Gambling skins has become an addictive and exciting hobby for many Counter-Strike players as they enjoy the thrill and want to expand their loadouts with cool skins. There are numerous forms of CSGO gambling, including betting on professional matches and playing casino-style games. It is safe to say that gambling sites are raking in millions of dollars a month in revenue.
However, have you ever wondered how CSGO betting started in the first place? In this article, we’ll dive into the CSGO betting history, how it all started, and the relevant events you should know about.
How CSGO Skin Betting Started
In 2013, Valve had the brilliant idea of releasing Counter-Strike weapon skins, which would enhance the visuals of weapons. These skins would cost real money, but the most important part is that they are tradable and marketable, giving them real market value, unlike other games.
The skins update was well-received in the community, and players were purchasing them to improve the aesthetics of their loadouts. During the same period, Counter-Strike’s professional scene was picking up the pace. More and more fans were interested in watching the best teams and players compete against each other.
With all of these things lining up, third-party websites took on the opportunity to create a business revolving around CSGO skins – a gambling business. Skin betting started when websites allowed players to bet their skins on professional matches, and the rest was history.
CSGOLounge – The First CSGO Gambling Site
The first website to take advantage of Counter-Strike skins is CSGOLounge, a legendary website that the early players of Global Offensive would have heard of, even if they gambled or not.
CSGOLounge was released to the world in 2013, the same year that Valve added skins to the game. At first, CSGOLounge was focused on being a trading platform, where players can post their trade listings and find others to trade with. However, they soon added a betting section that was made for players to bet on the outcome of professional matches.
Players could deposit their skins into the website and pretty much use them as gambling chips. They could bet their skins on which professional team would win a specific match, and if they were correct, they would have their skins returned with additional winnings. Betting on matches would undoubtedly enhance the esports spectating experience as there is something on the line for the bettor.
After the CSGOLounge spread to the entire CSGO community, the website rapidly grew, and everyone knew about it. At the website’s peak, they were taking in millions of dollars in bets and became a gambling empire that also helped CSGO’s professional scene gain more traction.
The Rise Of Casino-Type CSGO Websites
After CSGOLounge became incredibly popular, other people thought, why don’t we straight up make CSGO gambling websites that feature real casino and gambling games? And so they did.
More and more third parties started developing their own gambling websites, with names such as CSGOFast, CSGORoll, CSGOEmpire, CSGO500, and more gambling sites launching.
At the time, Player vs. Player (PvP) game modes were the most popular ones, with Jackpot and Coin Flip taking the charge. Players would gamble their CSGO skins against each other, and the house would take a percentage cut after every round played.
However, other websites would focus more on players going against the house, just like a real casino. These websites featured game modes such as Roulette, Crash, Dice, and other RNG-based games.
At this point, there were dozens of CSGO gambling sites, and players had an abundance of games to bet on, whether it was match betting, PvP games, or casino games.
Gambling Controversies
However, with a sensitive topic like gambling, there was no way that everything was sunshine and rainbows. There was a lot of shady stuff going on in the CSGO gambling industry, and most of these incidents ended up getting exposed to the public, highlighting how dangerous skin gambling could be.
Match Fixing
Let’s go back to talking about CSGOLounge. As we’ve highlighted earlier, CSGOLounge was undoubtedly the most popular CSGO gambling site, and it was focused on the match betting niche. Though the system was benefitting the professional scene and its viewership, actual professional players took advantage of the website to throw their own games.
The most notable match fixing case was performed by iBUYPOWER. The iBUYPOWER team was one of the most potent rosters in the North American region, and had the potential to compete at the highest level globally.
They had a Best of 1 match against NetCodeGuides.com, an inferior team. However, the match was for an online tournament without too much value – it didn’t really matter if iBUYPOWER won the game.
Since iBUYPOWER were the heavy favorite and NetCodeGuides.com were the underdogs, the returns you’d get from betting on the latter was around 9 times your initial bet. With this in mind, the iBUYPOWER players intentionally bet against themselves and purposely lost the game so they’d win some easy skins.
Soon after the match, Valve launched an investigation with CSGOLounge and found that there were large amounts of suspicious bets on the NetCodeGuides.com squad. After digging in deep, it turns out that the bettors were the iBUYPOWER players and staff.
After this was made public, the entirety of the iBUYPOWER roster except for Skadoodle received 10-year bans from the professional Counter-Strike scene.
Underaged Gambling
The next major issue was a general one, as almost all CSGO gambling websites at the time faced it. It was underage gambling.
Most gambling websites didn’t implement any personal verification where users had to show proof of their age upon signing up. Back then, there was no KYC (Know Your Customer) system, so new users could easily lie about their age and get access to the site. Additionally, deposits and withdrawals were based on CSGO skins, so it’s not like there were credit card or bank transactions being made. There was little to no way of verifying a user’s age.
Though CSGO was primarily targeted at a mature audience, there were still many underaged players in the game, and they were exposed to gambling and decided to try it out. Though the damage is difficult to measure, there are definitely thousands of underaged players who developed a gambling addiction due to CSGO.
Lack Of Transparency
The two issues we’ve mentioned are pretty bad, but we’d argue that this third one is the worst. To promote their website, gambling sites would often sponsor content creators and streamers, paying them to play on their website and stream it to their audiences to watch.
Sponsoring content creators for promotion was very normal, as long as the influencer didn’t have organizational ties with the website. However, there were some creators that secretly owned the website they were playing on!
The largest scandal involved two massive YouTubers, TmarTn and ProSyndicate. These two have a combined subscriber count of over 10 million. They were actively promoting and playing on the website CSGOLotto, which is a website focused on Player vs. Player games.
They seemed like they were having a good time playing on the site, winning Jackpots and praising the website. However, it was later revealed that there were two owners of the website, but they never made this information public. Who knows, it is likely that they could have rigged their games in their favor.
Valve Steps In
Though Valve only had good intentions of releasing weapon skins into the game, they were caught in a tangle when their products were being used as gambling chips, and we now know all the issues the CSGO gambling industry has caused. As a result, the Washington State Gambling Commission prompted Valve to do something about this situation.
To try and kill CSGO gambling, Valve actively tried shutting down unregulated websites themselves, shutting them down and restricting their access from the Steam platform.
All of these websites used automated trading bots to process deposits and withdrawals, so Valve pretty much just banned all of these bots. It was rumored that each of these bots cost around $3,000 to make, so you can imagine how much financial loss gambling sites suffered when most of them had hundreds of bots.
Additionally, Valve also imposed a new “Trade Lock” rule, where skins received in trade would be on trade cooldown for 7 days. Back then, players would deposit their skins into a Jackpot, for example, and if they won, the website would send the skins and the winnings back to the winner. However, if skins received in trade were locked for a week, then this entire system no longer works.
CSGO Gambling Industry Today
Today, the CSGO gambling industry still exists, but it isn’t nearly as massive as it used to be. The act of skin betting has become less popular due to the trade lock rule that is still in place.
However, most of these websites have started integrating real money deposits through cards, cryptocurrency, and more. Then, players could withdraw CSGO skins as winnings through the website’s inventory.
Some websites have also implemented Peer To Peer (P2P) trading, where users would directly trade with each other for skins and website balance. However, this system is relatively complicated, so most users prefer using cash methods instead of skins to deposit.