take over and watch the football or basketball game and gamble on it in between commercials or timeouts or quarters or whatever it may be. We see the same thing with esports."

While it doesn’t have live-betting for esports yet, Bookmaker hopes to start offering it this summer.

"We know that live-betting for esports is the wave of the future. So, we actually have an entire team of people working on expanding our esports gambling platform so that it covers even a broader amount of odds and allows you to get involved with the live-betting aspect."

Bookmaker sets odds for esports in the same way it does for any other sport. A team of researchers predict what the score will be for any certain matchup, and then adjust the odds based on how people are betting.

"It’s very similar to traditional sport," Cooley said. "It’s just research and our numbers. Our team sits down and creates numbers through the research we’ve compiled. We establish lines based on how we think the betting public will react to the betting odds that have been posted. As soon as we post them, we have a careful eye on how the lines are moving and who’s betting on what side, and we adjust the odds accordingly, based on the betting action."

Esports revenue is projected to exceed $1.9 billion by 2018, so sites like bookmaker are hoping to capitalize on the increasing popularity of online gaming sooner rather than later.

"We’ve recognized that it’s something that’s going to be a budding, growing industry, if not exploding in the next five years."