The goal of this thread is to (hopefully) chronicle my journey from square one to consistently making +ev wagers on professional cs on a regular basis, and ultimately being able to do this full time.

A bit of background on myself, I have well over a thousand hours playing csgo and have been following the cs eSports scene pretty seriously over the past couple of years, in that time I've seen tons of lines that I thought were off but never tried to take advantage of it up til now.


Reasons why I'm optimistic:

In my experience following the cs scene, lines seem to be "way off" more so than traditional sports, likely due to the inherent difficulty in defining odds for what's (literally) a video game. Whereas football/basketball etc are established sports with thousands of stats/historical matches for oddsmakers to use, oddsmakers for cs don't have that luxury.

Limits are fairly high; Pinnacle normally has limits of 3-5k minimum for tier 1 cs matches, and far higher for major events. Even a modest winrate can provide significant returns, which is why I've chosen for this project to follow tier 1/tier 2 cs only, ignoring the tier 3 and below matches where edges are perhaps higher but limits far lower (not to mention the higher vig as well).

I've watched thousands of professional cs games and feel I have an understanding of the game on a deep level that will hopefully allow me to pick up on things that the market may not.


Reasons I'm not optimistic:

Higher vig than traditional sports, although there seems to be a trend towards lowering vig for tier 1 matches so this may not be as large of a concern going forward.

Line shopping on soft books doesn't seem like as viable a path as with traditional sports due to the aforementioned vig, I regularly see pick em lines at -120 which seems really hard to beat.



Really welcome any and all advice as well so don't be shy to chime in, cheers

having played the game itself is more than likely a negative rather than a positive

Would you mind elaborating on this? FWIW would consider myself far more exposed to the esports side of things rather than actually playing the game so I think my perspective should be fine if that’s what you mean, nevertheless it’s a fair point though.

First picks:

Astralis v Natus Vincere

If navi end up picking dust 2 may look to hedge off but I think they'll likely go for nuke/overpass and I'm skeptical of their ability to win either map especially starting on t side, navi's t side on overpass is extremely uninspiring in the mid round which should be easy for Astralis to counter. Would slightly favor their chances there however compared to Nuke which would be a huge mistake IMO but they've shown they can pick nuke against Astralis before and I think it's certainly a possibility they try it again. Ofc could always just pick Train but at that point they're really conceding the veto and I'd assume we'd see the odds shift heavily in Astralis' favor pre match.

Don't think it's hugely consequential what Astralis picks, will almost certainly ban Mirage but as long as they don't pick into D2 I reckon they have a pretty significant advantage on all the other maps their pool just matches way too nicely against navi's.

Astralis -1.5 @2.70 1u


G2 v Furia

It seems quite likely that this'll go 2-0 one way or the other, some of the possible scenarios for the match:

1. G2's players show up individually as they sometimes do and they overpower Furia 2-0

2. Furia's hyper aggression is extremely successful against G2, especially given their communication issues and Furia wins 2-0

3. Furia entirely fails to perform as was a problem for them in late November and G2 wins an easy 2-0

4. Furia's aggression works on their map pick (Vertigo? Inferno?) but G2's skill is too strong on their pick (Mirage?) and the match goes to three maps.

Ofc there's other possibilities but IMO the first three options happen enough of the time for there to be value on the under.

Under 2.5 Maps 1.719 1u


Gonna try and dive into some more model based stuff over the next few days but for now these are obvs all just qualitative picks.

glgl

All my esports betting knowledge comes from DotA2 and CS:GO is a little bigger market than that so take it FWIW.

Firstly, have some respect for the market. This is a decent sized market. Pinnacle has said in interviews that esports as a whole is like their 6-7th biggest market. It isn't just all squares. At the same time, it can be beaten.

I'm a bit skeptical that the market can beaten with a good volume of bets purely qualitatively. You will need to build a model. I follow the DotA2 pro scene closely and I'm frequently surprised at what my model favors.

Line shopping should still be in the toolbelt. You may not find a ton of arbs (I'm sure you'll find some) but this is a good way to get your average vig way down. For DotA2, there are at least a half dozen decent books with different lines and I'm sure CS:GO has at least as many since all books that offer DotA should offer CS:GO lines. There's also a lot of books that buy from the same line suppliers so be mindful of that.

Here's a few general tips:

• Be careful with betting live matches. The books are all buying very low latency feeds which is shorter than the in-game client or Twitch streams. Don't get front-run. If you want to bet live, bet during breaks.

• Qualitative handicapping is still worthwhile but I'd combine it with something quantitative. Also, frequently if you find something qualitative angle and you have data, you can try to evaluate its real worth.

• Most of the esports specific books limit decent bettors very quickly. They are purely in the market for crushing squares.

Good luck!

One more tip: double check the outcome of your bets. I see about one misgrade every 150 wagers or so. Occasionally it is in my favor but more frequently not. I don't think this is malicious but just due to the nature of a smaller market. This isn't with props either. This is primarily match winners, match spreads, and map winners.

This is what every square sports bettor thinks about whatever sport they blow their money betting on thinks

Made a fair bit of progress today on the modelling side of things, had some difficulty scraping some of the data earlier but I've been able to figure it out now, already finding a couple promising trends but could just be statistical noise tbh I'll have to dive deeper to see if it really means anything.

That being said, if anyone has any information on where to find historical lines (ideally en masse) that'd be much appreciated, right now I'm manually tabulating stuff but if there's some sort of data readily available out there that'd speed things up for sure.



Really appreciate this, thanks. A couple of thoughts/questions if you don't mind:


I've noticed the same, even most betting websites that have streams are often at least 1-2 minutes behind, sometimes just as far behind as the twitch stream (which can be up to 6 minutes delayed) so that's not really an option. I don't plan on doing any live betting for that reason besides halftime and tech pauses but if I can find a solution to at least somewhat alleviate this in the future I might give it a go.

Working on something like this right now, I'll see what ends up happening but I'll likely record qualitative/quantitative picks separately and then abandon one (likely qualitative) if I have success with the other, or I might just keep doing both if they're both +ev, time will tell I guess.


This is largely my (admittedly) ignorant opinion as well, I'm under no illusions that I'm significantly (or even at all) beating the market right now. That being said, I do believe that esports is significantly less efficient than other traditional sports, so I'm hoping that the difficulty level is far less than trying to cap NFL spreads or something.

Given how quickly esports books in general tend to limit, do you think it's worthwhile basically "saving" these books and then just max betting when something is really off, or is it more a case of taking the best price possible and if and when you get limited so be it?

This is probably true, but it's fallacious to state that I'm a square bettor because of that. (I very well might be).

Basically my hypothesis, to really flesh it out is as follows:



1. CSGO is an inefficient market

2. I have a high degree of knowledge regarding CSGO

3. Therefore, it stands to reason that I should profit from the CSGO market.


Obviously you can question the premises(especially #2, which may very well not be true), but I don't think there's anything there that's automatically disqualifying to my argument.

If I was a huge fan of third division Senegalese soccer, watched every game followed every team injury etc, would you say I can't beat the market because that's "what every square bettor thinks?"

Don't mean for this to be confrontational FWIW just trying to explain further my perspective on it, appreciate you chiming in nonetheless

I don't really save books. Some books are going to figure it out quickly if you show a lot of closing line value. Some won't or won't care.

I do use a few tactics to try to not get limited and while I've been limited a few places, I've avoided it better than I expected. These might not do anything but it's easy enough to do and doesn't give up much value.

• For sportsbooks that use the same line provider (eg. a bunch of books use Ultraplay/Odds.gg), use different browsers to access them. No need to make it easier than it already is to tell that it's the same person. I don't use a VPN or anything that would give them some cover to pull shenanigans.
• Have more books so you're spreading your bets around naturally.
• Bigger, more established sportsbooks might be more willing to let you win some at esports if you're also betting something like NFL sides and totals. I'm not saying to make -EV wagers as cover but if you're already going to bet an NFL side/total, might as well do it at a book where you're beating them on esports.

Do you think every Senagalase soccer super-fan is +EV because the book doesn't have the most efficient pricing for their market or is it possible they'd be slightly better than a coin-flip but still worse than the vig? I'd guess most CSGO bets are placed by people who think they're smarter than market rankings rather than homers who always bet the same org every match but who really knows.

How often do you think Astralis sweep vs. win 2-1? You need them to sweep 37% of the time to break even at 2.7...61% each map, or 50% on opponents pick and 74% on home pick are a couple ways to get there but that just breaks even.

Idk anything about the CS:GO esports scene. I grew up playing 1.6. I was on pinny checking some stuff and saw a match was live so I decided to check it out and put some wagers down for fun.

It was Vitality vs Complexity. Watched the first match which was Complexities choice. They got handled 16-9. During the second map I made some live wagers.

I bet Vitality -12.5 at 4-1 for -121, Under 22.5 at 4-1 for +101. $100 on each. Hit them both. Was a fun time lol.

I would only bet Majors bc of the risk of match-fixing (still there but mitigate it hopefully)

This problem mostly takes care of itself because the limits scale down as the tournament prize pool gets smaller. It's hard to get more than a couple hundred down on bad teams in a tiny tournament. At the biggest multi-million dollar tournaments, you can bet 10k+. For the $150k prize pool EU tournament that just finished today with top tier teams, you could bet ~$2k on a match winner.