Live betting made up 70.9% of wagers placed during the Esports World Cup 2026, according to data released by esports betting technology supplier DATA.BET, with Dota 2 posting the highest in-play share at 87.7%. Four games produced 93% of the turnover the company tracked, and Counter-Strike 2 took the largest single share at 41%.
DATA.BET covered all 24 games on the tournament schedule, including EWC debutant Trackmania and Fortnite, which came back with its Reload mode. The seven-week event ran in Paris from July 6 to Aug. 23, the first EWC held outside Saudi Arabia, across 25 tournaments and a combined $75 million prize pool.
Counter-Strike 2’s 41% of tracked turnover was followed by Dota 2 at 31.8%, VALORANT at 11.7%, and League of Legends at 8.5%. The other 20 games shared just 7% between them, with Rainbow Six Siege, Call of Duty, and Rocket League generating the most turnover outside the top four.
League of Legends had the highest average stake of those four games, ahead of VALORANT and Dota 2, while CS2 had the lowest, so the most heavily wagered titles weren’t necessarily the ones drawing the biggest individual bets. DATA.BET didn’t disclose absolute turnover figures or the number of bets it processed during the tournament.
Pre-match betting accounted for the remaining 29.1% of activity across the tournament, and CS2 had the largest pre-match proportion of any individual game at 29.1%. Dota 2 sat at the other end with its 87.7% live share, and no discipline took a majority of its turnover before matches started.
Drafting in Dota 2 and League of Legends is a major reason bettors prefer to wait, according to DATA.BET. Teams pick and ban heroes before each game, which hands bettors extra information about team compositions and likely outcomes, so some customers hold off until the draft is finished before placing a wager. Odds keep moving as the game develops, creating further betting opportunities after that.
Player-specific markets took 11.8% of CS2 turnover and 10.2% of VALORANT turnover, against 4.9% in League of Legends and 3.9% in Dota 2. DATA.BET had expanded its CS2 offering ahead of the tournament with markets on which player records the most kills and which records the most deaths, both including overtime.
Match-winner and map-winner markets took 67.4% of Dota 2 turnover and 65.4% in League of Legends, compared with 59% in VALORANT and 53.3% in CS2. DATA.BET put the lower concentration in the two shooters down to its wider range of available markets, which spreads customer activity across more outcomes. Round and map total markets accounted for between 3.4% and 4.3% of turnover in each of the four leading games.
FUT Esports against Team Spirit generated the highest betting turnover DATA.BET recorded during the tournament, followed by Team Vitality against Team Spirit and FURIA against FUT Esports, all three of them CS2 matches. Team Spirit, FURIA, and FUT Esports also topped the club rankings by both turnover and number of bets, putting CS2 teams at the center of the company’s EWC figures.
Team Spirit won the CS2 championship on Aug. 23, beating FUT Esports 3-1 in the grand final after knocking out Team Vitality in the quarterfinals, which means the eventual champion featured in two of the three highest-turnover matches. Spirit took home $600,000 for the win, while FUT collected $340,000 as runner-up.
The Esports World Cup drew 440 million hours watched across its competitions, a 26% year-over-year increase, and organizer Esports Foundation reported 850 million viewers. More than 2,000 players represented 200 clubs from over 100 countries, with AG.AL winning the overall Club Championship. Those are tournament-wide audience figures and separate from DATA.BET’s betting measurements.
DATA.BET Head of Esports Bogdan Holovnov acknowledged that several games in the EWC lineup haven’t yet built the betting popularity of the leading esports titles. The supplier covered the full schedule regardless, including the chess tournament from Aug. 11 to 15, where 22 players competed and Magnus Carlsen retained his title.
DATA.BET’s numbers only reflect activity processed through its own betting solutions, so they shouldn’t be read as a measure of the global esports betting market as a whole. Within that scope, turnover concentrated heavily in four established titles despite the EWC’s expanded lineup, bettors showed a strong preference for live wagering, and shooters and MOBAs split noticeably in which markets drew the money.