Whether you’re a newcomer to the scene or a longtime player, there are plenty of opportunities to land some profit when betting on League of Legends. Looking for your best bet? We’ll take you through everything you need to know before adding to your bet slip.
Beginner’s Guide to League of Legends
What, Where and When?
League of Legends is by far the most popular game in the world of esports. Developed and published by Riot Games, the game boasts an astonishing 100 million users per month. With such a competitive esports scene, this number is set to continue growing.
As a multiplayer online battle arena game, League of Legends is extremely complex and challenging, combining real-time strategy with role-playing game elements.
While most of League of Legends’ premier esports tournaments take place during the Spring and Summer, you’ll find that events take place throughout the year. Each week, you’ll find teams from various leagues, including the North American, European, Chinese and Korean leagues facing off against two of their fellow league competitors. Following the conclusion of each regular season, regional playoffs commence.
Who to back?
A popular tactic amongst novice esports punters is to back the bookies’ favourite. The best players and teams in the world will usually be odds on favourites in a League of Legends match. Such teams include KING-ZONE DragonX, Fnatic, Team Liquid and Team SoloMid, while Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok, Martin “Rekkles” Larsson, Peng “Doublelift” Yiliang and Søren “Bjergsen” Bjerg are some of the world’s best individual players. Sure, you’re likely to win more often than not when adopting this tactic, but the sportsbooks aren’t always right!
Taking a statistical approach can help you take advantage of such opportunities and could result in some huge wins! Before placing your League of Legends bets, we’d recommend looking at head-to-head records, recent form and individual player stats.
League of Legends Betting Markets
Once you’ve had a look through some recent statistics, you’ll be ready to place your bets on upcoming League of Legends esports matches. Here’s a list of the most popular betting markets you can expect to find at top esports betting sites:
- Tournament winner: here, you are betting on a certain team to win a particular tournament.
- Tournament finalist: here, you are betting on a certain team to qualify for the Grand Final of a particular tournament.
- Match winner: here, you are betting on a certain team to win a particular match.
- Game winner: here, you are betting on a certain team to win a particular game within a match. League of Legends matches are usually played in a Best-of-1, Best-of-3 or Best-of-5 format.
- Game event: here, you are betting on the occurrence of a certain event within a particular game, such as a player getting a Pentakill.
- First team to accomplish something: these types of betting odds allow you to predict which team will be the first to get First Blood, destroy the first Inhibitor, kill the first Baron and so on.
- Handicaps: here, you are betting that a certain team will win a particular match while starting with either an advantage or a handicap, such as being 1.5 games behind (-1.5) or 1.5 games ahead (+1.5).
How to play League of Legends
League of Legends is an extremely complex game and as you can imagine, is incredibly difficult to master. The world’s best League of Legends players dedicate huge amounts of time in order to rank among the world’s best, but this doesn’t mean you have to in order to become a successful League of Legends esports bettor. However, when placing bets on League of Legends, or any other esports game, we’d recommend at least having a basic understanding of how the game is played. You’ll be able to make smarter bets at the bookies and follow the progress of your bets with ease.
League of Legends is contested between two teams of five. Players on team red and blue pick champions out of a pool of over 140 options at the beginning of each game. The two sets of players then proceed to battle in a two-sided virtual arena, with the objective of destroying the opponent’s Nexus, which is the main structure inside a team’s base.
Every champion possesses a unique set of abilities, which can be upgraded as you level up. Three of these abilities are available at level one, while the fourth –called the ultimate– becomes available at level six. In addition to these, you also have multiple Summoner Spells such as Smite, Teleport or Flash. You can choose two of them for your champion at the start of each game.
Players can also choose their champion’s primary and secondary development paths. There are five paths to choose from: Precision, Domination, Sorcery, Resolve, and Inspiration. These, in turn, contain a Keystone, Rune slots, and give your champion a Trait. All of which can translate into a variety of bonuses, such as increased movement speed, damage resistance and cooldown reduction.
Champions possess a number of attributes such as health, movement speed, attack damage, attack speed, armour, magic resist, health regeneration, and ability power. These attributes increase as you level up, or purchase items like Dead Man’s Plate, Guardian Angel, B.F. Sword and Luden’s Echo.
With such a large variety of champions to choose from and hundreds of items available for purchase, League of Legends has tremendous replay value for players and is incredibly entertaining to watch and bet on for fans of its esports competitions.
Bet on League of Legends
Now we’ve taken you through the ins and outs of League of Legends betting, you probably fancy a flutter on the next big tournament! Looking for a top League of Legends betting site? Check out our list for the very best esports betting sites available today. The bookmakers on our list are packed full of the best bonuses, markets and promos on the market. All that’s left for you to do is compare, sign up and place your bets!
