The State of Dota 2 Betting in 2024: Key Insights from Industry Movers
Esportsbets talked with figures across the industry to gain insight into the state of Dota 2 betting. Our respondents Abios’ engineering manager Ludvig Fröberg, head of strategy at Thunderpick Kelly Sanders, and representatives from DATA.BET, and even “average” Dota 2 bettors. Across the board, they were positive about Dota 2 betting prospects and highlighted the unique challenges and opportunities the game presents to bookmakers and gamblers.
Dota 2 is one of the biggest esports in the world, commanding millions of viewers on its largest events, with astronomical prize pools and some of the toughest competition for teams and players. Alongside the millions of viewers is a vibrant betting market that offers customers odds on these top-tier games.
But how healthy is the Dota 2 betting scene?
While the tournaments see viewership numbers reach into six and seven figures, with prize pools their equal, can the betting market for Valve’s premier MOBA title match the heights of its tournaments? With betting sponsors adorning the best Dota 2 teams, do those sponsorships translate into a vibrant gambling scene for Dota 2?
Markets Bettors Look For
Almost every organization we talked to had a slightly different perspective on what Dota 2 bettors wanted.
- DATA.BET said the most common thing for this esports data aggregator is that customers value engaging and personalized content that fully immerses them in the game. Data.Bet placed priority on a “comprehensive market line that allows gamblers to place bets on almost any in-game action outcome.” But the company also highlighted video widgets and live streaming elements to keep bettors up to date, helping “customers to analyze the tournament and place bets from any device, even with an unstable Internet connection.”
- Kelly Sanders, head of strategy at Thunderpick, also highlighted market variety as an important element, although pointed out that many bettors stuck to Match Winner and Map Winner bets. When bettors ventured out of these markets they looked towards some more niche options: “Total kills bets on the number of kills in a game or by a specific team, handicap betting which provides a virtual advantage or disadvantage to even the playing field, and over/under bets on whether a certain statistic like total kills or match duration will be over or under a set number, are frequently pursued.”

- Ludvig Fröberg, engineering manager at Abios highlighted that for over 80% of bets, the most popular market remains Match Winner. He also highlighted that across the Kambi network, hero kill markets have seen significant popularity, as they “add engagement throughout the match as the odds can swing in a team’s favor in a few minutes or seconds’ notice.”
But it’s the offers which data provider Abios has seen gain more popularity recently:
“We’ve seen handicap bets gain traction, as well as total minutes and correct map score. These bet offers necessitate watching the full match to know the outcome, adding another level of engagement to the game.”
- Steve, our “average” Dota 2 bettor says sticking to what works is in his mentality. For him, basic markets like match winners, tournament winners are the priority. If it’s “going well” he might look for more in-depth markets such as First Blood, First Roshan, but not often. Offers, he says, are only important if he can claim them right away. He said he doesn’t even look at offers most of the time.
Game Complexity and Data Models: The Biggest Challenge
So with a seemingly simple market offering, that focuses mainly on binary outcomes, what challenges do esports bookmakers and data services run into when providing betting options?
For DATA.BET, the issues come from the complexity of Dota itself: The vast variety of heroes and item builds, which can significantly differ from game to game. Frequent patches (relatively) and the fact Dota 2 players don’t strictly adhere to their lanes, with role swaps, pick swaps, tri lanes, and other non-standard tactics coming into play at all levels of the game. This all stacks up to make Dota 2 “much harder to predict outcomes and set accurate odds.” For a company focusing on AI, that means different challenges:
“This fluidity means that almost every betting market in Dota 2 may need its own dedicated AI model instead of having a single model cover the entire market. This level of complexity and constant evolution makes providing accurate and reliable data for Dota 2 particularly challenging compared to other games.”
The complexity problem is something Sanders knows well, with Thunderpick also dealing with Dota 2’s unique nature in their offerings.
“The game’s complexity and depth, with numerous heroes, abilities, items, and strategies, require sophisticated analytical tools to capture and accurately interpret the data. The dynamic meta, which frequently changes with patches and updates, necessitates keeping up with these changes to provide accurate odds and markets.”

Even when Dota 2 isn’t working as intended, companies like Abios have to be able to provide accurate models, as Fröberg highlights:
“Dota 2 has many bugs, and bug exploitation is allowed in competitive play. This means that our data implementations must be able to handle and react in the right way to rare instances possible under certain circumstances, such as when players get assists on their teammates. This necessitates a strong understanding of the gameplay on all levels, from the trading floor to the modelling of trading algorithms.”
This seems like an incredibly daunting prospect. But Fröberg points to at least one advantage Abios has:
“As a company that has worked in esports for more than 10 years, Abios is fortunate to have a team of esports experts, many of whom have backgrounds in high-level play. This leads to a strong understanding of the games on a granular level that is used to vet product performance.”
Dota 2 Match-Fixing, the Elephant in the Room
It’s an unfortunate reality that Dota 2 betting has a spector that looms over it with the issues surrounding match-fixing in Dota 2. The game has had multiple high-profile incidents, often with big-name players. However, data companies like Abios point to the fact that these issues don’t tend to affect the highest levels of play which generally have a strong level of integrity.
“With the growth of the esports ecosystem, tournament organizers have gathered more resources to implement control systems, the proper incentives for players, and collaborations across different verticals in the ecosystem.”
“Providing data and automated odds feeds to sportsbooks, Abios has the technical capabilities to monitor betting activity and report suspicious bets to authorities or the relevant integrity bodies.”

Unfortunately, even with the most robust methods, there will be those who attempt to circumvent match-fixing prevention. Besides a diligent community, which often reports and highlights suspicious activity as it happens, more overall protections come in the form of oversight. In this case from ESIC, the Esports Integrity Coalition.
Abios announced its partnership with ESIC earlier this year. The organization works to prevent match-fixing, cheating, and doping by investigating and reporting players or teams where it finds evidence of nefarious activity. This partnership means one of the biggest esports data providers for Dota 2 is upholding esports integrity and safeguarding from bad actors.
What’s the Market like in 2024?
Even with these complexities, Dota 2 is one of the most commonly offered games among esports books. This suggests a strong market, but the realities of the esports space may not align with that theory.
Thunderpick’s Kelly Sanders identified one key challenge for Dota 2:
“[The game] has seen a declining interest over the years, with LoL taking a big chunk of the MOBA genre player base. While Dota 2 is still one of the most-watched and most-played esports games around, there’s no denying League of Legends commands millions more players and viewers.”
Still, this doesn’t indicate directly a declining customer base for betting offering, as DATA.BET points out:
“The total turnover of DATA.BET clients during International in 2023 was 34% lower than the previous year and over 60% lower than in 2021 (the market-changing year for the esports betting industry due to COVID-19).
Meanwhile, the average bet amount in 2023 increased by nearly 40% compared to 2022 and over 123% compared to 2021. This indicated that while Dota 2 faces challenges maintaining its competitiveness within the gaming market, its fans remain exceptionally loyal and active.”
With this robustness and growth from the betting sector, the question turns to how companies can sustain this growth. Thunderpick’s methods have been an expansion into the variety of offers and information it gives customers.
“We offer a wide range of unique betting options beyond traditional markets, such as specific in-game objectives like which team will destroy the first tower or first barracks. Our platform includes exciting prop bets like predicting the total duration of the match, the number of kills in the first 10 minutes, or the first team to reach a specific number of kills.”
Companies like DATA.BET and Abios are at the forefront of expanding these offers, through expanded in-game statistics, building on the growing experience of gamblers, and facilitating informed and savvy decision making from bettors. To this end, companies like DATA.BET are attempting to innovate, developing interactive widgets to captivate gamers and encourage them to spend more time on the event page, increasing their overall engagement and enjoyment.
Key Takeaways & Conclusions
For the bettors themselves though, this innovation is harder to see. Steve identified that: “The market has been pretty samey the last few years.”
Without more dramatic offers he doesn’t see the appeal in switching sites or trying something new. The biggest draw for a Dota fan like Steve, he says, would be more connections to in-game things. Betting for in-game rewards, Arcanas, and other cosmetics, might be the innovation that would push him towards a different bookie.
Ultimately, the Dota 2 betting scene is strong, and getting stronger. But bookmakers will have to try and innovate to keep things growing. With customers often locked into one betting site or another by habit, rather than attracted by offers and innovation, there’s opportunity for bookmakers to experiment.
However, the biggest opportunity in Dota 2, for in-game item-linked betting, seems to have eluded the market. Even so, changes in stakes, expansions in data sets, and more in-depth tracking could heighten interest in betting on the game.
Abios facilitates the growth of a sustainable esports ecosystem by fueling enterprises and ambitious startups with the tools and data needed to build esports projects at scale. With more than 10 years of experience in esports, Abios provides historical and stream-live data from popular esports titles, such as Counter-Strike, League of Legends, VALORANT and Dota 2, to sportsbooks, search engines, esports teams, and others. As part of Kambi Group PLC, Abios provides data-driven odds and widgets to the regulated betting industry. Using proprietary modelling and innovative product features, Abios is taking esports betting to the next level.
DATA.BET is an esports data provider, which focuses on high-tech offerings. It gives operators a comprehensive esports betting solution, including live score feeds, odds and markets, iFrame solutions, and risk management offerings.
Thunderpick is a crypto esports betting platform which offers crypto stakes for a massive selection of events and markets to bet on which can also be watched via high-quality live streams. Thunderpick’s crypto-only platform is a tech-led solution that is easy to use, lightning-fast, and features fee-free payments.