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The bet builder is one of the most important features in sportsbooks, accounting for over 30% of bets on one of the largest sports betting networks in the world, Kambi, for Euros and Copa America.
Moreover, during 2024, almost 30% of bet builder bets on the Kambi network were placed on selections with more than five legs. As esports is a growing sportsbook vertical, getting the bet builder right is more important than ever to ensure stable margins and long-term profitable esports operations.
Niclas Sundell, Sales Director at Abios/Kambi, discusses the features of a successful bet builder that make esports a profit centre in a sportsbook.
Making esports profitable with the right bet builders
A bet builder is one of the most important features in a sportsbook, as it unlocks added engagement for matches, especially the more mundane and predictable ones. With every leg a user adds to a bet builder, their payout increases exponentially. This can make each bet feel more consequential and adds a thrill to each moment of the game.
For operators, bet builders are popular features that help drive growth in a sportsbook. To acquire new users, we’ve seen lots of operators offering lower margins on bet builders. While attractive for new players, it can quickly lead to a race to the bottom and eat into profits.
While bet builders can act as customer acquisition tools, they should support multiple combinations to ensure long-term profitability. With multiple legs, bet builders become more attractive for players as they yield higher potential earnings. For operators, having more legs reduces the risk, which increases the product’s profit margin.
Counter-Strike 2 and picking the right bet offers
For FPS titles like Counter-Strike 2 or VALORANT, player performance is largely measured by the number of kills and assists players can achieve during each round. The best players on each team are expected to take the headshots and win the round for their team.
Many fans are highly knowledgeable about their favourite players’ performance, making over/under predictions for player kills a popular player prop. These types of bet offers can be settled throughout the full match, making them more engaging than match markets, which conclude at the end of the game.
For users looking to combine markets, player kills can be combined with multiple in-game events, such as an ace, overtime, a knife kill, and more. This provides engagement throughout the match, as several game components must occur in the right way for the user to win the bet.
Multiple-leg bet builders
The bet builders in esports that can be seen on the market primarily support combining two bets. While this does provide the potential to combine engaging markets, it doesn’t yield the exponential payout that is unlocked with additional legs.
With a multiple-leg bet builder, users can bet on their favourite players to get over kills, their least favourite to get under kills, the match winner, and other aspects that together yield more payout potential. This also provides more engagement throughout a match, as events such as player kills or bomb defusals can occur in every round, bringing that edge-of-your-seat excitement throughout the entire game.
For sportsbooks, multiple combinations add more stable margins, as the likelihood of events occurring decreases with each combination added. Nonetheless, a bet builder supporting multiple combinations is also harder to build, as it has to account for more, potentially correlated events occurring.
Abios’ suite of next-gen esports betting solutions
To bridge the feature gap between bet builders in esports and those seen in sports like football, Abios supports its partners with a bet builder that offers multiple combinations across bet types, maps, and titles. This allows end-users to combine their favourite markets, providing an engaging experience throughout the game and an experience endemic to esports.
As esports grows in popularity with sportsbooks, Abios supports partners worldwide on the Kambi network, offering an increasing number of markets, including bet builders and player props, which unlock the most engaging features of betting for esports fans.
