Bookmakers in Russia: the Olympics expectations, lower payouts and new lines

Publication date: 29 Jul 2021

The Olympic Games have started in Tokyo, which has brought some excitement and expectations to the betting world. While the Olympic Games are the most important event for world sports, and athletes around the globe are preparing for it, for the betting business it is not the most key milestone.

What do Russian bookmakers expect from the Olympics 2020? 

Russian bookmakers don’t expect huge activity, the turnovers are planned at the level of the European football championship.

First of all, the time difference between most of Russia and Japan affects the activity of Russian bettors. And also, the wide variety of sports disciplines, in which the championships are played during the day.  Many Olympic kinds of sports are traditionally not very popular in Russia. Football, on the other hand, is a central discipline for betting, with a weakened lineup of teams declared.

But there are also positive aspects influencing the growth of activity: the expected high results of Russian athletes at the Summer Olympics.

As a result, bookmakers assume that the total volume of bets made during the entire period of the Tokyo Olympics will be about a quarter of the volume during the Euro 2020.

The contributions of Russian bookmakers may become less

At the initiative of the Wrestling federation and the Russian Olympic federation prepared a document in which it is planned to reduce the percentage of contributions from bookmakers in favor of the sports industry.

Now the contributions are made in the following way: betting companies pay out contributions to sports federations according to the volume of bets on both domestic and foreign sporting events. The money is distributed according to the specialization of this or that federation, i.e., the Russian Ice Hockey Federation receives money for all hockey events, the Russian Basketball Federation for basketball games, and so on. As a result, the leading federations received the most money collected from the most popular sports (football, hockey, basketball, volleyball, and tennis).

The initiative of the Russian Wrestling Federation and the Olympic Committees is as follows: the Russian federations have nothing to do with the organization of foreign events and cannot thus demand such a number of contributions. Instead of it, bookmakers will transfer to the sport federations only 20% of bets made on foreign events, and it should be divided evenly among all federations.

According to Yuri Fedorov, an adviser to the Russian Wrestling Federation president, even 20% is illogical and a lot, which may hint that the distribution percentages may change again in the future.

Russian bookmakers open new lines

Russian betting companies have been accepting bets on online sports since the mid-2010s, now it is represented by the classic disciplines: football, basketball and hockey. Now cyber-boxing will be added to these disciplines!

The Russian Boxing Federation and the United Professional Sports League will be holding boxing simulators matches. Competitors will fight in Fight Night Champion and Fight Night Round 4, and the number of matches will be up to half a thousand a day. Each fight will last only one round, so the bookmaker’s calculation will be very fast. The platform for the tournaments will be SportGamesTV.

According to representatives of the federation, it should popularize fighting sports among the youth.

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