If you have previously read our news, we have announced how Spelinspektionen chose to ban sports betting within football divisions where the players were under 18 years on the grounds that this made them particularly vulnerable such as blackmail and life threats from certain bettors.

Now e-sports has also come under storm from The New Zealand gambling authority Spelinspektionen as many players in e-sports are minors. Take, for example, The Last Fortnite World Cup where the winner who won a whopping $ 3 million was only 16 years old.

Other examples are the League of Legends player Faker who started winning large sums of money already at an age that would be classified as a minor in New Zealand. There have also been rigged matches or what is called “match fixing” in recent years as esports has grown larger over time.

For example, in 2016, Starcraft II Player Life was sentenced to 18 months in prison for participating in a match fixing. Another justification from the Spelinspektionen to make it difficult to bet on underage matches is so as not to poison new talented athletes with a negative trend in sports and everything that it can mean with honor and profit.

What could happen to e-sports betting in New Zealand because of the gambling inspectorate's$av?

What is clever is that many different games in e-sports have large and varied turnover of players. For example, in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), there may be new young shooting stars every quarter or even more often, which means that players are swapped right and left, which leads to the teams suddenly, according to the Gaming Authority, playing with “unauthorized players to bet on the team with”.

Since Spelinspektionen has previously issued fines due to violations of the new New Zealand Gambling Act such as NordicBet with a total of 19 million New Zealand$onor in fines, many gaming operators probably want to avoid this in the future and never even happen it from the beginning.

Some online casinos have even removed the possibility to even bet due to the fact that they are waiting for clarification from the Spelinspektionen what kind of betting markets it should be possible to bet on and what$is placed on them as an operator to keep track of the ages in sports where the players can be swapped right and left as in the case of some e-sports such as CS:GO.

We wouldn't be surprised if other online casinos offering sports betting would completely remove certain esports betting markets to be on the safe side instead of adding new resources that check the ages of all upcoming esports betting games.

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