What is CS:GO Totals betting?

How does CS:GO Totals betting work?

CS:GO Totals betting works on a similar concept to Over/Under goals markets in soccer. For CS:GO, you can bet on either the amount of maps played in a match, or the amount of rounds played in a map.

The key part is that, for the most part, you’re not betting on a team to win. Your bet is focused entirely on how long a match will last. For CS:GO, Totals bets are offered for the Match and for each Map played.

The market is set up in a way to show you what the traders think will happen (which we’ll get onto later). If you think differently, and believe you can beat the traders, then bet on it!

CS:GO Match Totals betting

In best-of-three or best-of-five matchups, one of the Totals bets available to you will be for how many maps a series goes on.

Odds for best-of-three matches are easy to determine. You have the option to bet if a series will last either under or over 2.5 maps. Simply, you’re betting on whether the match will be decided in the opening two maps (under), or if the series will need to go to the decider (over). The reason bookmakers use the .5 decimal is to ensure the market gets settled (it has to be either over 2.5 or under 2.5 – it can’t be exactly 2.5).

We can use a hypothetical example to help make this even clearer. Look at the odds for this match between Dignitas and Cloud9. This is a best-of-three series, so the options will be over or under 2.5 maps.

As you can see here, the traders expect the game to be done in the opening two maps (because the under 2.5 is the favourite). To take this further, we can combine these odds with match winner odds - Dignitas favourites at 1.781 and Cloud9 the 2.050 underdogs. While the two teams are relatively evenly matched by the odds, by combining the two markets together, we can see that the traders believe Dignitas will beat Cloud9 in just two maps.

CS:GO Map Totals betting

Every CS:GO match has at least one best-of-thirty round map to go through. While every map has to play at least 16 rounds, the options in the Totals market usually range between 22.5 and 30.5 rounds.

Anyone who watches CS:GO will know that 16-0 sweeps are possible, but they aren’t exactly common. This is why the lowest Map Totals mark you’ll see is around 22.5 (this suggests the losing team will win at least six rounds).

Returning to the example match between Dignitas and Cloud9, below are the Map Total odds for the first map. 

Looking at the above table, based on where the Map Totals odds match up the traders appear to expect the game to finish somewhere around the 26th round (this is because it’s the most evenly matched set of odds). If you look at it statistically, this makes sense. So far this year, on maps won by Dignitas have averaged 27.36 rounds per map played, while Cloud9 have averaged 25 on maps lost.

How does Team Totals work in CS:GO betting?

Another kind of Map Totals odds available to CS:GO bettors are Team Totals. These act very similar to Money Line odds in their application, but also allow a return if a game goes into overtime. Here’s another hypothetical example using the same teams from before, but this time for the second map. On the Money Line, Dignitas are 1.833 to win the second map and Cloud9 1.990.

Here is what the Team Totals odds might look like for this match.

For going over 15.5 rounds, the odds for both Dignitas and Cloud9 are shorter than for them to win outright. This is because the bookmaker needs to cover themselves for if the match went to overtime (if the odds were the same, everyone would bet on a team to get over 15.5 instead of just win the match).

If you think it will be a very close match, you could bet on both teams to win over 15.5 rounds – if the match goes to overtime then both of your bets would win!

CS:GO over/under betting predictions

In order to improve your predictions with Totals betting in CS:GO, you need to look at the data. One of the best sources for CS:GO can be found on HLTV.org, where they have easily accessible statistical data going all the way back to 2012 – the start of the CS:GO era.

However, you need to be wary of using data that is no longer relevant (data with roster changes, major dips in performance or from before major game updates/map pool changes) while also ensuring you have a big enough sample of data to make your analysis worthwhile.

While individual team stats are useful and the most easily accessible, obviously previous matches between the two teams involved can also be beneficial (sometimes the two teams may played each other but not the same lineups which makes a direct comparison a little more difficult).

In order to see how we got the statistics we used above to compare map lengths, let’s use the example of Dignitas, where we looked at their match statistics since the start of 2020. From there we added up all of the rounds they played in regulation since the start of the year (425) then divided it by 16, the number of maps played, to get an average of 26.56. For rounds played in map wins, we did similar maths but only from the maps they won, 301 divided by 11, for the total of 27.36.

To further refine your predictions, predicting which map a team will pick before placing your bet is also important, and also seeing how each team plays on each side of a map. This is because not all maps are made equal for each team, some might prefer Mirage to Nuke and therefore you would expect them to get a higher number of maps in the Team Total.

This would then have a knock-on effect, as it may make the Total Rounds for a map lower if you expect a team to dominate and make the under 2.5 Match Total in a best-of-three more likely if you think they will then dominate the whole match and win 2-0.

It’s clear to see that even some simple research can help you make more informed decisions across all Totals betting markets in CS:GO. It’s also important to acknowledge how the different types of Totals markets will often be linked together. If you think you have a value bet in one specific market, you might be able to apply that knowledge across other Totals markets.