You may well remember that I have speculated several times in articles over the past
few years, that the next generation of Virtual Football games will have some new features and probably the most key element of that is to give the games their own context.
What we mean by that, is rather than by having entirely random games selected by the software, you would instead have a schedule of games involving teams that play out within the context of a competition, such as a league or cup format.
Well, it now seems as though the future is here and this is exactly what is now available at 10Bet via the site’s Virtual Sports 3-Way betting.
Alongside the standard Virtual Sports offerings of Football, Horse Racing and Greyhounds, 10Bet now offers Football, Basketball, Horse Racing and Greyhounds in 3-Way Virtual Sports and there is a big difference between these games as in each of the 3-Way sports, each race or match takes place within the context of a tournament or a race meeting.
The importance of this cannot be understated as it means that every game and race is given additional context. Furthermore, this context then generates its own statistics, which are presented to players across a number of key markets before the matches kick off.
Yes, you did read that right as in 3-Way Virtuals, you can tune in to several matches
by clicking across them and viewing the action on screen.
We are going to take a look at 3-Way Virtual Basketball, Greyhound and Horse Racing in more detail in subsequent articles over the next couple of weeks, but for now let’s focus on 3-Way Virtual Football and what it has to offer.
10Bet Virtual Football 3-Way
If you are wondering what the 3-Way refers to in the title of this game, then I believe it refers to the number of bets available on each match in the new Virtual Football game at 10-bet. You can bet on the following bets
- Correct Score
- Money Line (Match Result)
- Over/Under 1.5 Goals at Full Time
However, it should be noted that the game itself seems to offer the opportunities to bet on more markets than those currently offered by 10-Bet, as the results screen shows a far greater number of markets and the results from them for the match. Maybe these are markets that 10-Bet will offer in the future, rather than the three rather simple bets available at the moment.
How does Virtual Football 3-Way Work?
In this game, there are 16 Virtual Football teams representing different countries 
around Europe. They play each other across a series of matches over 30 weeks.
Each week sees eight matches in the league take place and each team plays the other twice, as in a standard football league. However, it is the sheer level of detail in Virtual Football 3-Way that makes it so appealing to players.
Indeed, this is as close to real life football betting as Virtual Football has ever managed to get.
Each game week takes around three minutes to play through and during these three minutes, you can view the action on any of the eight games by clicking on the game itself. Each game will see highlights shown which includes goals, set pieces and near misses but also which now includes goalkeeper saves, offside rulings and even VAR representations of offside decisions.
Furthermore, each game is not restricted to just up to four goals being scored, which means you get a far more realistic spread of results and of course, more betting options for, for example, the Correct Score market.
The real brilliance of Virtual Football 3-Way is not just that it has a league format which is played through every 90 minutes or so, but that each and every game generates data and this data is then made available to the player through a fantastic interface.
In the box where the highlights of a game is being shown (and these are shown 
pretty much continuously), there is a button which seems to show a graph. Click on this and you will bring up the access to the data that the game generates.
Here you can see a huge amount of data about the current league including the league table, the head to head meetings between the teams over the last five meetings, top goalscorer lists, disciplinary lists, fixtures and even a huge amount of data on each team’s squad and each of the players within that squad.
The amount of data that is collected and generated by the league format is incredible and although much of it is not utilised by 10-bet’s game at the present, it is clear that this data could be used to allow punters to make a massive number of additional bets in future versions of the game.
A great example of this is the leading goalscorers list which not only displays which players have scored the most goals, but lists how many games they have played, how many goals they have scored and even how many of those goals have come as a result of a penalty.
At the moment, 10-Bet have kept things very simple with their 3-Way Virtual Football betting with just the minimum number of markets available, but it is abundantly clear that this version of the game is going to be the template for the next generation of Virtual Football games and I would be hugely surprised if at some point in the near future, the company does not expand the number of bets available in the game.
3-Way Virtual Football – The Verdict – 95%
Virtual Sports has now had its ‘concorde’ moment, where there has been such a leap 
in what is possible that the original Virtual Football game looks like a pale imitation in comparison. 3-Way Virtual Football is a stunning success. The quality of the animations, the variety in the creation of the results and most of all, the amount of data collected and then able to be easily viewed by punters, is stunning. It is an almost exact replica of real life football betting, but one in which an entire season lasts around an hour.
It is clear a huge amount has gone into this game, even down to the details of the players name sounding like they come from the city and country they represent (but with a few foreign players added for realism).
It is fair to say that although 10-Bet are offering a slimmed down version of the game, the full version with all betting modes available, could well define how Virtual Football games look from now on. It is that good and it is also well worth a closer look.
