Individual duel
The first option you have is individual game betting. Here you wager on which player will win an individual duel. This case is very useful if you don’t want to watch an entire match but want to bet on the Hearthstone. You can place money on individual duels, which are considerably shorter than an entire game.
Many value odds are available on individual battles, where luck can be a huge factor. If Bob plays Dave, and Bob is a better player, the odds would be more even than an entire match, where skill triumphs luck. While in a full best of five the odds might be something like 3-1.33 in favor of Bob, in an individual fight it would be something like 2-1.5 in favor of Bob.
Over or Under Turns
Our next Hearthstone betting option is the over/under on turns in a fight. These wagers are usually only available in the biggest HS matches but are really fun to place money on. In this wager, you are basically prediction for how competitive the battle will be, because the more turns a battle takes, the more competitive it is.
For example, let’s say the over/under on turns is eighteen. If the game is over in less than eighteen turns than the under hits. If the battle lasts more than eighteen than the over hits. If the battle lasts exactly eighteen turns, both bets are pushed. Over/under bets are a fun little bet that I would recommend you try if you get the chance!
Simple Match
The third option we have available is the classic and simple match betting. Here you simply bet on the player you think will win. The odds are usually heavily sided toward the favorite, but if you just want to watch a match of Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft and root for your favorite player this is the wager for you. Very easy to understand, and probably the most popular bet out there.
Handicap
Our fourth betting type available is the match handicap. In this wagering offer, oddsmakers create a battle handicap for the match. For example, let’s take Bob and Dave again. The battle handicap is -1.5 Bob because he is the favorite. This means if Bob’s score -1.5 is more than Dave’s score, Bob wins the bet.
Basically, Bob must win either 3-1 or 3-0 for this bet to hit and if Dave gets two or more maps, he wins this wager. Handicap bets are very popular with the more sophisticated bettors, as value is oftentimes available if you know how to find it. Handicap wagers are a cool market to try out and hopefully win some money on!
First Damage
Our fifth and final Hearthstone bet is the first damage market. Here you bet on whose hero will take damage first. Often considered a very luck based bet, these wagers have how limits and are very even.
I would recommend you try this wagering option if you have some time to catch a start of a battle but not the whole thing. First damage is a market that is often considered a coin flip, and you should treat us as such.
This is a really fun e-sport to watch, and placing a bet just makes a match that much more exciting.
Tournaments
With sponsors lining up around the block to support these contests, many big ones have emerged, with ridiculously huge prize pools. Now we will be going over some of the biggest tournaments in the Hearthstone pro scene available for betting!
The first contest in this list is the Hearthstone World Championship. Organized by the game’s creators Blizzard, this competition features huge prizes, long and tenacious qualifiers, and a great and exciting atmosphere. We will analyze the 2016 version of the tournament in this section. It had a one million dollar prize pool, with sixteen of the finest Hearthstone players in the world competing for that.
The winner, Pavel from Team Millennium took home a whopping two hundred and fifty thousand dollars! The second place finisher DrHippi from Virtus.Pro got a pretty good prize as well with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Third and fourth places brought home hundred thousand dollars each as well. Even with these huge prizes, there was still four hundred thousand dollars split among the bottom twelve teams, which isn’t a bad payday for losing a tournament. Taking place in different places each year, it is usually hosted in big arenas with killer crowds. The World Championship happens once a year. This competition is definitely the biggest one of the year!
The next contest on this list is the World Cyber Arena. The prize pool has increased every year, with it having a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar pool in 2016. This China-based tournament is the biggest international non-American event to place Hearthstone bets on. With over a hundred thousand prize for the winner, this event had two players without teams win last time in 2015.
The best part of this battle is the passion in the stadium. Many people have described the energy level in the stadium to be incredible. The Chinese absolutely love esports and make this a fun event to witness! This competition takes place once a year, usually a few weeks before the Chinese New Year. Featuring a 30 player round robin, this event takes a solid week from start to finish and provides a ton of high quality Hearthstone. The World Cyber Arena is probably the longest major HS tourney out there, with an arduous qualifier that ensures that only the best of the best make it. An awesome contest to check out, and one of the biggest ones out there.
The third battle on our list is the Archon Team League Championship with a huge two hundred and fifty thousand dollar prize pool. This tournament was first scheduled in 2014 and happens once a year with a constant prize pool. It is a twelve-week round robin, with a playoff for the best teams in the groups, but the really interesting part of this contest is the story behind it.
The organizers of this event, Jason Chan and Brent Kaskel, were basically broke when they organized the tournament and first announced the prize pool. In fact, they would have to go deep into debt to pay the winners if they couldn’t generate enough sponsors and revenue. The event was thankfully a huge hit with millions of viewers, and is now one of the biggest HS competitions out there. With the right mix of ambition, attitude, and luck, this bold move made by two young entrepreneurs is one of the most viewed Hearthstone events out there!
Our fourth and final contest in this article is Hearthstone Team Story. This Chinese based tourney is full of extremely talented local players. With a prize pool approaching one hundred fifty thousand USD (converted from Chinese Yen), it has the third biggest prize pool for a HS contest (excluding repeats).
This battle took place over two years, with each year divided into “Chapters”, like a story in a book. Players compete in a long group stage, earning about six hundred US dollars per win, and the winner of the four team playoff wins a huge fifty thousand dollar prize pool, all of it going to the winner.
A unique aspect of this event is that “teams” made up of five players play each other, and whichever team’s players win more matches (three out of five), wins the matchup. The Hearthstone Team Story is the only team based HS contest to offer a prize pool of over one hundred thousand dollars, and the team based aspect of it makes it appealing a unique and different type of tournament. The plan on holding another competition next year and the Team Story looks to be a huge and exciting event heading into the future of this game.
With so many events happening, it is useful to know the best and the biggest ones.
Rules of the competitive Hearthstone
Next will go over the basic competitive rules. Hearthstone is a free to play online card collectible game available on iOS, Android, and PC’s. It is quite incredible for a mobile card game to become an e-sport, but if anyone can do it, it would have been Blizzard the developer of Overwatch, a popular first person shooter. Without further ado, let’s get into the rules!
Hearthstone is a very complicated and has many rules like most other card games, so let’s get started with the basic gameplay. It is a turn based game, with each player taking their turn. Opponents cannot do anything during your turn. During your move, you can cast spells, and summon minions, just make sure you have the mana tokens for it. You get one mana every turn, and your mana is refreshed at the start of every round. So on turn one you would have one mana, two mana on the second, etc.
On top of this, you have a hero with thirty hit points. The person who kills the opponent’s hero first wins the battle. When each match begins, both players have thirty of less cards in their respective decks. The player who goes first is allowed to draw only three cards while the player who goes second can draw four. This is to help balance out the advantage of going first. Even despite this, those going first are considered to have a small advantage.
At the start of every round you must draw a card, and if you can’t your hero takes an amount of damage that grows every turn. When it is your turn, you can play any combination of spell and minion cards as long as you have mana for it. Your move ends when you either choose to end it, or your timer runs out. As the turns progress, you will eventually get enough mana to play higher level cards and get complicated and powerful card combinations onto the field.
Eventually, someone’s hero will die either by taking damage because the player can’t draw a card or because the opponent did enough damage. When that happens the match ends. In competitive play, guys run five battles with the first one to win three of them winning the whole battle.
Since this game is based off the lore in Warcraft, heroes are a big aspect here. First of all, if your character dies you lose the match so you want to protect it. The hero also determines what cards you are allowed to use, as each character has a certain set of cards that correspond with it. They also have a special hero power, that comes in handy during the match. There are nine characters available, and each has a certain class that determines what cards your deck can be made up of. Each hero’s special power is unique and has a different purpose. In short, your hero basically dictates your play style.
Next, let’s go over minions, an important part of the game. These minions are useful in building an army, but the ones with better abilities cost more mana and are usually reserved for later rounds. Minions battle other minions, and the one with better stats kills the other minion but can’t attack for the rest of the move. If the opponent has no minions, you can direct attack the opponent’s hero, and take off some of its health. Some minions also have special abilities that aid the caster.
Spells are the last type of card in the game. These can have various effects, from damaging the hero, to weakening an opponent’s minion. Alone, these cards are almost useless, but if used in the correct combo, they can be deadly!
Let’s go over some other various rules. A player is only able to possess a max of ten mana, to prevent insane and unstoppable combos. Another rule to keep in mind is that the guy who goes second gets to draw four cards, to the first guy – three. Before the match starts, players can do a mulligan, in which they put any number of cards back in their deck, shuffle, and redraw the same amount of cards they put back. This helps keep the game from being too luck based, even though luck is a big part of the Hearthstone as it is with any card game. Also, the player who goes first cannot attack right away and must wait till his second round.
The best Hearthstone pro-Players
Wherever there is a pro scene, there will be some people who are better than others. Here we will be discussing who these extremely talented players are. Hearthstone is a very skill based game with a twinge of luck involved, and those I am about to mentioned are extremely talented. Even if you don’t agree with this list, be sure to acknowledge the time, effort, and skill the following put into this game.
The fifth best wizard on this list is the German player Lifecoach. This premier guy plays in a lot of top-tier tournaments and has an impressive fifty seven percent win rate against the best of the best. This former poker genius has won over a hundred thousand in poker games and over eighty thousand dollars in Hearthstone. He understands strategy and guile extremely well, and which he hasn’t won anything major yet, he has had good showings at some lower level contests, and respectable finishes at the top-tier ones.
A member of G2 esports, Adrian “Lifecoach” Koy’s top winnings include three five figure wins. Victories at the Viagame House Cup, the Celestial Invitational, and the Seat Story Cup and other notable victories. He is known as an incredibly analytical player due to his poker background, often reading into all the possible plays his opponent can make. He earned the nickname “Ropecoach” because he often runs his seventy five second timer so low that the burning rope animation that shows that time is running out is a regular occurrence at his matches. He is probably the most analytic player in the game and has earned himself a spot in this top five list.
The fourth best player on this list is the Romanian Rdu. Another G2 pro-gamer, he has over a hundred thousand dollars in career earnings. With over two hundred forty wins in his career, he is a very good Hearthstone pro which you can always place our bets on. He has victories against high tier players and won the recent DreamHack Summer 2016. His other achievements include a victory in the DreamHack Viagame HS Championship in 2014 and the 2015 TrueSilver Championship.
Usually an aggressive player, he is known to make lightning fast moves to fluster his opponents. Earning six figures is extremely hard because of the relatively low prize pools compared to other eSports, and to do so you need an extremely consistent track record. Due to his two and a half years of success, he makes the fourth spot on this list.
The third best Hearthstone wizard out there is the Netherland based ThijsNL with a sixty two win percent and two hundred and ninety one wins as of December 2016, he is a strong and explosive guy. With two Dreamhack grand final appearances and a major under his belt, he is hugely successful. He is also part of G2 (which you will not be surprised to find out is considered the best Hearthstone team in the world), a name you probably are feeling is quite repetitive to this point as numbers five to three are all part of this powerhouse roster.
He started with small local contests and cups, and slowly worked himself up to the star he is today. With over one hundred and eighty eight thousand dollars in career earnings, Thijs is probably one of the most consistently good players in the HS scene. His journey from a local nobody up to a huge star is the envy of aspiring professionals everywhere, and he deserves the third spot on my list!
Close to the top but clearly just a bit short is Swedish Ostkaka at second place. With over one hundred and twenty seven thousand dollars in winnings, he is a proven winner with a track record a mile long. The 2015 champion of Blizzard’s Hearthstone World Championship, he has been a part of the community since its release. He grinded his way through his regional qualifiers and took the world by storm in 2015. Since then, he has been a constant and established winner in the fast changing HS professional scene.
You almost get the sense that he was made to win at Hearthstone, as he would be number one if he had managed to defend his World Champion title. He had the analytic thinking of Lifecoach, the consistency and explosiveness of Rdu, and a climb to the top similar to that of ThijsNL. A mix of the qualities that make good players has made him into not a good player, but a great one. Clearly, any top professional list without him is lacking; a great mind and snubbing one of the best in the business.
The number one player is the undisputed 2016 world champion, winning Blizzards World Championship. He is the one, the only, Pavel! The Russian champion is part of Team Millenium and didn’t have much of a track record before his huge two hundred and fifty thousand dollar win at the 2016 HS World Championship’s; he was a local player, participating in the smaller regional cups. He made it through the long qualifiers and defeated all the higher profile players en route to his victory of DrHippi in the finals.
He has everything number two player Ostkaka, but with a unique ability to adapt to any situation on the fly. You almost feel as if he can take your plan and turn it against you. Blizzard’s Hearthstone World Championship’s are the golden standard in the pro scene, and by winning it Pavel has made himself the undisputed number one, and until the 2017 Championship’s it’s going to stay that way.
Thanks for reading this article and sticking around till the end. Hopefully, this article was able to help you better understand the various bets you can make on Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft matches, rules, biggest tournaments and players.
Be on the lookout for further articles, see you next time! Good luck!