Bruce Dias 
With League of Legends and Dota 2 tournaments among the biggest upcoming events, the eSports scene for the rest of 2025 is looking exciting. If you’re interested in taking part in different ways while watching the action, you might wonder what bets you can make on these games. The following are some of the most important types of eSports bets.
The Outright Winner
Probably the simplest type of bet you can make is to place your money on the outright winner of a tournament or match. This involves predicting which team will come out on top in a tournament or match. It’s a type of betting in esports that lets you focus on any of the listed tournaments where you feel that you have a good idea of the relative strength of each team, like the upcoming ESL Pro League S22. Here, we can see the odds, including the favorites Team Vitality and underdogs such as Rooster and Fluxo.
If you prefer to concentrate on a single game, you can place your bets on the outright winner of an individual match. This gives you just two options, as you need to choose which of the two teams you think will win. Odds show how strongly each team is favoured. Negative odds usually indicate the favourites, while positive odds indicate the underdogs — giving fans a way to see how evenly matched a contest might be.
Bets on Maps
If you want to go more in-depth, you can look at the bets that are based on winning maps. The total maps bet lets you predict how many maps will be needed in a match before it’s settled. For example, in League of Legends games, you’ll usually see this listed as under 4.5 or over 4.5. The Summoner’s Rift map is the most famous in LoL and is used in competitive games.
Another option lets you bet on who will win a specific map. This could be the game’s first map, or you might look to use live betting and place your wager on the next map to be played.
First Blood and Other Prop Bets
The first kill bet is also sometimes known as first blood. It’s one of the quickest eSports bets to be resolved, as you don’t need to wait for the outcome of the match. The outcome of your bet is decided when the first player is eliminated, so it shouldn’t take long to find out if you’ve predicted correctly or not.
This is known as a prop bet and is popular in games like Counter-Strike. Other prop bets in this game include total kills and whether a round is won by a bomb exploding or being defused. If we compare this to DOTA2, the most popular prop bets there include First Tower and First Roshan, who is a powerful boss that spawns at the start of every game.
For long-time fans of eSports, this wide variety of bets lets them choose exactly what they think will happen. For newcomers, following the more straightforward outcomes — like which team wins a match — can be the easiest way to start understanding the dynamics of competitive play.
