Halo eSports: betting, history and current state of the game

There is no game that can compare with Halo in how legendary it is. After all, this game defined an entire generation of games that were to come. It defined how first-person online shooters would be played for ages to come, and it sold record amounts of copies over the entire series. Of course, we are talking about Halo, the precursor to every first-person online shooter you have ever played. It doesn’t matter whether you are a fan of CoD or of Counter-Strike today, you owe the fact that you can play that game to the fact that Halo exists. This is why we are going to dedicate an entire article to discussing the history of the game, the ups, and downs of its competitive existence, and where it is today, in terms of who plays it and how they play it in the competitive leagues. But before all of that, let us talk about the game in the context of what interests us most – where it stands as an eSport today, how the Halo bets are placed, and what the best way to bet on the game is.

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Catching up with the championships

Today Halo is not organized just by the all famous MLG that has been organizing the games for years. Those who are interested in participating, watching or betting on the games will be able to do so at a large number of tournaments around the world. Teams in North America, Europe, and Australia are all participating in local competitions to win prizes and provide the kind of content we all need in our Halo lives. Those who are interested in the games will be able to catch the streams online throughout twitch or through the official Halo homepage. And if you are intending to be Halo betting on the games any time soon, you need to start learning about what’s going on in these championships, who the front runners, the underdogs and the important players are, and what their track records of gaming are.

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There are several ways of going about betting on Halo championships. The market for betting is diverse and allows all people Halo 5 betting interested people to pick something that they might enjoy betting on. It gives the options of picking something you are confident about so that you do not have to worry about losing your money because you decided to bet on something that was out of your expertise. Below, you will find some of the categories that you can bet in, and what they are.

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Map Winner

This could be considered micro-betting, where you will be trying to bet on your prediction of a particular team winning a particular map within the match being correct. It is not always easy to predict this kind of outcome, but understanding the general strategy of a team, understanding their general strategy and specific tactics, as well as their strengths and weaknesses,  will enable you to make some generally correct predictions regarding specific maps. While this might seems like an information-dense betting strategy that requires a lot of preparation on your part, it is also one that might end up being the more precise and the more lucrative bet that you make. Usually, the Halo 5 betting odds for the map winner are pretty diverse and often low.

Match Winner Halo betting

This is a rather straightforward Halo betting strategy that you will be able to find in most games. This type of betting requires you to predict who the winner of a specific match will be. It does not require too much knowledge, most of the time. All you need to do is have a basic understanding of the general match standings, the expectations most people have for the game and the level of the players who will be participating in the game. This is also the most popular type of betting being done throughout the championships, simply because of the traditional nature it has in relation to all of betting in the history of human betting.

Handicap

A relatively high-risk thing to be betting in Halo 5 on, the rewards for this might be higher than many anticipate. Within this betting category, a person will be trying to predict whether one team or an another with a handicap will be able to win the match, the game or a certain part of the map. So let’s say the bookmaker gives a team the advantage of already having one map, if you bet that the team playing against that team will be winning, you might be seeing some big rewards. This type of betting is some of the highest risk types since the handicap does provide a certain disadvantage to the players, so they have a higher probability of losing. Understanding the team is integral to making successful handicap winning bets.

Tournament Winner

Probably the best that is made earliest at the beginning of a tournament, with the payoff for the prediction being the highest. If you are extremely confident in your predictions of how the tournament will be going, you can make a bet on who the finalist of a tournament will be. Being right might just make you rich, simply because being wrong is so easy. After all, in a tournament full of strong teams, anything may happen, even if your understanding of the teams and the players participating are at a very high level. eSports are much more unpredictable than traditional sports, simply because the medium is not fully mapped and understood yet. Usually, Halo 5 championship betting pretty hard to do, but once won, they earn you a lot of cash.

Tournament Finalists

If you are not confident in predicting the Winner, you could always predict who the finalists will be. In this case, the winnings might be a little lower, but you can still be proud of making a winning bet if you do win. Usually, it is easier to predict the finalists, as there is always a bunch of teams that are similar in their proficiency and stand higher than the rest in their skill level. Still, be careful, because eSports tend to be very unpredictable – all it takes is one innovative and highly successful strategy for a team to become unbeatable.

Region Winner

This one only works for international tournaments. This will allow you to bt on where the tournament winner is going to be from – North America, Europe, Australia or anywhere else. The odds here usually depend on the proficiency of the regional teams, as well as to how many of them are in the competition. Not all Halo betting sites will allow for you to bet this way, so make sure you are working with one that allows you to do so.

Combined Halo 5 bets

You could always combine your bets – so bet on match winners, tournament finalists, and Tournament winner, but this will take a lot of skill and knowledge. If you are right though, you might become rich over the duration of a single tournament!

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The early history of eSports competitions and Halo betting are the same

The first Halo game, the one that defined my childhood and the childhood of many people my age, and many who came after us, was released in 2001 on the Xbox. And the game took the USA and then the entire world by the storm.  Initially, the copies did not seem to sell too much. There was no real hype surrounding the game so not that many people were lining up at the shop entrances to purchase Halo: Combat Evolved. But the sales did not stop, and the trailing sales kept increasing the number of games sold until five months later, one million copies had been sold.

This brought the game into the hall of fame of record breakers, making it the first sixth-generation console game to ever achieve this number, up to that point. The number of sales kept increasing though and the number of fans for the game kept increasing too. The fandom became immense in size and the hype for the next Halo game was growing by every minute, even without the announcement.

And then the announcement was made and the world went wild. People were standing on the streets, holding signs and waiting in lines, trying to get one of the first copies of the just-released Halo 2 game. The first day sales of the game broker worldwide gaming records, setting the future standards for first day triple-A games sales in the future. $135 000 000 worth of games were bought on the first day and the world went wild with the game. The story went on, but the people were especially happy to be playing the multiplayer that came with the game.

For three years many teenagers would go home to turn on their Xbox and keep playing their favorite game non-stop, worrying their parents to death about grades and health. But things did not stop there and three years later, Bungie released Halo 3, which again broke the records for the most sales on the first day of a game’s release, earning the company $170 million and completing the story that started in the first Halo game. This is also when the multiplayer became the smoothest and most fun to play, with the internet connections of the majority of the population being finally able to match requirements to play the game. Around the time that Halo 3 was released, the first precursors to esports betting sites such as GG bet, Betway eSports and so on.

In the end, all of the Halo games have had competitions held for them. These include:

  • Halo: Combat Evolved
  • Halo 2
  • Halo 3
  • Halo Reach
  • Halo 4
  • Halo 5: Guardians

There are more Halo games being in development at the time of writing this article, and they too will have competitions held for them.

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The first Halo Championship bets

The competitive gaming of the Halo world was not what eSports look like now, but it was the logical precursor to it. What happened in the Halo competitions would go on to define how we play and participate in eSports today, what we expect of the competitions and what we see on the screens. The competitions were ahead of their time and the first competition, which was entirely organized by MLG (Major League Gaming), was an exceptional case of an eSports event happening a long time before eSports were an actual thing. MLG would go on to use their track record and experience of organizing Halo championships to becoming one of the largest companies in the tournament organization history up to 2016. The very first offline championship was held for the original Halo in 2004. At the time, the championship involved nothing but competition and earned the players the name of the best. There was no prize pool, no prize money, not even betting on Halo, only the name and trophy of the best team in the world, and that is all that the gamers at the time needed.

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The games would go on to become more and more popular with fans and eventually, with the release of Halo 2, they were able to start offering prize pools amounting to the (now) tiny amount of $5000. At the time, nobody thought it possible for a game to earn you money, so the five grand was already a sort of an overkill for many. But the games kept going and becoming more popular. Soon enough the local offline competitions were able to attract more teams and more fans and the prize pool kept growing with that.

The MLG tournaments became a national thing, with people looking out for the championships and attending the events in person. This unstoppable growth of fandoms and teams soon led to the prize pool hitting six figures, and the fans going crazy for the games. Halo 2 became the first game to offer their players and competitors a chance to earn a few hundred thousand for playing. And all this simply because the players wanted to know that they were better than everybody else who was playing the game at the time. The first time a team won the championship and ended up earning several hundred thousand is the first time that the world realized that the future of gaming was not simply to offer entertainment for the players, but also an ability for them to compete for insane prizes. This is also around the time when the first Halo betting sites started appearing, paving the way for how we look at and bet on eSports today.

The competitions only got more popular after the release of Halo 3. More people than ever were interested in playing the game and being ranked against all of the others, simply because they were just learning how to understand the global rankings for the game. Simply being part of the Top 200 players in the world made many players think that they would be able to win the global competition, and the number of players trying to participate grew. The prize pools grew as well and soon enough, there were teams that would be winning a hundred thousand dollars from the competition.

Hundreds and thousands of fans would attend the events, and the players would be so invested in the games that they would spend days at a time competing for the first prize. The community of the players within those competitions would keep on trying to emulate the close quarters, friendly feeling that was part of those competitions. The top Halo betting sites of this time still remain as some of the most popular eSports betting websites today. Many still believe that this was the golden period for the Halo competitions at the time.

The championships kept up throughout the time of the release of Halo Reach, Halo 4 and Halo 5, but MLG started expanding the events to other games as well. 2016 was the last year of the Halo competitions with MLG.

The Gap and the comeback of the Halo series betting

Around the time when MLG started diversifying their championships to other games, people started believing that the golden age of Halo competitions had ended. Some even thought that there would never be the same level of eSports attention to the game as there used to be in the years when people used to play Halo 3 an Halo Reach. It seemed like many people stopped caring about the game as much as they used to before. So the popularity of the competitions fell and the name of the game seemingly fell off the charts for a little while. Not as many people were playing it, most dedicating more time to CoD, the many MOBAs that came up.

But A renaissance came about, once again, after the championships entirely dedicated to Halo were created. Now, the game is back in full force in its Halo Championships shape, and it presents some of the best entertainment you can get out of eSports. And with the game being back in full force as a popular eSport to watch, so are the top 10 Halo betting sites springing back up in their activity and livelihood. The tournaments to watch out for are:

  • Halo World Championship Series
  • Europa Halo Championship League
  • Halo Australia regional Competition

There are more coming to the table in the coming years, and all of the competitions will be able to offer a great show to those who are interested in seeing the games play out. They will also be offering a great opportunity to bet on Halo 5 championship outcomes.

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FAQ on Halo Betting

What can you bet in Halo?

In addition to the standard betsthere are also unusual types of betting, such as the exact score and the total number of kills. Here’s the full list:

  • Betting on the winner of the map
  • Betting on the winner of the match
  • Handicap
  • Betting on the winner of the tournament
  • Betting on the winner’s region
  • Betting on the finalist of the tournament
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What are the main tournaments in Halo?

Offline and now online events are taking place all over the world. The biggest competition is from Microsoft, Halo World Championship. Its prize pool is $1 million. There is also the Halo Championship Series. It takes place online, and 16 teams take part in it: 4 from North America, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. Other events also include:

  • MLG Open Halo
  • HCS GRASSROOTS 2020.
  • HALO 5 PRO SERIES
  • MCC PRO SERIES
  • DREAMHACK ANAHEIM
  • HCS PARTNERS WITH ESPORTS ENGINE
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