Esports betting in Australia has grown enormously. Sportsbet, TAB, and multiple international bookmakers now offer markets on VALORANT, Counter-Strike, League of Legends, and Dota 2 matches involving Australian teams. The volume of bets placed on esports in Australia roughly doubled between 2024 and 2025.

And almost nobody in the gaming community is talking about the problems this creates.

The current landscape

Australian gambling regulation permits esports betting through licensed operators. The Interactive Gambling Act covers online betting, and state-level regulations govern individual bookmakers. Major platforms offer live betting, match winner, map winner, first blood, and increasingly granular prop bets on esports events.

The advertising is everywhere. If you watch esports streams, you’ve seen the bookmaker sponsorships. Several Australian esports teams have gambling sponsors. Tournament broadcasts carry betting odds overlays. Social media accounts run by bookmakers post esports tips alongside their AFL and NRL content.

For a sport whose audience skews young — significantly younger than traditional sports — the normalisation of gambling is happening fast.

Why esports is particularly vulnerable

Match integrity. Esports has a match-fixing problem that’s more severe than most traditional sports. The reason is economics. A professional Counter-Strike player in a tier-two Australian team might earn $1,000 to $3,000 per month. Offer them $10,000 to throw a map, and the financial incentive is enormous relative to their salary.

International esports has been rocked by match-fixing scandals. IBuyPower in Counter-Strike, the Korean StarCraft match-fixing ring, multiple Dota 2 incidents in Southeast Asia. The conditions that enabled those scandals — low player salaries, limited oversight, and growing betting markets — exist in Australia today.

Limited regulation. The ESIC (Esports Integrity Commission) monitors betting patterns and investigates suspicious activity, but their resources are limited and their enforcement power depends on tournament organisers cooperating. Australia doesn’t have a dedicated esports integrity body. The existing sports integrity framework wasn’t designed for esports and doesn’t account for its unique characteristics.

Young audience. The average age of an esports viewer in Australia is estimated to be between 18 and 24. Gambling advertising is reaching an audience that is disproportionately young and may not have developed the financial literacy or impulse control to manage gambling responsibly.

The advertising problem

Australian gambling advertising is already a contentious topic. The government has taken steps to restrict gambling ads in traditional sports broadcasts, but the enforcement around esports is patchy.

Esports streams on Twitch and YouTube exist in a regulatory grey area. An Australian bookmaker sponsoring an international tournament broadcast reaches Australian viewers, but the broadcast itself originates overseas. State-level advertising restrictions struggle to apply to global streaming platforms.

Esports teams with gambling sponsors create another layer of complexity. When a team’s jersey carries a bookmaker’s logo and the team’s social media promotes betting offers, the line between sport and gambling blurs in ways that traditional sports are only beginning to grapple with.

What should happen

Stronger match integrity monitoring. Australia should fund an esports integrity function, either within an existing body like Sport Integrity Australia or as a dedicated unit. Betting pattern analysis, player education about match-fixing consequences, and whistleblower protections are all necessary.

Gambling advertising restrictions for esports. The same restrictions being discussed for traditional sports should apply to esports. Stream sponsorships, team partnerships, and social media promotion should all fall under the same regulatory framework.

Age verification. Betting platforms need stronger age verification for esports markets. The current systems rely primarily on self-reported dates of birth, which is inadequate.

Player salary minimums. This is the unglamorous but critical solution to match-fixing. If professional players earn a living wage, the financial incentive to throw matches decreases dramatically. Tournament organisers and team owners should be pushed toward minimum salary standards.

The uncomfortable truth

The gaming community tends to treat esports betting as either a fun addition to watching matches or a distant problem that affects other regions. Neither view is accurate for Australia in 2026.

The money is real, the risks are real, and the audience is young enough that the consequences of getting this wrong will play out over decades. This isn’t an anti-gambling argument — it’s an argument for ensuring that the regulatory framework catches up with the reality of the market before something goes seriously wrong.

Because in esports, “something going seriously wrong” means a generation of young Australians learning that gambling is just part of watching games. And that’s a lesson we shouldn’t be teaching.