Rocket League is a crossover between a football game and a vehicular game. That’s why it is conveniently named as a vehicular soccer video game. The game is the brainchild of the San Diego based video game development studio Psyonix. It can be played on Microsoft Windows, Play Station 4, Xbox One, OS X, Linux, and Nintendo Switch.
The game is based on a simple concept in which one or a group of up to four rocket powered vehicles hit a ball around using their cars. The objective of the game, as in regular football, is to place the ball in the opposing player’s or team’s goal. Rocket League can be played both offline and online and has a single player and multi-player game modes.
Rocket League is hugely popular in the world of eSports. This is because the game is really competitive in itself and it resembles two very popular real life sports, a football match and a demolition derby. In addition to this, the format of the game is perfect to both follow and bet on. This format includes rounds of 5 minutes, which are played until some of the players or teams manage to be the first to get to two, three or four winning rounds. This means that a regular Rocket League match will never drag on for longer than 30 to 40 minutes which in turn ensures that each match will never turn into a boring snooze fest. If a round is still tied after the 5 minutes, the match goes into sudden death to determine the winner.
Some of the more distinctive features of the game include the oversized ball, the changes in gravity, players taking shortcuts to cross the field quickly, additional power when striking the ball, destroying opposition players’ cars, quick dodges, attractive spins, cars propelling midflight etc. This all makes for attractive play and attractive viewing and it is no surprise that Rocket League has taken over the eSports competitive world like a storm.
Rocket League tournaments are organized under the umbrella of the Electronic Sports League (ESL), Major League Gaming, and the game’s creator, Psyonix. Some of the more popular tournaments include Psyonix’s very own Rocket League Championship Series, The Rocket League Challenge, the Gfinity Elite Series, the Rocket League Universal Open, the FACEIT X Games Rocket League Invitational, the DreamHack tournaments and many other online and offline tournaments.
What is important to note is the fact that due to the game being a relatively new release, the prize pools for these tournaments haven’t been as big as prize pools for some of the eSports behemoths such as Counter Strike: Global Offensive, League of Legends, Dota 2 or Call of Duty. This seems to be changing however, and we have recently seen Rocket League tournaments with prize pools of $100 thousand, which was unthinkable last year. This trend of increasing popularity will probably continue in the future as well, as many competitive eSports franchises have a Rocket League team in addition to having a League of Legends, Dota 2 or CS:GO team in place for big tournaments.
Since Rocket League is still picking up in popularity, the teams on this list will still have a lot to prove in the future. However, with the Rocket League competitive calendar being more congested than other eSports calendars, each of these two teams has had a lot of game time under their belts in the last couple of years.
As we already mentioned at the beginning, Rocket League is perfect for the betting enthusiast. This is because it has all of the characteristics of a football match minus the fact that you have to wait for over two hours to see whether you won or lost. With Rocket League the wait time is almost four times shorter and the betting enthusiast also has the chance to feast on some out of world acrobatics and hits which not even Eric Cantona in his kung fu heyday could deliver.
Rocket League betting is available at almost all popular sportsbooks which enable eSports betting, as well as at skins betting sites. These betting establishments usually come out with four possible types of betting markets from which the betting enthusiast can choose. They include the universally popular match winners market, the handicap market, the futures or outright winners markets, and the betting specials markets.
The easiest type of betting market to understand is the match winners market. In it, punters choose which of the two teams will triumph at the end of the match. We'll use an example from the FACEIT X Games Rocket League Invitational to better explain this market. In the final match of FACEIT X Games Rocket League Invitational 2016, Gale Force eSports played against NRG eSports. This was the climax of the tournament and the two best teams got to face against each other. Since both of the teams were evenly matched, most betting operators gave them odds of 1.85 to 1.90 each to win the match. This distribution of odds meant that there was no clear favourite and it was anyone’s guess which team will win the duel. The match lived up to its billing as it ended 4-3 in favour of NRG eSports. This meant that all punters who backed NRG got almost double the money they backed them with.
The handicap market is similar to the match winner market. However, it has one small difference and that is the starting advantage of +1.5 or +2.5 which is given to one of the teams. If we use the same example from above in the context of the handicap market we will notice that whichever team gets the handicap advantage sees their odds drop because their chances of victory suddenly increase.
The futures or outright winners market and the specials markets are the last two types of markets on offer for Rocket League games. In the first one the punters can predict the winner of a specific tournament before it has started and in the specials markets they can predict the Correct Score or the result of each of the rounds.
Rocket League betting is all about understanding how teams react in different scenarios. Teams which have been on a winning run are always the best choices, whereas teams on losing runs should be avoided at all costs. In addition to this, teams who always rise to the occasion are a much better choice than a team which crumbles under pressure. Punters can get these pieces of information by either going through Rocket League statistics or by watching live streams of matches on channels such as Twitch.
There are currently no odds available
