The esports gambling market offers different types of bets and the most popular ones are line bets and proposition bets also known as ‘prop bets’ or ‘side bets’ (Sweeney et al., 2021). However, regulation of esports is crucial to address the potential issues such as unregulated and underage gambling, which can occur through in-game features and the risks to the integrity of competitions through match-fixing or other forms of cheating (Gainsbury et al., 2016; Hamari & Keronen, 2017). Wilsenach et al. (2017) stated that gambling syndicates have been organising match-fixing and corrupting competitors in different markets in which the betting market was worth a lot and similar to traditional sports, a number of corruption scandals in esports came to light in the last decade (Holden et al., 2017). For example, number ‘322’ became a symbol for gambling-related match-fixing within esports after a Dota 2 player placed a bet against his own team to win $322 USD in 2013 (Durrani, 2016). In countries like South Korea where esports is extremely popular, there have been numerous cases of match-fixing influenced by illegal gambling which led to the Korean Esports Association closing the world’s longest-running esports league in 2016 (Ashcraft, 2016). Abarbanel and Johnson (2018) argued that educational programmes on rules and regulations around wagering on esports competition and the potential impact gambling has on game integrity for athletes are vital for the development of the esports and related gambling industry.
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