Is CS:GO gambling legal? It's a common question among fans as the issue has been clouded in controversy for years.
This CS:GO gambling guide will take you through all the steps to enjoy CS:GO matches and bet on them the best and safest way possible.
There can be as many as 70 betting markets - sometimes more - on a single match and this can sometimes be daunting for esports fans looking to spice up their experience up through CS:GO gambling.
There are various ways and markets that allow you to gamble on CS:GO the way you want. Thanks to them you can exploit your CS:GO knowledge for the chance to win real cash.
This CS:GO gambling guide covers:
- Choosing matches and markets
- Selecting events to bet on
- Payment options
- Free bets and bonuses
- Is CS:GO gambling legal?
1. Choose your match and market
CS:GO gambling odds
The odds is the number by which the amount of money you gambled will be multiplied if the condition of your bet fulfills. If you bet €10 at odds 2.00, it means that €10 will be debited from your accounts and €20 will be credited back if your bet wins.
If the odds are 1.50 and you bet €10, again €10 will be debited from your accounts and €15 will be credited back if your bet wins.
Pre-match CS:GO gambling
Although it is hard to match the excitement and fun there is in gambling live on CS:GO, pre-match betting is sometimes preferable.
Second-guessing can be unprofitable in CS:GO gambling and betting pre-match allows you to back your bet up with concrete data available on the internet. There is so much data available online that you basically can back any decision up with it. So it's important to pick the data that is relevant to you, be smart!
Moreover, there is far more betting markets pre-match than there are during the game and this is paramount in a CS:GO gambling winning strategy: spread your bets.
CS:GO maps winning rate
A CS:GO game outcome is often determined by the maps that are played during that game. The map winning rate for the teams competing against each other is paramount to take your decision as such.
As a consequence of that, extrapolating probabilities of CS:GO maps being picked or banned and associating past winning rates from both teams to it is an important indicator of how the game is going to unfold. Of course, it should be considered with other indicators to back your decision up but this method allows you to have a plan.
You gambled on that CS:GO team for reasons associated to the maps that are going to be played. If both teams do not end up playing the maps you hypothetically planned they would play, you have an edge to edge your bet in anticipation and minimise your loss.
If it goes your way on map selection and still does not go your way at the end of the game, do not change anything just yet in your CS:GO gambling strategy, sample size is too small to ditch that strategy just yet.
Sample size
CS:GO gambling like any process involving an undetermined outcome can be unpredictable. For anything that is unpredictable, you cannot be right all the time. There will be times where the underdog surprises you and that's OK - that's CS:GO gambling. Astralis can have their bad day and ruin yours if you neglected risk management, that's fine, that is the beauty of CS:GO.
It is often hard to think long-term but still this is how you will end up winning your bets. Randomness works this way, for anything that has 70% chance of happening, there is a low percentage of chance that the outcome that should happen 30% of the time, happens 3, 10, 100, 1,000 times in a row. However, in fine, the more you accumulate the occurrences of gambling in the 70% area, the more you are likely to win.
This is not important to be right every time, it is important to understand the risk for that outcome to happen, adjust the amount you want to gamble on that CS:GO game according to the risk you are taking and assess if that risk is worth compared to the odds the esports bookie is offering you.
Think of it this way: if you bet on an outcome with odds 2.00, you need to win this bet more than 50% of the time if it was to be repeated indefinitely. To think long run on a single event, imagine if this CS:GO match was repeating 1,000 times, would that outcome happen at least 501 times.
CS:GO gambling markets
CS:GO live gambling
CS:GO live gambling has a strong advantage, every second you watch from the match you are gambling on, is a piece of information that allows you to make a more educated decision for your CS:GO bet. There is however a drawback to the information you can get from the ongoing match, there are not as many CS:GO gambling markets available.
The different CS:GO gambling markets are also the statistics endpoints that are interesting to you. It is always important to know what happened in the past to know what could happen in the future. However, this should always be taken as an indicator. Some CS:GO statistics are so accurate that it is often tempting to base one's judgment only on one indicator and this is a recipe for failure along with poor risk management. Your decision should always be backed up by several elements of your CS:GO gambling system.
Gambling on CS:GO pistol rounds
First make sure to understand the pistol rounds dynamic before making a decision. Check the history of each team and their respective pistol round winning rate. Have these two teams already played together? If yes, check their head-to-head pistol round performance and use that an another indicator.
All the data is available online, with basic skills in programming, you can even determine the team's Map 1 winning rate when they won the pistol round.
CS:GO round gambling
Luckbox.com offers you the opportunity to bet on various CS:GO match rounds. A best-of-three match will have at least 2 rounds (or maps), you can use the Round 1, 2 and 3 markets to edge your bets according to the CS:GO gambling plan you elaborated in your pre-match analysis.
You can also gamble on the total number of rounds: you think this CS:GO match will be a difficult one but cannot figure out who is going to win? The Total Maps, Full Match market have you covered.
Total Maps 2.5, Full Match - Under / Over
If you press the 'Under 2.5' button (only available for best-of-three matches), you are gambling your money on the CS:GO match to be 2-0 either way. The important to win your bet is that there are not more than two rounds played.
If you press the 'Over 2.5' button (only available for best-of-three matches), you are gambling on this CS:GO match to be difficult for either side conceding at least a round.
CS:GO handicap gambling
Like Total Maps gambling, CS:GO handicap gambling is expressed in numbers ending with a .5 decimal.
Map Advantage (-1.5), Full Match
Pressing the button on the desired team on this market means you are gambling on that particular CS:GO team to win the game 2-0 if it is a best-of-three match, 3-0, 3-1 if it is a best-of-three match. It boils down to associate a handicap of 1.5 rounds to the CS:GO team you are gambling on. As a consequence, this team needs to win by at least two maps for your bet to win. If your team wins 2-0, with the handicap it wins 0.5-0. The interest of using handicap this way is to increase the odds / risk on a desired outcome.
Map Advantage (+1.5), Full Match
Pressing the button on the desired team on this market means you are gambling on that particular CS:GO team to start the game with an advantage of 1.5 round. In a best-of-three match, it means that your the team you have chosen needs to win at least one round for your bet to win. In a best-of-three, if your team wins a round, it finishes the match with 2.5 rounds no matter if the opposing team wins the two other rounds, your team will have more rounds at the end of the match. (2.5 > 2)
2. Select your CS:GO gambling event
CS:GO is the most busy esports of them all, you can literally watch and bet CS:GO every day. Several premium franchises have undertaken to organize CS:GO live events and some have improved the CS:GO scene to allow to be what it is today.
BLAST Pro and BLAST Premier Series
In 2019, the BLAST Pro Series delighted us with four amazing competitions around the globe. It started in May 2019 with the BLAST Pro Series Madrid and went until November to BLAST Pro Series Copenhagen with steps in Los Angeles in July and Moscow in September.
It is worth mentioning BLAST Pro offers a slick production and event organization with a constant thirst for watcher's experience improvement. BLAST is clearly targeting quality of their events rather than quantity making of their series a must-watch for any CS:GO fans.
In 2020, BLAST Pro Series launches BLAST Premier Spring 2020 in a slight different format from BLAST Pro Series in 2019. BLAST Spring finals will happen at the end of spring in June 2020.
The eventual goal is to qualify to the BLAST Premier: Global Final 2020 which will happen in... January 2021.
DreamHack
In 2020, DreamHack is offering a series with several steps around the world too. The DreamHack series is visiting Anaheim, Valencia, Montreal, Rotterdam, Hyberabad, Sevilla and Jönköping in Sweden for the DreamHack Masters in June 2020. DreamHack allows a wider panel of CS:GO orgs to taste competitive CS:GO at the highest level.
The ESL franchise
ESL has been around for a while and this is another franchise that puts a lot of effort into their event production and organization. The CS:GO scene would not be the same without ESL for sure. ESL One Cologne is already a classic happening every year and ESL Pro League Finals always feature the very best CS:GO teams in the world. ESL is used to visiting great esports destination such as New York (2017, 2018, 2019) or Rio in 2020.
The Intel Extreme Masters Series
IEM is another premium CS:GO franchise who has visited countless cities since its creation in 2007. Sydney, Oakland, Shanghai, Beijing, Chicago, Katowice or Melbourne. The IEM franchise has made of Katowice the Polish world capital of esports as it holds their world championship every year around February or March.
3. Payment and bonus options
The best CS:GO gambling options are on Luckbox.com but to open the door to the CS:GO gambling fun, you first need to load your account up with some funds. While it looks like it does not need to be mentioned, it is actually not as obvious as it looks. Payment options are the bread and butter of your CS:GO gambling hobby. While most of the time, loading up your account up with your VISA card will work, several banks put restrictions on some transactions. That is why Luckbox.com offers several options.
Visa and debit cards
Luckbox.com offers Visa and debit cards as a way of depositing funds on your account. Most of the time, your personal VISA or debit card will be enough to deposit and your funds will appear instantaneously on your Luckbox.com balance.
E-wallets
If your bank has applied tight security restrictions on your Visa card transactions and you need to find a third party wallet. It is also very convenient as you do not need to input your card details every time you want to perform a transaction online. The most famous are Paypal and NETeller but according to the region you are from, you might prefer Boleto, Qiwi, Yandex.Money or WebMoney. Anyway, Luckbox offers them all.
CS:GO gambling with crypto
Buying cryptocurrency often requires to go to an exchange, buy crypto currency and transfer the crypto currency from the exchange to the website wallet. It can be a lengthy and daunting process for those unfamiliar with currency trading. Here again, Luckbox made sure to offer players the safest ans simplest option possible by offering the Cryptopay services where players can buy crypto and transfer it to their Luckbox.com account from the same place.
Using cryptocurrencies to fund your Luckbox.com account is fast and secure. A bit like the e-wallets out there, it allows you to have funds avaialble to spend online in one click. Even more convenient than e-wallets, depositing with crypto (Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP or Litecoin) has no country restrictions whatsoever, once you hold crypto in your cryptocurrency wallet, it is yours and you do not depend on a third party terms and conditions to manage and transfer your funds. For security reasons, you will still have to send documents to request a crypto transfer to your bank account.
4. CS:GO gambling bonuses
Now you managed to deposit funds into your Luckbox account, you are entitled to a gambling bonus. For most esports fans, the bonus mechanisms are misunderstood and often rated as scams.
Luckbox offer $5 free bets
That is the very reason why Luckbox offers $5 instant bonus on your Luckbox.com account creation. Free bets are different from bonuses as you do not need to deposit to play the money on your account. You still need to meet some wagering requirements to cash the money out to your bank account, free money does not come that easy after all.
Luckbox 100% deposit bonus
Luckbox offers a 100% bonus. It means that when you deposit €20 on your Luckbox account, you get €20 more instantly credited to it, making your total balance €40. When making a deposit, you need to use the bonus code GLHF to take advantage of the bonus.
To be able to cash your bonus money out to your bank account, you need to wager the amount you deposited on your account ten times. In that case you need to bet the equivalent of €200 to clear your bonus and be able to cash it out.
Moreover, only the bets with odds 1.5 and more will be taken into account into clearing your bonus. While these conditions could look hard to meet, they are here to prevent people from bonus hopping without really wanting to gamble on CS:GO but rather angle shooting a few dollars without enjoying the matches. Luckbox has, by the way, the best bonuses in the CS:GO gambling market with the lowest requirements to make sure not to harm players' experiences.
5. Is CS:GO gambling legal?
Yes, CS:GO gambling is legal - but only with the correct licence. Given the quite recent emergence of CS:GO on a mainstream business level, CS:GO gambling has rapidly shown the need to rely on a legal framework to be sustainable on the long run.
The days where anyone, including underage CS:GO fans, could gamble skins on a CS:GO match without control is past us and actors like Luckbox.com ensures each and every player playing on Luckbox meets the necessary legal requirements to enjoy their experience fully.
By holding a gambling license from the Isle Of Man Gaming Commission, Luckbox made sure to embrace the best legal framework out there that also is the most protective for players. In a lot of other areas in the world, it is easy to get a gambling license but they often do not impose requirements on the operators and do not protect players as such.
A lot of illegal CS:GO skins gambling websites are still operating out there, without being able to ensure players that their funds are safe.
Players' money access depends solely on this platform stability and ability to pay them back. And given the weakness of their licensing framework, there is no way to know if that CS:GO gambling platform can afford to pay you back.
Quite scary, is not it? Good news is actors like Luckbox can guarantee you that and you do not realise how valuable this guarantee is until it's too late.
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Pictures: Copyright ESL / Stephanie Lieske, Bart Oerbekke & Helena Kristiansson
