DATA.BET has published its analysis of wagering activity during the Esports World Cup 2026. The seven-week event ran from July 2nd to August 23rd, at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, the first edition staged outside Saudi Arabia, and carried a prize pool of $75,000,000.
DATA.BET covered 24 titles, making it a unique offering in the market. This included Trackmania, which made its EWC debut this year, and Fortnite, back in the line-up with the Reload mode.
Four titles drove 93% of turnover: Counter-Strike 2 at 41%, Dota 2 at 31.8%, VALORANT at 11.7% and League of Legends at 8.5%. Bet size told a different story, with the highest average stake in LoL, ahead of VALORANT and Dota 2, and CS2 closing the list with the smallest average bet size.
Outside of this leading group, Rainbow Six Siege, Call of Duty and Rocket League produced the most turnover. The pattern is clear -turnover, leadership and stake size don’t move together, and a line-up has to serve both high-frequency CS2 and the higher-stakes LoL bettors. Across the full slate, 29.1% of bets were placed pre-match and 70.9% live, and no discipline was pre-match dominant.
This pattern makes sense for esports, where matches carry far more in-play variables than sports, so live betting dominates, especially in Dota 2 and LoL. In these disciplines, draft and hero selection can reshape a game before the map starts, and bettors wait for that information before placing a bet.
This is where DATA.BET comes in: mathematical models and a professional trading team watching the lines in real time, with odds auto-correlated across outcomes.
Market preferences followed a similar hierarchy. Player Props drew the strongest share in CS2, accounting for 11.8% of all turnover on the market, compared to 10.2% in VALORANT, 4.9% in LoL and 3.9% in Dota 2. Also, part of the esports audience follows players as closely as clubs. These bettors want to wager on a specific player’s actions rather than a team’s result, and Player Props directly meet that demand.
Ahead of the tournament, anticipating the demand around CS2, the company expanded its line-up with two new markets in Player Props: Player with Most Kills (incl. overtime) and Player with Most Deaths (incl. overtime)
Duration markets, including round and map totals, led in Dota 2 at 4.3%, followed by LoL at 4%, CS2 at 3.5%, and VALORANT at the lowest, 3.4%. The pattern holds for Straight Winner and Map Winner selections, which also make up a larger share of betting in Dota 2 (67.4%) and LoL (65.4%) than in the two shooters, VALORANT (59%) and CS2 (53.3%). The reason is depth of choice, not preference. In CS2 and VALORANT, high uptime and mature mathematical models allow the company to offer a far wider range of markets, so bettors spread across many outcomes rather than concentrating on a single result.
Bogdan Holovnov, Head of Esports at DATA.BET, says: “Esports World Cup is not the first event in esports history to bring multiple disciplines together under one banner. However, it is undoubtedly the most ambitious event of its kind, featuring the largest number of titles. We recognise that many of these games do not currently enjoy the same level of popularity, including among bettors.
“As a leading force in esports, we are constantly evolving, exploring new opportunities and striving to lead the way into new areas of the industry. For us, this is yet another challenge we have set ourselves and another demonstration that, when it comes to esports, there is virtually no limit to what we can deliver.”
Behind the numbers, an event of this scale is as much a technical undertaking as a commercial one. All events were spread over seven weeks, which meant it placed sustained peak load on the solution rather than a single burst.
The Esports World Cup 2026 confirmed what the data has been showing across the season: esports betting is live-first and player-led.
