There are many esports betting sites that allow you to bet live on events, with these including most of the top esports games and their respective professional leagues and tournaments. Esports live betting allows you to offset bets you think might lose, after seeing the game in action, and take advantage of momentum shifts in games that you are watching. Live or in-play betting is extremely popular with esports fans who can spot trends and changing tides in the game they follow, which allows them to get better odds than before the game started.

Our top live esports betting sites for 2024 are:

United States Live esports betting sites

Live esports betting sites

#1 BetOnline

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#2 Bovada

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Live betting on esports explained

Esports live betting refers to betting on esports events while they are underway. This form of betting is suited to people who have great knowledge of at least one esports title and can accurately predict what the state of a game will be in 5-10-20 or 60 minutes, based on what is going on right now.

For instance, let’s say you’re watching a MOBA game such as Dota 2 or League of Legends and the two opposing teams are about to complete their drafts. If you’re really knowledgeable about the game and understand strategies, hero compositions and what the teams want to do with them, you can spot asymmetries (advantages or disadvantages for either side) right from the start of the game.

In esports live betting, these kinds of asymmetries might prompt you to place a bet on one of the two teams at that very moment, simply because you know in advance what is most likely to happen based on the information you already have.

The main difference between standard esports betting and live esports betting is that the first type requires you to make a decision without knowing anything about the particular aspects of a match (you only know who the teams are and what they’ve done in the past), while the second type provides you with additional information.

What betting sites have live esports betting?

Almost all of our tap-rated esports betting sites have live betting, much like football and other traditional sports have markets available, once an event is underway. Our top sportsbook for live esports betting is BetOnline largely because it has more markets running once esports events are underway.

How to succeed betting live on esports

Esports live betting can be a challenging thing to succeed at, due to several reasons:

  1. In general, you can’t get any extra help from anyone. In standard esports betting, you can usually do a research about the teams or read a well written analysis with betting predictions about a certain match. But when you engage in live betting, you have to do all the thinking yourself and rely on your own esports knowledge to make correct predictions.
  2. It’s difficult to stick to a sound strategy and place rational bets. When you feel like one of the teams is clearly winning, you are often tempted to bet much larger amounts than usual and deviate from your standard, carefully planned, mathematically sound betting patterns. Sometimes you may even go all-in on a single game or game event, which tends to be a bad idea, for obvious reasons: if it becomes a habit and you do it enough times, you will eventually lose everything. And it’s enough to get it wrong even one time, and all your efforts will have been in vain. Which is why a more careful approach, one that always leaves you outs and is designed to steadily increase your bankroll in the long-run, is a much better idea.
  3. You need to act quickly. When engaging in esports live betting, the odds increase and decrease based on which of the two teams appears to be winning. If team A looks more and more likely to win, its odds will decrease very often throughout the match. So if you don’t act fast, the opportunity of placing your bet at a certain point (when the odds are x – y) will quickly vanish and you will need to place your bet at a different set of odds. Another aspect to keep in mind here is the fact that while a match is underway, you will not always be able to bet on one of the teams. The betting possibility will usually be turned on and off by the bookmaker, depending on how the match evolves.

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eSports live betting strategy

Getting an edge at esports live betting requires you to do several things:

  1. If you want to bet on a particular esport, follow its professional scene and learn all you can about it. Otherwise you won’t be able to correctly assess in-game situations and know what the most likely outcome will be, based on what is going on right now.
  2. Formulate a plan for how you want to bet and what your limits are. Have:

    Single-bet limits: what is the maximum amount that you are willing to bet in a single instance.

    Single-match limits: what is the maximum amount that you are willing to bet on a single match, during which you may place multiple individual bets depending on how things go.

    An exit strategy: if things start to go badly, you can usually cancel out an initial bet by betting a large enough amount on the opposite result, while the team that you’re betting on still has good enough odds to allow you to do this. Some bookmakers even allow you to get back a certain percentage amount of your initial bet and drop it entirely.

  3. Be prepared to act quickly (before a betting opportunity disappears). And ideally, use two monitors or at least one big monitor split in two. When engaging in esports live betting, you really want to watch the game and look for patterns. At the same time, you do not want to Alt-Tab, switch browser tabs and so on. You want to be ready at all times and place your bet within 5 seconds after assessing a situation and making a betting decision. The time interval between the moment when the decision was taken and when the bet has been successfully placed should be as small as possible.
  4. Do your preparation ahead of time. Do not start doing research about the teams while the match is already underway. Do it before it starts. That way, you’ll have more information at your disposal and fewer things to worry about. This inevitably leads to more informed decisions and better results.
  5. Make sure you don’t misclick, bet on the wrong team by accident, bet the wrong amount, bet on the wrong match or even the wrong match event. These kinds of technical errors tend to happen more often in esports live betting, because you need to act quickly and are tempted to make all kinds of wrong assumptions. Pay careful attention to all the necessary aspects before clicking that ok button.