MAFIA GOLD Slots Game by Play'n GO
Connect with us
MAFIA GOLD Slots Game by Play'n GO
MAFIA GOLD Slots Game by Play'n GO

eSports

Hawks Talon Gaming To Tip Off Season Thursday, May 27 Against Hornets Venom GT

Published

on

HAWKS TALON GC DEFEAT HORNETS VENOM GT IN FIRST IN-PERSON REGIONAL MATCHUP IN NBA 2K LEAGUE HISTORY

 

The NBA 2K League announced its 2021 regular-season schedule and season-long competition structure. The 16-week season will begin Wednesday, May 19 with THE TIPOFF Powered by AT&T, and will conclude Saturday, Sept. 4 with the 2021 NBA 2K League Finals Delivered by DoorDash. Hawks Talon Gaming will begin the regular season with a two-game series against Hornets Venom GT, the official NBA 2K League affiliate of the Charlotte Hornets, at 8 p.m. ET on Thursday, May 27.

As part of the announcement, it was also shared that for the first time, the NBA 2K League will be aligned into two conferences: the Eastern Conference and the Western Conference. Hawks Talon will be in the Eastern Conference with 76ers GC, Celtics Crossover Gaming, Gen.G Tigers of Shanghai, Grizz Gaming, Heat Check Gaming, Hornets Venom GT, Knicks Gaming, Magic Gaming, Nets GC, Raptors Uprising GC and Wizards District Gaming. The Western Conference comprises Bucks Gaming, Blazer5 Gaming, Cavs Legion GC, Jazz Gaming, Kings Guard Gaming, Lakers Gaming, Mavs Gaming, Pacers Gaming, Pistons GT, T-Wolves Gaming and Warriors Gaming Squad.

“We are ready to get back on the virtual court and start competing with the best of the best in the NBA 2K League,” said Hawks Talon GC Head Coach Wesley Acuff. “We are thrilled with the talent we retained and the draft picks we made this past offseason. We strive to give the city of Atlanta an esports team that they can rally behind.”

Regular-season games will begin at 7 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights with four distinct matchups each night. Matchups will be played in a two-game format.

Advertisement
Stake - Best Online Casino & Sports Betting Platform

Hawks Talon Gaming’s 2021 NBA 2K League Schedule:

 

Game Week Date Day Home Away Game Start (E.T.)
1 5/19-22 TBD – THE TIPOFF TOURNAMENT POWERED BY AT&T
1 2 5/27 Thursday Hawks Talon GC Hornets Venom GT 8:00 PM
2 2 5/29 Saturday Hawks Talon GC Grizz Gaming 9:00 PM
3 2 6/4 Friday Hawks Talon GC Raptors Uprising GC 7:00 PM
4 3 6/5 Saturday Heat Check Gaming Hawks Talon GC 7:00 PM
5 4 6/12 Saturday Celtics Crossover Gaming Hawks Talon GC 7:00 PM
6 5 6/17 Thursday Hawks Talon GC NetsGC 8:00 PM
7 5 6/19 Saturday Hawks Talon GC Heat Check Gaming 9:00 PM
8 6 6/26 Saturday Magic Gaming Hawks Talon GC 9:00 PM
  7 7/4 JULY 4th BYE WEEK
  8   BYE WEEK
  9 7/12-17 TBD – THE TURN TOURNAMENT POWERED BY AT&T
9 10 7/21 Wednesday Knicks Gaming Hawks Talon GC 7:00 PM
10 10 7/22 Thursday Hawks Talon GC T-Wolves Gaming 7:20 P.M.
11 11 7/30 Friday Hornets Venom GT Hawks Talon GC 9:00 P.M.
12 11 7/31 Saturday Kings Guard Gaming Hawks Talon GC 7:00 P.M.
  12   BYE WEEK
13 13 8/13 Friday Gen.G Tigers of Shanghai Hawks Talon GC 9:00 P.M.
14 13 8/14 Saturday Hawks Talon GC Pistons GT 9:00 P.M.

 

Each NBA 2K League team will begin the 2021 season playing remotely from its local market. Games will be simulcast live on the NBA 2K League’s Twitch and YouTube channels, and will be available on Dash Radio, ESRevolution, Loco in India and Sport1 in Europe.

 

Advertisement
Stake - Best Online Casino & Sports Betting Platform

eSports

Influencers, Content and eSports: Unleashing the Power of Dynamic Strategies in the eSports Ecosystem

Published

on

Influencers, Content and eSports: Unleashing the Power of Dynamic Strategies in the eSports Ecosystem

 

The sports betting industry is undergoing significant growth worldwide with restrictions loosening and new markets emerging. New opportunities create fierce competition among sportsbooks, and this has led to them devising increasingly expensive and aggressive advertising campaigns.

Public figures and influencers have become a popular go-to for sportsbooks promotions, such as Michael Jordan partnering with DraftKings or Jamie Foxx with BetMGM. Big names are costly, and sportsbooks haven’t realised the ad spend used on these campaigns is going to waste. Without the right precautions in place, up to 22% of ad spend is lost to fraud according to Juniper Research.

The big budgets behind high-profile brand campaigns need to translate into real user engagement. To achieve this, sportsbooks must ensure their digital channels are optimised to capture the surge in interest these campaigns generate. Without proper management, this potential can be lost to inefficiencies like invalid traffic, diluting the impact of their investments.

 

Advertisement
Stake - Best Online Casino & Sports Betting Platform

Ad Budgets Going to Waste

In today’s competitive landscape, sportsbooks need to make every click count. In 2023 alone, The American Gaming Association estimated that over $1.9 billion was spent on advertising campaigns in the US. With such a large amount of spend in play, it’s crucial that sportsbooks see as big a Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) as possible.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns are vital for sportsbook growth but can be disrupted by invalid traffic (IVT). IVT includes both malicious activity, like fraudulent bots, and unintentional actions, such as users repeatedly clicking on ads without intent to convert. These interactions inflate impressions and skew campaign performance data, leading to higher customer acquisition costs (CACs) and inefficient allocation of ad spend. Effectively managing IVT ensures that ad budgets drive genuine engagement and measurable growth.

Investing into influencers and celebrities also forces sportsbooks to bid on brand keywords to prevent their competitors stealing potential users searching for them. Up to 29% of PPC budgets are spent on this bidding according to Wordstream. As competition for brand keywords increases, PPC budgets are depleted without generating any new net revenue.

As campaigns become more expensive than ever, sportsbooks can’t afford to let profits fall to ad fraud. Instead of cutting budgets, sportsbooks should focus on analysing their campaign strategy.

Advertisement
Stake - Best Online Casino & Sports Betting Platform

 

Problematic Navigational Traffic

Navigational traffic is also presenting a significant challenge to sportsbooks alongside ad fraud. Navigational traffic refers to existing customers clicking on branded keywords to log into their accounts. While this seems convenient and harmless enough, this behaviour drastically inflates CACs. Like ad fraud, this can skew the effectiveness of PPC campaigns. By utilising paid search results instead of organic links to navigate to the site, costs are driven up without contributing to new user acquisition.

In addition to the challenges posed by navigational traffic and ad fraud, the competitive landscape for first-time depositors intensifies the need for strategic bidding on Google search. Brands investing heavily in influencers or sponsorships of major sporting events to generate awareness and drive potential users to search for them. However, without securing top placements in paid search results, these prospective customers may be intercepted by competitors before reaching the organic search listings. This creates a critical juncture where the effectiveness of a brand campaign hinges on converting that intent-driven traffic into first-time depositors, ensuring marketing spend achieves its goal of meaningful user acquisition.

First-time depositors are a critical metric for sportsbooks, and this issue directly impacts the cost efficiency of acquiring them. High CACs make marketing budgets less effective, reducing overall ROI.

Advertisement
Stake - Best Online Casino & Sports Betting Platform

 

Shoring Up Your Defences

Before launching costly ad campaigns, sportsbooks should adopt a multi-faceted approach to address ad fraud. IVT typically goes unnoticed, so to prevent this sportsbooks should monitor and analyse their campaign traffic for any suspicious activity. It is possible to identify IVT by looking out for signs such as irregular spikes in traffic from unknown locations or high pageviews. Fraudulent traffic can then by highlighted and removed.

The advancement of technology has made ad fraud more difficult to identify, and legacy fraud tools fail to detect IVT. They don’t analyse traffic at the impression level or consider the context of the business advertising. Sportsbooks can leverage ad-verification platforms to compensate for this. This allows sportsbooks to analyse and report suspicious traffic in real-time. Fraud can then be blocked before it has a chance to harm budgets.

Sportsbooks can also deploy tactics to reduce the impact of navigational traffic on CACs. Methods include encouraging existing customers to use mobile apps or direct bookmarks to log into their accounts instead of paid search campaigns. This decreases their reliance on PPC campaigns for navigation and protects budgets.

Advertisement
Stake - Best Online Casino & Sports Betting Platform

 

Keeping Profits in Sportsbooks’ Hands

Influencer and celebrity campaigns have proven to be a popular and useful tool in reeling new users and profits. However, if sportsbooks don’t have the essential precautions in place, they risk losing these profits to advertising fraud.

To make the most of their advertising efforts, sportsbooks need to prioritise their traffic. Implementing sophisticated tools to analyse traffic and filter out fraud will allow sportsbooks to protect their interests and focus on driving future growth. This way, they can secure their position in an increasingly competitive landscape.

 

Advertisement
Stake - Best Online Casino & Sports Betting Platform

Written by: Chad Kinlay, Chief Marketing Officer, TrafficGuard

A driven, open-minded, creative senior marketer with a strong sense of dedication and commitment. With over 15 years of progressive international experience in marketing and communications management, Kinlay has a credible history of commercial success.

Continue Reading

eSports

Community Gaming Joins Forces with Moonton as Official Esports Partner for Mobile Legends: Bang Bang

Published

on

Community Gaming Joins Forces with Moonton as Official Esports Partner for Mobile Legends: Bang Bang

 

Community Gaming (CG), the leading esports platform for automated tournament payouts and sponsor of the Mobile Legends: Bang Bang’s professional league for the Latin America Region, MPL LATAM, now supports developing esports communities in Latin America in collaboration with Moonton.

This partnership is a significant boost to CG’s existing advantages associated with its grant program, a partner-backed initiative to provide organizers with economic resources based on the performance and growth of their local gaming communities. Tournament organizers can apply to receive platform support, prizes, in-game currency, items, and tournament professional assistance including “Tournament Mode,” a special setting on Mobile Legends: Bang Bang that grants organizers enhanced features, such as unlocking all available skins in the game for players to fully enjoy a complete and unique MLBB pro tournament experience.

Wei Xu, regional esports operation manager at Moonton, said: “We are excited to announce the partnership with Community Gaming. Community Gaming is the most accepted esports platform in our community in Latin America. We hope this partnership brings new experiences to the players.”

As MPL comes to its end this year, CG will also be collaborating with MLBB professional teams for a flash $4000 prize tournament set to enhance the visibility of the company’s services. This event marks a pivotal moment set to highlight CG’s preparedness to impact the professional MLBB scene.

Advertisement
Stake - Best Online Casino & Sports Betting Platform

Community Gaming and Moonton are no strangers to mutual cooperation. In the past both companies have partnered to develop the Dawn of Heroes Series, a set of events in 2021 and 2022 that offered qualifying slots to MLBB’s Signature Competition, Liga LATAM. The companies have also worked together on Peru’s University Tournament INTERU 2023 and currently Community Gaming hosts significant activity of MLBB Tournaments from over 12 countries on a monthly basis.

Continue Reading

eSports

Esports player age verification should be simple

Published

on

Esports player age verification should be simple

 

Despite the continuing professionalisation of esports, misconceptions about player age persist – particularly of underage pros playing in professional esports.

Back in 2021, the PandaScore whitepaper dug into the data around player age in professional esports and found that the average age of a pro player was just under 24 years old. By comparison, the same report noted that the average age for a men’s professional footballer was about 26 years old.

While there is no great gulf in player ages between esports and traditional sports, there’s more apprehension around this topic once there’s a keyboard or controller involved. There are good reasons behind this focus, but the truth is that a simple and straightforward product makes player age verification easy.

The reason behind the focus on player age

Compliance with player age requirements has been a particular concern as legalised sports and esports betting rolls out across the US. These are completely reasonable concerns, partly because of the state-by-state nature of American regulation, but also due to past compliance issues in the likes of ITF tennis.

Advertisement
Stake - Best Online Casino & Sports Betting Platform

Age compliance isn’t a challenge unique to esports. It does have younger players in the same way tennis does, so it’s a space that operators consider a potential risk area based on precedent. While it’s understandable to be vigilant about ensuring age compliance across your whole book, the reality in esports is it’s just like any other sport.

However, with this greater attention, it’s crucial for esports suppliers to have a simple, high-quality solution that is flexible for any jurisdiction – and not just treat it as a spreadsheet-based, tack-on service.

Importance in the US

It’s abundantly clear that if you want to ensure compliance in the US space, player age verification isn’t a nice to have, it’s an integral part of your product. Across each jurisdiction player age verification can vary – something we’ve seen in Europe as well such as Sweden’s rule that a match must have 60% of players over the age of 18 for an operator to offer match bets.

In sports, it’s fairly straightforward to implement but has been an oversight from sports data providers in the past. It’s quite easy to provide, it just requires collecting data from multiple, reputable sources outside of the match itself.

PandaScore has been collecting player age verification data since it was founded in 2017 to ensure compliance no matter the regulation, no matter the jurisdiction.

Advertisement
Stake - Best Online Casino & Sports Betting Platform

Embedding player age verification in your product

Ensuring age compliance was a founding principle for our product suite – we included it as a key datapoint in our API, which is the bedrock of our broader offering. Suppliers should have this embedded in their products, rather than an additional service.

PandaScore believes that offering player age verification as part of an API and integrated into your service means you can be more confident in your compliance not just for individual esports titles, but from match to match.

For us it’s simple: one of PandaScore’s founding principles is to not rely on only one single data source, but leverage multiple quality data sources that we can trust. We have a longstanding and highly developed process that guarantees a level of accuracy for player age verification that’s in line with regulation and gives operators the confidence that they’re compliant. Our practice of using multiple data sources means that double and triple-checking information to ensure player age compliance is in our nature.

With player age verification built into an API, operators can leverage the data to match the compliance needs of any given jurisdiction. This can be done by integrating player age data via the API, it can be included in their feed via our odds product with the flexibility to add exclusions where necessary, or if an operators wants it in a simper form, it can be done via request.

Player age verification might seem like a simple item, but is a compliance matter that’s essential to operating in a proper fashion. Noting the concerns and greater focus on player ages in esports, it’s something that’s important to get right: player age verification should be entrenched in esports products themselves to give operators the flexibility and simplicity that they need.

Advertisement
Stake - Best Online Casino & Sports Betting Platform

 

Author: Oliver Niner, Head of Sales at PandaScore.

Continue Reading

Trending

GamingAmericas.com (part of HIPTHER) is your one-stop portal for the latest news, insights, and analyses in the gaming industry across the Americas. From legislative updates and market trends to interviews with industry leaders, we provide a comprehensive look at the dynamic landscape of both online and land-based gaming. Whether you're a stakeholder looking to stay ahead of the curve or a gaming enthusiast eager for reliable updates, GamingAmericas.com has got you covered. Follow us on social media and subscribe to our newsletter for real-time updates and exclusive content. Make informed decisions and stay ahead in the game with GamingAmericas.com.

Disclaimer: All the information provided is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Always check your local laws before participating in any gaming activities.

Copyright © 2018 – 2024, HIPTHER. All Rights Reserved.