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.
The League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational is a chance for regions and teams to show who’s on top halfway into the season. With an all-new format and more teams joining the fun, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Our detailed MSI LoL betting guide has everything you need to know about the upcoming changes to this exciting tournament, as well as the latest odds and our expert predictions!
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Every year, each region’s top teams come together for one of the biggest esports tournaments around, which means that competition is always tough.
To get you started as a punter, look out for bookmakers with competitive odds, diverse betting markets, and a wide variety of payment methods. Whether you’re a newcomer or an experienced bettor, our recommended bookies will have you covered!
bet365 offer various betting lines from futures, moneylines, all the way to complex props on maps, objectives, and kills scored. The bookie is licensed and regulated by the Government of Gibraltar and has been a trustworthy betting platform since their launch in 2000.
Pinnacle first started out as Pinnacle Sports back in 1998, revolutionising the industry with their reduced overround, otherwise called ‘vig' or ‘juice'. The site is able to offer lower margins on their bets because they do not offer bonuses and have efficient bookmaking, which allows them to accurately price their odds. Pinnacle were also one of the first well-known bookmakers offer esports betting back in 2010. Thanks to this experience, the bookmaker has been able to expand over the years to cover Tier 1 esports like League of Legends all the way to World of Warcraft and PUBG.
Betway goes way back to 2006 and are licensed by the Malta Gaming Authority to operate across the UK, Spain, France, the United States and many more countries worldwide. Above all, the bookmaker offers competitive odds for a diverse collection of esports titles, including League of Legends, and offers generous promotions from welcome bonuses to free bets. Alongside this, they also strongly advocate for responsible gambling, which only further emphasises their customer-driven philosophy.
In League of Legends, there are almost an endless number of ways that you can bet on tournament matches and games. There are futures, moneylines, handicaps, totals, and props. Understanding how each of these betting markets work is key to any punter's success.
Futures allow you to place bets on the MSI even before it begins, including wagers such as the outright winner, which teams will make it to the finals, which region the champion will come from, and which teams will remain undefeated throughout the event.
If you're feeling confident, you can even make more specific predictions, such as which team will have the highest average game duration, which team will have the most deaths in a game, or which team will slay the most elemental dragons. However, as high the potential payouts are for getting these sorts of bets right, that’s only because getting them right is incredibly difficult.
Moneyline bets are a great option for beginners in LoL esports betting, as they are simple and straightforward. With this type of wager, you choose the team you want to support and set the amount you want to bet.
If you correctly predict an upset, where an underdog team wins against a favored opponent, you can earn even higher returns on your bet. To take your betting to the next level, you can also try matched betting, which involves using betting bonuses to secure returns on your bets.
If you're already familiar with over/under markets when betting on traditional sports, totals work in the same way. Here, you are asked to predict if the match will go over or under an in-game metric such as towers taken, dragons slain, and game time. As an example, in a best-of series, you can bet on how many games the match-up will last for. For instance, you can predict that JD Gaming will 3-0 the Golden Guardians by betting under the 3.5 map spread.
In totals, you can simply look at a team’s performance over the course of the competitive split and go from there. However, before you confidently place your bets, always remember that players are just human at the end of the day. They can underperform compared to their ‘norm’ of play at any time.
Handicap bets allow bookmakers to even out the playing field for the underdogs. In League of Legends, they do this through maps won (in best-of series) and stats like number of kills, barons, or inhibitors in a game or series.
With this market, you can cash out on a bet placed on a team at +1.5 as long as they manage to win one game in the best-of-three or win it outright. Meanwhile, a -1.5 bet means that the team must win two straight games to have the bet paid out.
This increases the risk that you take while betting, but it has an equivalent increase in payout if you manage to get it right. The objective handicap works in the same way where, for example, a -7.5 kill handicap means that your chosen team must end the game with over 8 kills ahead than their opponent to win the bet.
If you’ve put in the time grinding in Ranked queue, you’d know that there are objectives to be taken in each game aside from kills such as dragons, towers, and inhibitors. With ‘prop' (propositional) bets, you can wager on the occurrence (or lack thereof) of these objectives being achieved by the team you’re eyeing.
In Rivalry, for example, you can place prop bets on events such as:
In this way, you can rake in seriously high payouts by betting on what’s happening on the Rift outside of who wins or loses. Bear in mind, though, that you need to put in a good amount of research on the teams you’re betting on and their playstyle in order to be successful here.
The Mid-Season Invitational (MSI) is an annual League of Legends tournament that sees the top challengers of the regional leagues clash on the Rift for glory midway into the season. League of Legends itself is one of the most celebrated esports games across the world.
The Mid-Season Invitational is hosted by Riot Games at the start of May and is the tournament teams fight to qualify for in the Spring split. In fact, the event only comes behind the World Championship in terms of prestige and renown. LoL's MSI began in 2015, with the 2023 tournament heading to London, England for its eighth yearly run.
Until 2019 and the rise of the West, the Eastern regional leagues have been primarily dominant in the short list of MSI winners. In 2015, China’s EDward Gaming took home the trophy and upset SK Telecom T1 in a year where they almost won everything. After falling that year, SK Telecom T1 returned with a vengeance winning back-to-back MSIs in 2016 and 2017.
Then, in 2018, the famed Jian “Uzi” Zi-Hao finally won his first-ever international trophy at MSI 2018. But in MSI 2019, in their own homeland, the West overthrew the East as G2 Esports made history as the first-ever Western champions of the Mid-Season Invitational.
After a one-year hiatus because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 MSI returned with a vengeance as RNG took down tournament favorites DWG KIA to claim their second championship. They rose to success again in 2022 when Xiaohu and Bin took down T1 to claim a back-to-back trophy run at MSI, making that the organisation’s third win.
In 2023, the MSI has an all-new format with each region’s champion and their runner-ups competing in a more competitive, double-elimination bracket. And this year, an all-new champion will be crowned as RNG failed to qualify for the upcoming tournament.
The League community’s pleas have finally been heard as Riot Games has decided to give the MSI a format overhaul that’s been long overdue. For the first time in the esports’ history, MSI will be featuring a best-of-five double-elimination playoffs bracket with 13 invited teams. This means more games, more series, and more betting lines for you to place wagers on.
#MSI2023 is coming to London! 🇬🇧 Read more about the new 2023 MSI format here: https://t.co/iAjqZKCOcl pic.twitter.com/hgr7WPCnii — LoL Esports (@lolesports) January 10, 2023
#MSI2023 is coming to London! 🇬🇧
Read more about the new 2023 MSI format here: https://t.co/iAjqZKCOcl pic.twitter.com/hgr7WPCnii
— LoL Esports (@lolesports) January 10, 2023
To start, eight teams will be participating in the Play-Ins which will be played out in two separate double-elimination brackets. Here, bracket matches will be in best-of-threes with the top team from each group qualifying for the playoffs bracket.
The runner-up from each group will then compete in a best-of-five last chance qualifier for the last spot in the Top 8. Once the bracket teams have been decided, they will then compete in a best-of-five, double-elimination bracket until only one team is left standing.
For MSI LoL betting, it’s better to stick to the reliability of the major regions. This is only a general rule, however, because as easy it is to write off teams from minor regions, it’s always in your best interests to judge teams fairly.
With a format that is the first-of-its-kind in the game’s history, teams need to adapt to these changes or fall behind the competition. The adoption of double elimination means that the team holding the trophy up at the end of MSI is likely going to be the better team, eliminating ‘flukes’. That being said, we had these changes in mind when considering which teams are going to be the last ones standing when the dust is settled.
The Mid-Season Invitational has competing teams from all the regional leagues from countries across the world: Korea, China, North America, Europe, Latin America, Turkey, Vietnam, Brazil, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific. In the tourney’s all-new format, major regions get to send in a second representative which make up a total of 13 teams competing in MSI 2023.
For seeding, Spring split champions of major regions get direct slots to the playoffs bracket. Meanwhile, the runners-up of major regions and the champions of minor regions qualify for the play-in stage – the only exception here being the LCK, which has both of their teams having direct entry into the playoffs due to their performance in Worlds 2022.
Odds for the outright winner of the MSI 2023 taken from bet365, April 25, 03:00 CET:
Coming into the play-ins, 12 teams will be competing for the last three spots in the playoffs. With double elimination in play, teams will have a second chance to qualify thru the lower bracket. To help guide your bets in the play-ins stage, we’re giving you our predictions on which teams will manage to qualify for the highly competitive playoffs.
The #MSI2023 Play-In Draw! pic.twitter.com/sezNofH6n1 — LoL Esports (@lolesports) April 23, 2023
The #MSI2023 Play-In Draw! pic.twitter.com/sezNofH6n1
— LoL Esports (@lolesports) April 23, 2023
The LPL’s highly formidable Bilibili Gaming is set to take the play-in stage at MSI 2023. Being the only team to take games off of JDG in the spring playoffs, BLG are coming in as one of the favorites that could very well make it to the finals. Their top laner, Bin, is a returning champion of the former RNG roster that won last year’s MSI and this year, he looks to defend the region’s trophy. In their group, expect BLG to run amok and easily qualify for the bracket stage, no matter who they are facing.
G2 Esports has taken criticism for their qualification at MSI despite finishing 4th place in the spring season. In the upcoming play-ins, there could be a universe where PSG Talon or DetonatioN FocusMe take down G2 if they underperform. At the end of the day, however, this team has the raw firepower to be a top contender with talents like Caps and Mikyx, who have won MSI before. G2 has to pull themselves together and prove their worth by qualifying straight for the bracket stage as the LEC’s winter champion.
The Golden Guardians had a Cinderella run in the LCS after taking down heavy favorites in the losers’ bracket to qualify for MSI. GG took down former champions and up-and-comers with the MVP performances of Licorice in the top lane. Alongside him, Stixxay and huhi are returning for the first time since 2016 MSI where they finished right behind SKT in 2nd place. GG are a well-balanced team that we can easily see qualifying for playoffs with maybe a single loss in a best-of-five against a minor region team.
Before all the action starts in the Copper Box Arena, we already have a good idea of the teams heavily favoured to make a mark in MSI 2023. These teams and their players have consistently showed up at the highest levels of competition to warrant the expectations set for them in the upcoming invitational.
Gen.G are heading into MSI as the reigning, back-to-back champions of the LCK after decimating T1 3-0 in the spring finals. Despite losing long-time marksman Ruler in the bot lane, the organization’s managed to keep their hold in the LCK with their all-new duo in rookie Peyz and Delight.
For the longest time, Gen.G have been criticized for the performance of their solo laners in big events like Worlds. But in this season, Chovy has made great strides to improve his play and make impactful plays around the map besides his incredible laning phase. Meanwhile, Doran was the late Spring finals MVP with amazing engages on Gragas that singlehandedly won them the series.
In the upcoming tourney, look out for how the team’s bot lane will do against top-tier talents like Ruler, Elk, or Hans Sama given that this will be Peyz’ first-ever appearance on the international stage. But regardless, Gen.G’s defensive playstyle will be a thorn on the side of every team that’s bound to face them in MSI.
JD Gaming or Jingdong Gaming is the superteam of the year with the best talent in each role coming into the season. With Ruler coming into the LPL, JD Gaming have their eyes set on nothing less but the championship at MSI. If that wasn’t enough, JDG put on Knight in the mid lane who has consistently proven himself as one of the best mids in the region.
Whether it was against Suning in 2020 or in quarters last Worlds, JDG have come up short in international tournaments every single time. MSI will be the first opportunity for the team to prove their worth with their all-new roster this season. But if their performance in Spring was any sign, at the least, JDG will be a fearsome opponent even against the top teams in the world.
In a meta that is perfectly suited for their star carry to shine, JD Gaming are, understandably, the undisputed favourite of the community and bookmakers alike coming into MSI. Though, always err on the side of caution when it comes to betting on favourites, as superteams have been known to fail.
It seems the golden boys of T1 are now getting a reputation of choking. Each time T1 makes a name for themselves in the regular season or the group stages, they end up disappointing in the grand finals. Case in point, since they won spring last year, this same roster has lost four finals in a row from 2022’s MSI, the LCK Summer split, and Worlds to this year’s spring finals.
This season, T1 had a near-perfect split, and have been firing on all cylinders with bot lane duo Gumayusi and Keria as the highlight of the roster. The problem, however, came in the finals, when T1’s laners in Zeus and Faker would get outshined by their counterparts which decided the series.
While there’s no denying that T1 is a world-caliber team, it’s clear that Faker and the gang now have a mental barrier to overcome if they want to win the organisation’s first-ever MSI championship since 2017.
MSI 2023 is heading to the United Kingdom this year with the Play-Ins starting on May 2 and ending May 21. The entirety of the tournament will be held in the Copper Box Arena in London, England until the grand finals. The Copper Box Arena was the host to the 2012 Summer Olympics and esports tournaments like the RLCS World Championship or the Call of Duty League.
All match days will be starting at 05:00 PST/13:00 GMT unless otherwise noted.
After all the competition, a new champion will be crowned as the first-ever to win an international, double elimination tournament, one that could be the first of many more to come.
Starting May 2, you can follow all the action live on Twitch, YouTube, or lolesports.com. For live updates on the tournament games and schedule, follow LoL Esports on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. For those in London, tickets for MSI are available on AXS.com.
There are brand-new, exclusive rewards for watching MSI on lolesports.com. You can receive emotes and icons by watching the action live through May 2 to 21. All you need to do is log in with your Riot ID while you’re watching MSI and you’re ready to receive drops, which are set to happen at random during live matches.
Aside from the honor of winning a top-level, international tournament, the MSI champion will receive a hefty slice from the tourney’s prize pool. As per tradition, the MSI’s prize pool will have a base of $250,000 and will increase based on a percentage of the year’s MSI skins sold.
This year, Riot is introducing the MSI 2023 Esports Premium Bundle which includes an event pass, Inkshadow Yasuo, its exclusive chroma, and emotes. 50% of the proceeds from this bundle will go towards the prize pool. Meanwhile, the Inkshadow Event Pass and Inkshadow Yasuo on their own will contribute 25% of its proceeds towards the prize pool as well.
Before betting on League of Legends, learn the basics of the game first. Aside from playing the game, resources such as Mobalytics, ProGuides, and Skill Capped can help you get into MOBAs and understand pro-level matches.
Knowing how champions work, the individual champion roles, game mechanics, objectives, and everything goes together is critical for your success as a bettor. But that’s just scratching the surface as if you really want to win your bets – you’re going to need to put in the work to beat bookmakers at their own game.
To start, you have to intimately know the teams you will end up putting your money on. Look up their past performances in the Spring regular season and playoffs, since these will be an indicators of their form coming into MSI. You can check out player and team stats on Oracle’s Elixir and Games of Legends to give you a precise idea of what teams like to play and how they play a game on the Rift.
After this, you have to objectively gauge a team’s strength, since not all regions are made equal. Historically, major regions (LCS, LEC, LPL, and LCK) are at a tier of their own, because they have the resources to better develop talent compared to the minor leagues. For example, Korea and China have been on top of the standings for the past decade, and deservedly so. They have an immense pool of talent to build on and a culture that is conducive for player development.
That being said, the West has had their moments – such as in the 2019 MSI, where there was an all-Western final between G2 Esports and Team Liquid. So, this shift to double elimination could just be what teams need to have a fighting chance at MSI.
For a tournament that has all the competitive regions joining in, it can feel like navigating through uncharted waters when betting on and against teams you’re unfamiliar with. Therefore, we highly recommend specialising by only betting on teams you have done your due diligence on.
Specialising is a betting strategy that will help you better know a team’s strengths and weaknesses and see how they will truly stack up against other teams. In League of Legends, some strategies work better against each other, and teams have their own individual styles that can work well against some opponents and poorly against others. So, knowing a team’s ins and outs and how well they relatively are is crucial in deciding bets that could go either way.
For instance, in the LCK 2023 Spring finals, T1 were almost always able to secure leads in the early game through their laning. However, Gen.G’s ability to stall games and rely on their superior teamfighting allowed them to nullify whatever advantages T1 got in the early game. Since T1 were heavily favored to win the finals, only bettors that saw Gen.G’s potential to upset the all-pro team would have been able to take advantage of the skewed odds.
At the end of the day, the team who performs will take the cake. So, you have to prepare yourself for when your bets end up going south. You can do this by betting responsibly through proper bankroll management. Only bet money that you are willing to lose with each wager only being around 1-5% of your bankroll, otherwise called a unit.
Never chase losses and have a record of the bets you have placed so you can adjust your betting approach whenever needed. This is an underrated way to make sure you can keep on betting and thereby have more opportunities to put down bets. For example, even if you wagered what you thought was a sure win on T1 and they ended up losing, you still have enough in the tank to bounce back from your loss.
Midway into the year, the meta has barely changed from last Worlds with a heavy focus on hyper carries down bot lane. In Patch 13.8, the patch for MSI, there still seems to be no meaningful changes that will shift the meta. So, you can expect that the latter will still revolve around teamfight-heavy compositions that rely on keeping the marksman alive.
Champions like Ornn (who received a crucial bugfix), Lillia, and Ezreal might see more play in MSI compared to previous patches. Furthermore, Yuumi and Milio will be disabled for the entire tournament which will limit games’ variance in MSI. But besides that, we will still be seeing the same carries like Jinx, Aphelios, and Xayah carrying down bot lane with Wukong, Vi, Sejuani or Makai engaging from the jungle.
Champion Stats (taken from Games of Legends as of April 25, 10:00 CET)
MSI 2023 is one of the biggest esports tournaments of the year, with an all-new format that will be a pleasure to watch. With best-of series as early as play-ins, there’s going to be even more games to bet on come May 2nd. Top-tier teams like Gen.G, T1, JDG, and BLG all look like teams that could go all the way to the finals and winning the championship. Unfortunately, Western and minor regions will once again be playing second fiddle to the LPL and the LCK.
Nevertheless, MSI 2023 will be one for the books as it is Riot’s first international tournament to feature a double-elimination bracket in the playoffs. With so many games to tune into, that only means even more opportunities for you as a punter!
The 2023 Mid-Season Invitational starts on May 2 and will run until May 21. Play-Ins will be from May 2 to May 8 with playoffs following from May 9 to 14 and May 16 to 21.
For the first time in the game’s history, the MSI will be featuring a two stage, double-elimination bracket. The first stage will see 12 teams compete in the Play-Ins which will be followed by the Playoffs bracket until one team is crowned the champion.
MSI 2023 will be held in London, England. The tournament will be held with a live audience in the Copper Box Arena, a sports complex that was originally built for the 2012 Summer Olympics.
The winning team gets to take home a hefty chunk of the $250,000 prize pool, which can still go up based on the sales of the yearly skin released for MSI.
For MSI 2023, our favourite betting sites would have to be Betway, bet365, and Pinnacle. These bookmakers offer competitive odds, diverse betting markets, and plenty of popular payment methods.
Through our in-depth guides and reviews, we are focused on providing the best insights into esports betting.