What is virtual sports in bookmakers
Many people confuse virtual sports with eSports, but they are different things. In esports, real people play computer games against each other (even if they are sports). Virtual sports are artificial competitions that are held by a computer based on a random number generator or popular simulators. Today we understand what virtual sports are and whether it is worth betting on it.
What disciplines are in virtual sports
The first virtual matches were presented in bookmakers back in the first half of the 2010s, but virtual sports gained particular popularity at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. At this time, there were almost no real competitions and crowds of players quickly mastered artificial sports.
The most popular virtual sport is, of course, football. Here everything is the same as in the real world. During the pandemic, this whole area was booming, and you could find virtual competitions in hockey, tennis, volleyball, basketball, baseball, various races, and even horse racing.
After real sports came out of vacation after the first wave of the pandemic, the interest of bettors in virtual sports has noticeably cooled down. In Russia, this type of betting was completely banned, and now it is not offered in legal bookmakers. But still, COVID-19 is not over yet and it is quite possible that virtual sports will soon again become the focus of bettors around the world.
What is virtual football
There are three types of artificial football:
- Playing FIFA between real players (this is eSports);
- Computer simulation of football matches (this is cyber football);
- Virtual football from providers.
Everything is clear with esports, we have considered it in other materials, and today we will not touch it. The essence of e-football is that on the popular simulators FIFA or PES, individual matches are launched, controlled by the computer. The power rating of the teams here is the same as in these PC games. The same lineups that match the real ones, the same graphics and infographics. But the match time is compressed to 5-15 minutes of real time. Again, do not confuse esports football with FIFA and PES esports battles in which real people play against each other.
Classic virtual football is a separate tournament, which only remotely resemble the competition existing in the world. The software shell for virtual football is provided by special providers, just like for slot machines in offshore casinos.
The most popular providers:
- Sportradar;
- Global Bet;
- Leap;
- Golden Race;
- Kiron Interactive;
- Other.
The graphics here are simpler than in FIFA, and the list of events is much more modest. Usually, only outcomes, double chances, basic totals and handicaps are available in the line. Sometimes even the exact scores and the authors of the first goal scored.
Each virtual tournament has a specific set of teams that bear the names of real clubs or national teams, but at the same time have nothing to do with them in terms of tournament strength or real form. Championship formats are different, but, as a rule, during the tournament, all teams play each other twice, in a round robin system. Matches of one round start at the same time and last only 2-5 minutes.
Each subsequent round starts a couple of minutes after the previous one, so that the players have time to place their bets. Thus, a full "season" passes in just a few hours. As a rule, each new season starts from scratch, without taking into account the results of “past years”.
Similar virtual competitions are held in other sports. There is also NBA2K-based e-basketball, NHL-based e-hockey, as well as e-sports matches of real players in these disciplines. But they, too, should not be confused with virtual basketball or virtual hockey, which we are considering today.
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An important clarification: there are no virtual sports in Russian legal betting shops. There you can find only eSports matches between real players and computer (cyber) matches in popular simulators. Virtual sports are legally equated with gambling and you will have to look for it on offshore sites.
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Should I bet on virtual football?
In the case of esports matches, you can still somehow assess the strength of esports players and other factors affecting the result, get some insiders. In computer simulations, and especially in virtual sports, everything is decided by luck and His Majesty Random. The maximum that can be relied upon here is the average numbers of teams for the “season”, but they not only do not guarantee, but do not even particularly affect future results.
There are strategies that allow you to more effectively guess the results in virtual sports, but most of them come down to a rather banal “deviation from the mean”, which also does not give any guarantees.
At its core, virtual sports are pure gambling, like online roulette or slots (slot machines). There is no way to find value or gain an advantage over the bookmaker. The search for some patterns in virtual sports is the same as the search for patterns in the sequence of numbers falling on roulette.
Due to the rather high margin that bookmakers put into virtual sports, it becomes a game with a frankly negative mathematical expectation. And unscrupulous bookmakers, quite possibly, also twist it up. Here, “reliability” is about the same as in slots.
But if your task is to have fun and kill a couple of hours on a high level of adrenaline, then this is a great choice. Virtual sports are available around the clock, there are always a lot of events, they go one after another, and end very quickly. But such entertainment, of course, has nothing to do with proper betting.