From February 22nd to March 5th, multiple Dota 2 fans will flock to South America to witness the Lima Major 2023 — the first Major of the 2023 Dota Pro Circuit season. This will be the first DPC Major to be held in South America, in Peru’s capital Lima, and features 18 of the best teams from the first leg of the DPC season.
Majors are among the most popular global tournaments in the Dota 2 calendar. These epic competitions draw in thousands of fans of various ages and professions from all over the world, whilst also seeing a 3-4x increase in bets placed compared to DPC tournaments, according to BETER’s trading department. For example, last year’s PGL Arlington Major 2022 was the second most-watched Major in history, with more than 707,000 people tuning in. First place in this regard is still held by the Kyiv Major 2017, which drew in over 840,000 spectators.
Betting providers and operators always put a lot of energy into preparing for Majors, whether that be through marketing activations, bolstering their offerings or in some cases sponsoring these events.
Operators tend to see a considerable spike in visits to the esports sections of their websites due to Majors or other international competitions sparking the interest of more casual esports fans. However, this means that as well as finding space for all these new faces, operators also need to find new and interesting ways to engage with bettors to offer them something new and exciting.
At the same time for providers, Majors are very important events. The competitions help them by offering an idea of how effective their operations are. Using the stats helps companies assess current trends, such as how teams are playing and how active bettors are. This ultimately gives suppliers a chance to improve the trading product their offer to operators.
By utilising these statistics, operators can look to create new kinds of content for bettors. This has led to solutions that now enable users to bet not only on matches, but also on duels. To explain, duels see the two top players from each team go head-to-head. At the end of each map, the winner of the duel is determined based on the individual results achieved by each player.
Next-map betting on these duels is nothing new in the esports space. The practice is already well established in CS:GO, Dota 2 and most other MOBA games, with the offering only growing in popularity.
However, to take the concept of duels even further, betting content and data provider BETER has taken the decision to be the first on the market to release a new kind of content for Dota 2 ahead of the Lima Major 2023 — duels in dynamic.
What are dynamic duels and how does it differ from next-map duels?
It’s important to note that dynamic duels are not a completely new offering, with the option already prevalent in CS:GO. However, this offering has previously not been featured in Dota 2.
Here’s a simplified breakdown of what makes dynamic duels different from typical duel offerings. For next-map duels, a bettor sees some odds for a next-map bet and places a bet on the map and on a player duel before the map in question begins. All they then have to do is wait for the end of the map and hope that their team and its members perform well so that their bet comes through.
However, with dynamic duels, for the first 10-15 minutes of the map, when the teams have already picked characters and started playing, bettors have a unique opportunity to bet on a range of markets with odds that can change in an instant. They can track and analyze the in-game situation, and how the balance of power between the teams and players changes depending on which players take part in the duels. This, in turn, should keep the bettor engaged not only in the game but with the operator as well.
Dynamic duels have been made possible thanks to BETER’s specialised MOBA trading team, which has around eight years of experience working in the industry, and in-house math models. Moreover, the company’s official games data from reputable suppliers assist the trading team in generating odds as quickly as possible, boosting uptime as a result.
Whilst BETER’s dynamic duels will only become available during the Lima Major 2023 playoffs (February 28th – March 5th), the provider’s internal predictions suggest that this new offering will increase engagement and activity by five times in comparison to next-map betting. Next-map duels were available during the group stage (22nd-26th February).
Alongside this offering, BETER will continue to provide its partners with a data feed that covers 11 esports disciplines and 450+ global esports tournaments. Overall, the company offers its customers 40,000+ pre-match and 25,000+ live events per year.
The article was originally published at Esports Insider.
