How Is It Possible To Bet On Virtual Sports As You Would A Slot?

Written By Ian John on November 7, 2018

One of the most common things you will read about Virtual Sports, when you start looking into them more deeply, is that many experts feel that they are less like an opportunity to indulge in a little computer-generated sports betting, and are much more akin to playing on a slot machine.

At first glance, this statement seems somewhat unusual, if not outright incorrect. A Virtual Sport looks like a real sport and has many of the same bets you would find on a real sporting event, with similar odds and whatnot. That is nothing like how a slot game is presented and plays.

Yet when you dig a little deeper and delve into the code that powers Virtual Sports, you will find that at the heart of all Virtual Sports games lies a Random Number Generator (RNG). This RNG is the same kind of program which is used extensively on slot games to produce the myriad of different outcomes available when you spin the reels.

As a result, this random nature of Virtual Sports means that the games more closely replicate how a slot spin is completed, rather than a real life sports event, which can see many different factors, the skill and quality of the individual or team competing, the quality of the equipment or vehicle they use, good or bad luck, officials, the weather to name but a few, all of which can influence the result one way or the other.

However, when it comes to betting on slots compared to betting on Virtual Sports, it is a much more complicated option when you look at Virtual Sports.

With slots, you can sometimes select the number of lines you can play on the game and you can select the size of the bet you wish to make on each spin and this can range from a small amount, up to very large amounts for higher rollers. However, these are the only factors you can alter on the vast majority of slot games when it comes to the bet you make.

With Virtual Sports, there are a far greater number of potential bets you can make on each Virtual Sports event, which means that you have a far greater choice of markets you can bet on and a wider selection of options available in each market.

There’s also the factor that in a slot game, you pay your stake money, spin the reels and when you do if you land one of the winning combinations, you’ll win. In Virtual Sports, you are betting on a specific market or a selection, which has to finish in the winning position for your bet to win. There’s no smaller prizes available as on slots (for example, when you land three symbols on the reels, instead of four or five), so it is very much a win or bust option.

So, if Virtual Sports do have similar mechanics to a slot game, can you actually bet on them in a similar way as you would a slot and can doing so be profitable?

Betting on Virtual Sports as you would a Slot

  1. Type of Virtual Sport – Game v Race

There are two distinct types of Virtual Sports available. One is a game-based Virtual Sport, such as Virtual Football, which sees two team of virtual players battle it out to decide the outcome of an arbitrarily selected football match.

For me, the markets that are typically available in this game mean that you really want to find a market with a number of options available to replicate the kind of payouts that you would land on a slot.

The good news is that with Virtual Football, you can do this on a popular market which is the Correct Score betting. This market has every possible combination of scoreline involving four goals or fewer (the maximum number of goals scored in Virtual Football at Betway is four).

This means you can bet on the following 13 possible scores:

  • 1-0
  • 2-0
  • 2-1
  • 3-0
  • 3-1
  • 0-0
  • 1-1
  • 2-2
  • 0-1
  • 0-2
  • 1-2
  • 0-3
  • 1-3

So if you wanted to play Virtual Football as you would a slot, you could play by backing one of the scorelines with your bet and then make the same bet on successive games.

One thing to note is that certain scorelines tend to appear more frequently on Virtual Sports with games on average having around 2.5 goals scored per game, which means that these scorelines may be shorter odds than the others. As such, by selecting certain bets you can increase the amount you would potentially win, or pick a bet which has more chance of coming in more often, but which offers a smaller value win.

With other Virtual Sports, such as Virtual Horseracing, Virtual Greyhounds, Virtual Motor Sports, Virtual Cycling or Virtual Speedway, these are all games based on a race scenario and as such, if you want to replicate slots betting on these games, then you can most easily do so by placing bets on the outright winner of each race.

What you need to factor in here is that each of these different Virtual Sports have a different number of competitors in each race. Virtual Speedway for example, has the fewest with just four in each race. Greyhounds have six, and the likes of Virtual Motor Sports and Virtual Horse Racing can have as many as 12 or 13 competitors in each.

You can try and emulate the type of slot game you enjoy playing by picking carefully which Virtual Sport and which competitor in each sport to bet on. If you prefer slots that pay out smaller amounts more often, then backing one of the favourites in a Speedway or Greyhound race is a good option for you as these will pay out more frequently.

Alternatively, if you prefer to play higher variance slots with fewer payouts but when they do land, they are much larger in value, then backing outsiders in Virtual Horseracing or Motorsports may well be the way for you to enjoy this form of betting.

As you can see, if you enjoy slot gaming, it is still relatively easy to enjoy a similar type of bet on Virtual Sports, although it is worth noting that with each Virtual Sport taking about 3 minutes to run to completion, there will be longer in between each bet than you would get when playing the slots.

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Ian John

Ian John is an expert across many realms of online gambling, both in US and international markets. Based in the UK, Ian covers sports betting, poker, and the regulated online casino and esports betting markets for a wide number of industry-focused publications.

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