29.03.20256 min read

What You Need to Know About Free Predictions and Gifts

Prediction contests accompany big and small e-sports competitions and are a popular modern form of entertainment. Participation is free and lucrative – each tournament allows players to win unique skins for their videogame characters, virtual currency, or gaming equipment! We compiled the key information about pickem contests: where to find them, how to take part in them, and how to tell a real one from fakes and scams, so read on!

What Are Free Predictions in Esports?

Massive e-sports tournaments are all the rage these days. Fans analyze every aspect of their structure, odds, and teams to understand what it takes to win it all. And where’s demand, there’s supply! Multiple online services, like MelBet Pick’em, started holding their own, branded prediction tournaments, allowing contestants to compare their luck and knowledge of the e-sports circuit and win various prizes: not only skins for Dota 2 and CS:2, but PC and console peripherals as well. Since esport prediction tournaments are free and require no monetary incentive to win or participate, the prizes usually go to the participants with the best analytical skills or the luckiest ones. Still, these competitions aren’t reserved only for the experts. Many consider them a free entry point into the higher tier of esports analytics, allowing you to test and sharpen your skills for free before taking on riskier challenges.

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Where to Find Free Predictions?

For most gamers, finding pick’em contests is not an issue. One can easily find dozens of them by simply googling “free esports predictions” and clicking on the first few results. Free prediction communities come in many forms, such as Discord or Telegram groups, subreddits, Twitter pages, fan forums, or dedicated websites, like pickem-mongolia.com, hosting prediction competitions dedicated to esports majors. Usually, though, only the latter are considered worthwhile, since they offer the most exciting prizes, a clear structure, rules, and reward players according to their predictions, instead of using a random number generator. Despite how easy it is to find free predictions, we’d recommend only choosing safe and verified sources. The format’s popularity has attracted many unscrupulous communities posing as proper prediction contests by name only, which we’ll stop on in more detail below. Reading the participation rules and requirements for receiving rewards before registration helps distinguish a proper prediction service from fraud.

Pickem Platforms as a Trend: Why It’s a Top Practice Tool?

If you’ve ever competed in any variation of a fantasy sport or a pickem contest, you’ll instantly recognize modern online prediction services. They are similar, whether a Dota 2 prediction contest or a CS prediction tournament. Participants choose a team in a competition (hence it’s called a pick’em), like The International, or any Counter-Strike 2 Major, during any of the rounds and state that it’ll go over an opponent. Players test themselves by picking the winning teams in each round. Every match yields different points, depending on its importance, so it’s possible to win even if your predictions haven’t been successful in the group stage. All these principles were first introduced in 2013, when Valve created the first prediction contest dedicated to involving more players in checking out CS: Go Majors, and have been perfected ever since by pickem MelBet.

The popularity of prediction contests can essentially be brought down to three key points:

They are entirely free, in contrast to traditional e-sports betting.
Participating allows you to gain advanced knowledge of your favorite e-sport discipline.
They’re a perfect tool for building analytical skills and practicing relating a team’s squad, performance, and tactics to how often they win and against which opponents.

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What Can You Get for Correct Predictions?

Your winnings depend on your choice of a platform. Most Discord groups and small communities usually offer their players a prize pool consisting of entirely basic items, mostly skins for CS: 2, Valorant, or Dota 2, with a total value of the entire prize pool rarely exceeding $100. Alas, with free participation, a community or a website without a sponsor usually can’t afford extensive prizes, no matter how good they are. Official platforms like pickem-mongolia.com, on the other hand, are different. Winnings available from pick’em contests on MelBet include in-game items too, but only as a basis. The best prizes are reserved for the top predictors and include premium items: mice, keyboards, and headsets from the world’s leading brands and gaming monitors! And in their biggest pick’ems, a player with the most points gets awarded a grand prize – PlayStation 5.

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Can You Join Later? Predictions After the Game Starts

Since most esports events are divided into several stages, joining the prediction competition with each subsequent stage is usually possible. For example, if a player misses the play-ins, the initial stage for most esports tournaments, they can start directly with the group stage or playoffs, or even only predict the winner of a final match. Besides, the more important the game is, the more points the player is awarded for their correct prediction, so joining late won’t hinder your chances of participating in the raffle for the biggest available prizes, even if you miss the first couple of tournament brackets.

How Not to Fall for Scams?

As we’ve mentioned before, some free prediction services turn out to be frauds. Here are the top five signs to distinguish a fraudulent website from a real prediction competition:

It asks for payment information to access predictions. Real services are free and do not require your card or bank account information.
It doesn’t have a database with previous tournaments, winners, and their prizes.
Fake and overly saccharine reviews on the main page..
Absent rules page.
It asks for payment before participation. You’ll most likely pay the entry fee and never see any prizes.

Finally, if a site seems unprofessional and sloppy, has spelling errors in a URL, and doesn’t feature any tournament or bookmaker’s logos, it’s best to stay away.

Free Predictions as a Tool for Self-Development in Betting

The esport prediction tournaments might seem a simple entertainment at first sight, but they are much more than that. By comparing your predictions with other players and closely following the biggest tournaments in the e-sports world, players develop tactical and strategic thinking, explore new ways of playing and interacting in the game, start following not only their favorite teams, but all industry leaders, and gain an unparalleled understanding of meta. Besides, with risk-free predictions at the best esport prediction site, you can gradually build enough confidence and expertise to move to riskier and more profitable ventures in esports betting.

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Author Bat-Erdene Ganbold

Pick'em and analytics expert for esports tournaments. In the scene since 2017, known for over 75% prediction accuracy and consistently ranking high in CS and Dota Pick'em challenges. Writes guides, tracks underdog teams, and plays in an amateur CS2 squad.