Photo credit: Helena Kristiansson and ESL
The technological advancements occurring everyday make it hard for companies and sports leagues to monitor the precautions that are accompanied with eSports. At the Leaders Conference in London’s Stamford Bridge stadium, ESL announced a partnership with SportRadar to tackle the challenges that accompany regulating eSports.
SportRadar is a sports data service provider. The company provides cutting-edge solutions and services to media companies, bookmarkers, sports federations and state authorities to more than 30 worldwide locations. Driven by technological innovation, SportRadar will develop products and services for ESL. Together the companies will take an active stance to ensure integrity within the betting world of eSports.
ESL, Electronic Sports League, is the world’s largest eSports company. It covers a broad field of services in gaming technology, event management, advertising and TV production while fully catering to the needs of the eSport’s ecosystem.
“With an ever increasing volume of betting on eSports, expanding our anti-fraud initiative to also include match fixing, collusion other activities related to illegal, underage and responsible betting, was the next logical step in our efforts to preserve and promote integrity across our many competitions,” said ESL CEO, Ralf Reichert. “SportRadar as the global leader in sports data was the logical partner for such a cooperation as it is not only the most experienced but also most committed data provider in the industry. We look forward to taking this important and historical step with them to ensure a continued growth of the eSports markertplace.”
SportRadar was granted the exclusive rights to process and distribute real time match data going deep into fantasy-level detail. The company will also offer live scoring delivered to customers across the globe.
The Fraud Detection System (FDS) by SportRadar will monitor 450 betting operators around the world to ensure ESL has the best and broadest insight into any suspicious betting patterns and behaviors around its competitions. By tracking odds changes and liquidity across such a wide range of markets, the FDS is in an unrivaled position to detect irregular betting patterns. If there is a suspected fraudulent activity, a report will be compiled within 72 hours.
The CEO of SportRadar, Carsten Koerl, commented in a press release, “On our part, we will be processing and delivering data in accordance with our industry-leading standards, ensuring that end users get the fastest, most accurate and most engaging data possible. We are embarking on some exciting times, with CS:GO, Dota 2 and other titles all coming online in the next few months and we are proud that ESL chose us as their partners for this future.”
eSports is a rapidly growing industry and an increasing amount of gambling is occurring on levels approaching traditional sports. This partnership between ESL and SportRadar seems to be a wise proactive move to insure fair play.
