One of the most anticipated StarCraft 2 tournaments is just around the corner, with the world's best players getting ready to fight for their share of $500,000 in prize money.
A legendary esports event, the Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) Katowice is a CS:GO tournament held in Poland. In this guide, we'll go over all the participating teams, details about the schedule, as well as everything you need to know about IEM CS:GO betting!
The Dota Pro Circuit is in full flow. The next big tournament in this seasonal circuit is the PGL Arlington Major. Texas is the location, Esports Stadium Arlington is the venue of choice, and seventeen brilliant Dota 2 teams will be eyeing their chances here.
The LEC (League of Legends European Championship) is entering a new decade starting with the inaugural Winter split. From team rosters to an all-new tournament format, the league will be seeing much more competition.
It takes more than luck to succeed in betting, and at the end of the day, when it's your money you’re putting on the line, you need to do your research and discover how to think for yourself! Find out how to analyse esports teams and get an advantage over the competition in our comprehensive guide.
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When it comes down to it, there are definite factors that can decide a team’s win or loss at any level of competition. The team’s current form, player experience, and the meta of the game they are playing in are but a few of these considerations to keep in mind when choosing the esports team you intend to place your bet on. Yet even after all that, it can all fall apart – be it due to nerves, a crisis (such as an injury), or simply, your team just not being up to performing on gameday.
So why do the research? In betting, nothing is completely certain; you are always taking risks even if betting on the big-time favorites that are voted to win 99% of the time. Which is why, doing your due diligence by researching teams beforehand can heavily reward you if you manage to see value where it is out of plain sight.
The game is stacked against you – the average, everyday bettor, and you’ll need all the help you can get if you wish to make a profit in esports betting. And that starts with knowing how to analyse esports teams.
Before you go deep into your spreadsheets, you first need to have a bird’s eye view of the competition to see how your team would do in practice. Doing so ensures you have the right context to evaluate a team’s strengths and weaknesses.
First, you must consider the relative strength of their region. Check Liquipedia or Fandom and look at the regional league they play in. A team is only as strong as the teams it plays against on an everyday basis. For example, a team in the LPL that regularly faces and scrims against teams like Royal Never Give Up and Top Esports will likely be stronger than a team that only has fodder to play against in a minor league. To go even further, you can then check the region’s historical performances in international play to weigh how good the team will be in future events.
To tie in with our last point, you should always check a team’s past performances to better predict how they could perform in their upcoming matches. You can check whether they’re on a bad loss streak or if they’ve been on the come-up in the past months. This matters because a team’s resilience is often what separates a championship-winning squad and bombing out of groups.
Furthermore, you can check their head-to-head record versus specific teams they’re about to face. Naturally, some teams’ playstyles have a distinct advantage over another, and this could affect a match’s outcome.
After that, you can get to know the team you’re betting your cards on even better by checking their roster for any changes that might influence the team’s performance in an upcoming tournament. For instance, during the height of the pandemic, teams in VALORANT Champions had to make substitutions for players due to travel restrictions.
You can do so by following news pages like Dot Esports, Dexerto, and theScore esports.
These can also include health-related conditions that prohibit a player from competing at their fullest potential. In the past week, star player Kyle “Danny” Sakamaki stepped down from Evil Geniuses for the 2022 LCS Championship Finals. which has drastically reduced their odds at winning the tourney and shifted the betting odds in 100 Thieves’ favor.
Now that you have an idea of your team’s competition, you can start looking at the hard data and contextualising that with all you’ve just learned. For example, in League of Legends, you can check team stats such as First Blood Rate (FBR) or Gold Difference at 15 Minutes (GD@15) to peek at their playstyle. In games like VALORANT, you could see win rate per map depending on whether they’re attacking or defending.
The data tells a story, and it’s up to you to decode what it is trying to tell you. But there is an overwhelming amount of data to consider, so the challenge is to see which stats are worth paying attention to.
Lastly, the current meta is crucial in knowing whether a team will thrive. Although the best teams are known to adapt no matter the meta, not all teams can do so. And if a team isn’t comfortable playing a given patch, they might struggle against teams who better understand the meta.
To make it easier for yourself, you can subscribe to platforms that focus on making meta guides such as Mobalytics, Blitz, and Pro Guides. Otherwise, you can watch content creators on Twitch and YouTube such as IWillDominate that can guide you with not just meta tier lists, but also match predictions, match commentaries, and more.
Now that you have an outline of how to analyse esports teams, we want to show you our own trusted tools in researching teams from every country, every game, and any genre. Each game has its own passionate community with former pros, analysts, and journalists that can give you the tools you need to find the best esports teams.
League of Legends is one of the most established esports in the scene. As such, there are several tools you can use to analyse esports teams and guide you in making cost-efficient decisions. Our go-to platforms would be Games of Legends by developer Bynjee and Oracle’s Elixir by Tim Sevenhuysen (director of Esports Analytics at 100 Thieves). Across both platforms, you can find the most detailed of player, team, and champion statistics across all the major and minor regions.
GoL even offers stats that are curated specifically for betting, such as First Blood Rate (FB%), a team’s recent form, and even head-to-head records. These platforms are used by pros, casters, and teams in the community to help them scout for teams and prepare for upcoming games. So, rest assured, you can trust these go-to names in researching esports teams.
Of course, even after looking at the stats, you should still find the time to watch the matches of the team you are looking to bet on. To get a full record of a team’s match history, head on over to Liquipedia or League of Legends’ Fandom wiki, where you should find the complete list of match records with the picks, bans, game length, and VOD available for your use.
We've introduced an update to our match page design, as it now provides more context. We're working on completing this information on the tournament pages, but many matches will already display this content correctly. See the update in action: https://t.co/qMTWJMmZvY pic.twitter.com/1LYaDXNyE9 — Liquipedia LoL (@LiquipediaLoL) August 12, 2022
We've introduced an update to our match page design, as it now provides more context.
We're working on completing this information on the tournament pages, but many matches will already display this content correctly.
See the update in action: https://t.co/qMTWJMmZvY pic.twitter.com/1LYaDXNyE9
— Liquipedia LoL (@LiquipediaLoL) August 12, 2022
Counter-Strike is even older than League itself and still has a loyal fanbase two decades later. Likewise, you can still find platforms that will provide you with the data you need – one such platform that the community trusts is HLTV, which has everything—and we mean everything—you need.
Introducing the analytics center! See it in action here: https://t.co/P8p5q4NR37 pic.twitter.com/DRMXdFA0kp — HLTV.org (@HLTVorg) November 12, 2019
Introducing the analytics center!
See it in action here: https://t.co/P8p5q4NR37 pic.twitter.com/DRMXdFA0kp
— HLTV.org (@HLTVorg) November 12, 2019
They offer news about upcoming tournaments, match records, all-time stats for players and teams, and even a dedicated analytics page for betting. A few of the stats you can find are K/D ratio, opening kill rate, and even stats during pistol rounds! You can also check a team’s live odds across bookies and an analytics summary of their chances in an upcoming tournament.
Although they do have it all, HLTV is not the end all be all of stats for CS:GO. Feel free to make use of Liquipedia, Rotowire, and Leetify (among others) to get an even deeper understanding of the pro teams and players.
Going back to the game that started all MOBAs, Dota 2 remains the title with the highest prize pool any esport has ever seen. In 2021, the International had $40 million up for the taking. Today, it continues to draw in hundreds of thousands of viewers with a community that is still intensely passionate about the game. Which is why, it’s rather easy to find platforms, aside from the usual Liqiupedia, that can provide the kind of data you need to analyse the top esports teams in the pro scene.
Among the many resources one can use are datdota, Dotabuff, Dota2ProTracker, and more recently, Stratz. In our experience, datdota has been incredibly useful with tracking player and team stats such as Gold per Minute (GPM), Average Hero Damage (HD), and more complex numbers. Meanwhile, Dotabuff can be better used to track tournament leagues and check detailed match histories.
Exciting News! We're releasing an update for the Dotabuff App that has a variety of features that can help you build good habits and improve your gameplay during your Dota games! Here's a little preview of the some of the features that have been added: (1/5) pic.twitter.com/PrajGnhByE — DOTABUFF (@DOTABUFF) April 13, 2022
Exciting News!
We're releasing an update for the Dotabuff App that has a variety of features that can help you build good habits and improve your gameplay during your Dota games!
Here's a little preview of the some of the features that have been added:
(1/5) pic.twitter.com/PrajGnhByE
— DOTABUFF (@DOTABUFF) April 13, 2022
On the other hand, Dota2ProTracker can tell you what pros are playing and therefore, give you an idea of what the meta is in the current patch. Lastly, Stratz is more of an upcoming platform that can do it all in style. Despite being an upcoming project, it has everything you need – from leaderboards, Dota guides, tournament schedules, and players’ detailed stat breakdowns.
Despite just being released in 2020, VALORANT is shaping up to be the future of esports and already has the success that some other esports titles could only dream of. All eyes are on the rising tactical shooter, and stat platforms such as The Spike, Valor Buff, and VLR.gg have popped up alongside it as players look to keep themselves up to date with the game’s fast-paced esports scene.
To start, head on to The Spike to check the schedule of tournaments just around the corner. But what makes The Spike so useful is that it shows match previews of upcoming matches with head-to-head player stats, betting odds, community predictions, stream links, and teams’ match history.
#VALORANTChampions Average SPIKE plant round time per map during group stage from quickest to slowest round plant time: Fracture: 00:50.30 Haven: 00:51.49 Breeze: 00:53.30 Pearl: 00:57.05 Ascent: 00:57.56 Icebox: 01:00.16 More stats here: https://t.co/2AXnqDtfVl pic.twitter.com/BkUjTy4AEg — THESPIKE.GG (@THESPIKEGG) September 9, 2022
#VALORANTChampions
Average SPIKE plant round time per map during group stage from quickest to slowest round plant time:
Fracture: 00:50.30 Haven: 00:51.49 Breeze: 00:53.30 Pearl: 00:57.05 Ascent: 00:57.56 Icebox: 01:00.16
More stats here: https://t.co/2AXnqDtfVl pic.twitter.com/BkUjTy4AEg
— THESPIKE.GG (@THESPIKEGG) September 9, 2022
To get deeper into it, head onto VLR.GG – which is what some would call “the HLTV of VALORANT”. See how a team ranks in their region and check stats such as a team’s win rate while attacking or defending, and agent compositions used. Should you want, you can even analyse more complex data like Kill to Death Ratio (K:D), Average Combat Score (ACS), First Kills Per Round (FKPR), and more.
You can then better make an educated guess on how players and teams will come along in an upcoming tournament given the meta they are playing on. For example, as of late, Valorbuff states that agents like Phoenix and Killjoy have been on the rise in high elo. This indicates that teams are shifting towards a newer style of play in the world championship.
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege has the highest prize pool in 2022 thus far, with the lion’s share of $3,000,000 USD going to TSM in the Six Invitational 2022. To catch up with all things R6, first check the upcoming matches and tourneys on Rainbow Six’s Liquipedia. Then, you can try out the authority on R6 Siege: SiegeGG.
Naming itself the home of competitive Rainbow Six Siege, SiegeGG has everything you need, from news, upcoming matches, tournament results, power rankings, and of course, a whole host of stats. You can check a team’s map stats in the past months of play, research in-depth player stats such as Percentage of Rounds Survived (SRV) or even Headshot percentage. You can also check players’ stats on Operators during attacking and defending.
How likely is a comeback? Does ATK/DEF matter? We look at Stage 2: – In Berlin, the team that was ATK first won 60% of the time – 76% of 3-3 ties in Berlin was won by the team that was ATK first – SSG had the worst “throw”, losing a 5-1 ATK lead ➡️ Read: https://t.co/BlzFEA13GK pic.twitter.com/kQJfD4278t — SiegeGG (@Siege_GG) September 12, 2022
How likely is a comeback? Does ATK/DEF matter? We look at Stage 2:
– In Berlin, the team that was ATK first won 60% of the time – 76% of 3-3 ties in Berlin was won by the team that was ATK first – SSG had the worst “throw”, losing a 5-1 ATK lead
➡️ Read: https://t.co/BlzFEA13GK pic.twitter.com/kQJfD4278t
— SiegeGG (@Siege_GG) September 12, 2022
For the beginners, an option is to head over to their ‘Newcomer’ section and get familiar with everything there is to know about Rainbow Six Siege. As most will agree, SiegeGG is the only tool you need to get up to speed on the R6 Siege’s pro circuit.
Call of Duty has its own esports league with teams based in cities across North America, the United Kingdom, and Canada. With all the noise surrounding the Call of Duty League, it’s no question that the circuit has passionate analysts who have gone above and beyond to create platforms such as COD League Stats which provide the most detailed and helpful stats.
In COD League Stats, bettors can check a team’s performance across game modes (whether Search and Destroy, Hardpoint, or Control) and check individual player stats to go alongside it. The creator of the platform, Karsen, is the stats producer of the broadcasts for the CoD League. There are even theoretical breakdowns of stats on the page that could further improve your understanding of the teams in the league. So, as such, you can trust that COD League Stats is a reliable platform for your researching needs.
Comparing players performance in same-weapon engagements with an AR vs SMG in Vanguard *min 125 kills pic.twitter.com/lWUPVXDO7U — Karsen (@KarsenCLS) August 18, 2022
Comparing players performance in same-weapon engagements with an AR vs SMG in Vanguard
*min 125 kills pic.twitter.com/lWUPVXDO7U
— Karsen (@KarsenCLS) August 18, 2022
But aside from that, there's also Breaking Point — the home of competitive Call of Duty, where, you will find the latest news on teams and upcoming tournaments, the latest standings, and of course, player and team stats.
We recommend first heading over to Liquipedia to check a team’s roster, history, and tournament results. Then watch their past matches on YouTube to get a feel of their playstyle!
We recommend going for established teams with longstanding championship records, like Team Liquid, Evil Geniuses, FaZe, OpTic Gaming, Fnatic, G2 and many others. If you’d like to know more about these established teams, check out our piece about esports organisations.
To get an idea of what events are taking place in the coming month, check out our upcoming esports tournaments article. If you’d like the full list of events happening later on in the year, take a look at our esports tournament calendar.
Each esport will have different platforms where you can access player and team stats. Make sure to do your research and read our guide!
You can easily find VODs of past esports tournaments on YouTube through official or highlights channels. For an easily-accessible record, check Liquipedia for a comprehensive history of matches.
Through our in-depth guides and reviews, we are focused on providing the best insights into esports betting.