The Biggest eSports Tournaments People Love to Bet On

Post-2019, competitive video game events have grown dramatically in the attention they receive. The same holds for eSports betting, and as this overall landscape expands, so does the excitement around wagering on high-stakes tournaments. Thus, in this guide, we dive into what we would call the biggest eSports competitions. If video games interest you, be sure to check out these contests, as one of the millions of people around the globe that will watch them, and maybe try your luck at gambling on their outcomes to get a taste of a unique form of entertainment.

The International

We have mentioned the importance of Dota 2 (Defense of the Ancients) to the eSports scene several times before at GOSUBETTING. Dota 2 has the all-time prize pool record at $318 million to date. And when it comes to eSports competitions, events do not get any bigger than The International. The first instance of this video game contest happened in 2011 in Cologne, Germany, and featured sixteen teams vying for the top spot and a grand prize of $1.6 million. From 2013 onwards, the Dota 2 community contributed to this competition’s reward pool by buying the Compendium or Battle Pass, as 25% of these purchases went into the contest prize fund, which peaked at $40 million (in total) for the 2021 Bucharest International.

In 2017, the International increased its team number to eighteen, and it boosted it once again in 2022 to twenty. Yet, in the 2024 edition set to get hosted in Copenhagen’s Royal Arena, the tournament will revert back to its initial sixteen-team format. What is unique about this event is also the media coverage it gets. Plus, the Aegis of Champions trophy, where the winners’ names get engraved. For those interested in learning about the inception of the International, there is a Valve-produced documentary called Free to Play that gives a look into the lives of the three professional Dota gamers who competed in the tournament’s initial edition.

Counter-Strike Major Championships

Valve, the creator of Dota 2, is also the company behind Counter-Strike, which old-school gamers know used to be a mod for the 1998 smash hit Half-Life. The Majors have been running for over a decade, as the first tournament in this series took place in 2013 in Jönköping, Sweden. It had a $250,000 community-funded prize pool hosted by DreamHack, a gaming brand specializing in video game conventions and competitions. Until 2016, the winnings available in the Majors were always a quarter of a million. In the 2016 Columbus event, organized by the Major League Gaming, the reward fund got bumped up to a million dollars, and it stuck to this amount until 2021 when it doubled.

Counter-Strike has the second-highest all-time prize record at $143 million, and the BLAST Paris Major in 2023 was the last Majors to include CS:GO. From that event on, Counter-Strike 2 was the game used in CS Majors and the one that gamers competed in in the PGL Major Copenhagen 2024. There will be another Major in 2024, in the first two weeks of December, in Shanghai, organized by Beijing Chinese mass media company Perfect World, dubbed the Perfect World Shanghai Major 2024.

Call of Duty Championship

Like Counter-Strike is a mode of Half-Life, something many modern gamers do not know is that the first Call of Duty game was actually a mod of Quake III Arena. The action in the inaugural Call of Duty Championship unfolded in 2013 in Hollywood, California, on Call of Duty: Black Ops II for the Xbox 360. In the years that followed, the game used kept changing, and in the 2023 competition, Modern Warfare got utilized.

Activision organizes the Call of Duty Championships, and the last one had eight teams, boasting a prize pool of $2.38 million, incorporating Double Elimination, Best of 5 Series, and Best of 9 Series for GF formats. In our opinion, Call of Duty does not see the wagering action it should, as many bookies do not list COD events. But, it is getting there, as more and more gamblers are paying more attention to Call of Duty contests.

League of Legends World Championship

League of Legends, commonly called by its acronym – LoL or just League, is a multiplayer battle area title developed by Riot Games, which hosts the League of Legends World Championship. The original championships were held in 2011, the same year as the initial International. In this professional gaming tournament, the culmination of each LoL season, the best League teams fight for the Summoner’s Cup, a twenty-kilogram-heavy trophy. The championship usually lasts around five weeks, now hosted across multiple cities.

In 2023, the LoL World Championships happened in Busan and Seoul, and it had a reward pool of $2.23 million, with $445,000 going to the winning team, which last year was T1, a South Korean team. The finals of that event got watched by over 6.4 million concurrent viewers at its peak.

eSports World Cup

Here is a novel competition that is sure to bring millions of eyeballs to computer/phone screens and create a sizeable betting handle around the globe. In 2024, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, will host the first edition of the eSports World Cup, a video game tournament funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Riyadh is likely a place many sports fans now recognize due to the Riyadh Season, a sports festival that has played host to blockbuster boxing contests and WWE events. Well. Saudi money is about to fund a $60 million purse gaming competition, the largest combined prize pool in the sphere’s history.

The eSports World Cup will feature twenty-two tournaments in twenty-one games, including popular wagering options like Call of Duty, Dota 2, CS 2, StarCraft 2, Overwatch 2, Rainbow Six Siege, and Street Fighter 6, as the top draws. Thirty teams will compete from five regions. These are Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and the Middle East, with each event MVP getting awarded $50,000 as an extra incentive for everyone to perform at their best.

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