The growth of sports betting has begun to generate great repercussions in different industries and sports, recently in the world elite of soccer has been known a scandal that led to investigations for match-fixing.
Now sports betting also puts the risk of arrangement or fixing in eSports. Mostly in the professional and semi-professional levels of electronic sports, the big problem are the frauds, the relationship between eSports and betting is problematic.
According to the ESIC (eSports integrity coalition), bets on electronic sports can bill this year about 40,000 million dollars and could reach 130,000 million in 2020. Of course, they are only estimated numbers because they do not publish their data (sportsbooks).
60% of the bets in electronic sports are produced in 'Counter Strike', a multiplayer shooting game, followed by 'Dota 2', a team strategy that can reach 20% and the well-known 'League of Legends', that can reach 13% of the bets, according to this group of organizers of competitions.
Regarding the match-fixing, the level of competition that is most affected, is the lowest or least professionalized one, especially in competitions where you can earn more money by losing than by winning. We see more cases in tournaments with lower prizes, semiprofessional, where there are players who rig games by hundreds or thousands of dollars, when the overall prize of the tournament does not exceed 5,000 USD.
The ESIC investigated 39 cases of possible rigging during the year 2017 and has about 40 so far this year 2018. However, although a possible match is tested, the traceability of the player, who usually plays under a pseudonym or a 'name of war ', leads to that in many cases it is difficult to find the person behind the nickname, and to top it off if the match is shown can take between two and five years to sanction it.
The organizers have to work harder to get to know their customers and identify their players. You have a player with a name, and when you want to find out who is behind you find a wall, that a player is several people or that a person competes with several names.
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* commissioner of the international organization ESIC, who fights for the integrity of these competitions.
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