Esports in Dhaka: How Bookmakers Are Adapting to a New Generation of Gamers

On some nights in Dhaka, the loudest crowd in the city is not at a cricket ground but under LEDs in a convention hall. When Discovery One staged the grand finale of Mobile Mania 2024 powered by Airtel at the International Convention City Bashundhara (ICCB), more than 1,700 gamers and supporters followed the action for a prize pool of 30 lakh taka as squads fought through brackets in Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, eFootball, and Call of Duty: Mobile.

Many university students streamed those games on their phones from dorm rooms and rooftop cafés, some following brackets on social media, others quietly checking odds on online betting sites that now list Free Fire qualifiers alongside football and cricket. The sound of the city’s traffic, mixed with shoutcasters’ voices and the staccato of controller clicks, turns Dhaka into an open-air arena that stretches from Gulshan to Mirpur.

Dhaka’s tournaments move from cafés to convention halls

Esports in Bangladesh has moved far beyond improvised LANs in back rooms. The Bangladesh Youth Development & Electronic Sports Association (BYDESA), founded in 2021 and headquartered in Dhaka, is now a recognised governing body for electronic sports and is affiliated with the International Esports Federation, the Global Esports Federation, and the Asian Electronic Sports Federation. It has brought Bangladeshi players onto global stages, including the IESF World Esports Championships and the Global Esports Games.

Around this official backbone, private organisers and media groups have built their own stages. Discovery One, based in Dhaka’s Gulshan area, brands itself as the country’s largest esports event organiser and has run multi-game tournaments such as the D1 Cup Bangladesh, Bangladesh Esports League (BESL), FIFA Royale, and Mobile Mania, combining online qualifiers with LAN finals at venues such as the ICCB. Mangrove Esports, described as an influencer-driven organisation, has delivered more than 20 campus and community LAN tournaments across Bangladesh under banners such as Free Fire Campus Hero, turning university galleries and regional halls into temporary arenas.

In mobile-centric Bangladesh, Free Fire, PUBG Mobile, and other portable titles have become natural gateways to organised play. The Free Fire Bangladesh Championship 2025, for example, was created as an official qualifier with a reported prize pool of just over US$49,000, underscoring how international publishers now treat the country as a serious competitive region rather than a peripheral market.

A young, connected city

Dhaka’s esports wave rests on simple numbers: people, phones, and bandwidth. According to DataReportal’s Digital 2024: Bangladesh snapshot, there were about 77.36 million internet users in the country at the start of 2024, representing 44.5% of the population. Social media users reached roughly 52.9 million, indicating how quickly digital habits have taken root. A Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics survey conducted in 2024-25 reported that 54.8% of households used the internet, and smartphone adoption increased from 63.3% to 72.8% over the year.

Those numbers are not abstractions in Dhaka. They appear as clusters of young people around power sockets in malls, as viewers spamming reaction emojis under tournament live streams, as photos from LAN finals at ICCB or university auditoriums circulating through Facebook groups such as E-Sports Network Bangladesh. When the government granted esports official sport status in 2025, it simply put a nameplate on something that already existed on those screens: a generation for whom a controller or touchscreen is as natural as a cricket bat.

What bookmakers see in the Dhaka audience

Global betting brands watch those numbers closely. International operators such as MelBet advertise dedicated esports sections that cover Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, Valorant, FIFA, and other titles, often through Bangladesh-facing portals that quote welcome bonuses in Bangladeshi taka and provide interfaces in Bangla alongside English. Their product teams have learned to treat a Dhaka Free Fire or Mobile Legends final much like a European football match: markets appear for match winners, map handicaps, total rounds, and player-specific statistics.

Analytics from esports viewership platforms indicate that Bangladeshi events remain modest globally, with peak concurrent viewership in the low thousands for some qualifiers. Yet, the demographic profile is precisely what bookmakers seek: young, mobile-first, and deeply engaged in competitive play. For that audience, the movement from cheering for a campus team to speculating about outcomes is subtle. They already track form, map pools, and roster changes; an odds screen simply provides a numerical echo of those judgments.

Esports odds, law, and responsibility

The legal context, however, is anything but simple. Under the colonial-era Public Gambling Act of 1867, most forms of gambling in Bangladesh have long been illegal, with narrow exceptions such as regulated horse racing. As online betting grew, authorities initially faced a grey area: servers were located abroad, payments flowed through mobile wallets and card processors, and local law primarily addressed physical gaming houses.

That ambiguity has narrowed. The Cyber Security Ordinance 2025 now explicitly criminalises the creation, operation, or use of online portals, apps, or other gambling devices, with penalties that can include up to two years’ imprisonment or fines of up to ten million taka. The Criminal Investigation Department of Bangladesh Police launched a nationwide crackdown in 2025 targeting online gambling and betting, and government agencies have since announced a zero‑tolerance policy towards gambling ads and betting-related content across digital platforms.

For young Dhaka esports fans, this means the culture of prediction surrounding tournaments is under real legal and social pressure. Investigative reports on online gambling in Bangladesh point to daily transaction volumes worth several crore taka moving through formal banking channels alone, and academics have warned about the risks of debt and addiction among students. Responsible gaming advocates in the region respond with familiar advice: treat any stake as a discretionary entertainment expense, never as a source of income, and be wary of unlicensed operators or platforms that promise “guaranteed returns”.

The next chapter for Dhaka’s tournaments

Even under regulatory scrutiny, the contours of Dhaka’s esports future are evident. BYDESA’s international affiliations tie Bangladesh into global calendars, from IESF championships to regional qualifiers. Discovery One’s arena-scale productions at ICCB and Mangrove Esports’ campus circuits demonstrate how tournaments can range from elite televised finals to local scrims that provide first-time competitors with a stage. Free Fire and other mobile titles remain pillars. Still, PC games such as Valorant and Counter-Strike 2 are increasingly prominent in brackets, particularly at mixed-platform events such as the D1 Cup.

Against that backdrop, the persistence of betting interfaces is a kind of ghostly double of the stage lights. International sites continue to tailor their products to Dhaka’s habits even as the law in Bangladesh hardens. Brand pages aimed at local users often highlight buttons or banners labelled melbet download or similar, promising quick access to esports odds in Bangla and in Bangladeshi taka. At the same time, the official legal position classifies both the operation and use of such portals as punishable offences. The dissonance between those two realities is part of the story of modern Dhaka: a city where digital opportunity and digital risk arrive on the same notification bar.

For players gathering at ICCB, university galleries, or cramped gaming cafés, the most enduring thrill still comes from the match itself: the clutch retake on a Counter-Strike map, the last‑circle Free Fire survival, the sudden momentum shift in a Mobile Legends team fight. If bookmakers have adapted to the city’s young audience, the healthiest response from that audience is to keep betting, if they engage in it at all, behind the brighter lights of competition, community, and craft. The scoreboard on stage, not the balance on a betting slip, is what gives Dhaka’s esports wave its real weight.