Yolo Group: The next chapter…

Black or white, because the grey is disappearing quickly!

I still remember the day in 2002, when we received our first Party Poker affiliate cheque for the grand total of $13.50! How proud Reio, Raido and I were to build something from nothing based on a potential idea and a strong-willed focus to innovate and win.

Poker was taking over the world, with Joe Hachem and Chris Moneymaker both winning the WSOP. Paradise Poker was hot with $1-2 Limit Holden going around the clock, flyers were being handed out in the car park of Hollywood Park casino for the Party Poker Cruises, Terrance Chan was the voice of Poker Stars based out of their Costa Rican Support office and the travel channel was about to launch the WPT, which would bring poker into the living rooms of millions of people. Poker was about to be brought to the mainstream and accessible to all, with e-commerce payment rails improving every day.

I arrived in Estonia, fresh out of university (with plenty of hours under my belt at the Crown Casino poker room) and via a 206 hour train trip across Russia to play in the Russian Poker Championships at the Cosmos Casino. I was lucky enough to have a month there playing as a prop player with John Kobeck at the Korona Casino on Novi Arbat and began to understand the economics of a poker room. We don’t want the players to go to the felt, we want the money going around the table and a small rake being taken every hand. Pot limit Omaha hi-lo enabled just this, with most pots being split multiple ways, so punters had that feeling of victory, along with a free drink with stacks maintained and the next hand being played out.

I ended up in Estonia, playing cards in the evening at the Astoria Palace casino with Andres Burget and multi-tabling $2-4 PLO on Party and Stars grinding out a small win every day. This allowed us to start understanding how online poker would take over and gradually make its way across Europe and in particular Eastern Europe. It was a crazy time, travelling to every casino from Helsinki to Odessa meeting with casino management and prophesising how online poker would compliment their land based poker and casino games. This was the basis of our online affiliate company from the early days, always putting the customer first and ensuring we built long lasting in person relationships.

Fast forward to 2013, we had skins on every poker network, we had worked out how to innovate in the payment world, having a single on / off ramp (and single KYC gated entry) and then helped players manage their liquidity and the action across multiple networks, all while offering the best rakeback deals in the industry and allowing players to cashout their rakeback in advance, before we had been paid by the poker networks.

With over 250k players and 300 white label partners, this was all working perfectly, until one poker network was unable to satisfy the network reconciliations because of its inability to collect from one of their larger skins. It left us in a massive hole and facing an existential crisis. It wasn’t our fault, we managed our treasury correctly, but if we couldn’t collect what we are owed, our players would blame us for the situation when they couldn't cash out their balances.

It was during our 2013 Christmas dinner, where after a few vodkas, I remember saying, “We are a smart, young ambitious team of 30 people here in Tallinn. We can achieve anything we put our minds to, as long as we can control the money”. That’s when either Raido or Reio piped up and said “What about bitcoin? We can be our own bank then”.

And thus started the immediate next chapter of our group.

Within two weeks we were running a Bitcoin poker network, which soon morphed into a crypto casino, called bitcasino.io in 2014. We had the experience of working with a Curacao license and regulation and had a lot of B2B connections to quickly onboard (and convince) suppliers. We built our own Bitcoin nodes and faced the challenges of double spending. We learnt quickly how to manage a treasury with hot and cold wallet management as well as deal with frequent hacking attempts. We engrossed ourselves in everything crypto in the world, on bitcointalk forums, at the conferences, over at the Paralelní Polis cafe in Prague, bright eyed and excited, given the decentralised nature of crypto.

This ambition allowed us to stay very true to our group values of “Fun, Fast and Fair”. We paid players within 1 minute irrespective of the withdrawal amount. If a player wanted to deposit and withdraw 20 times a day, we agreed! Such an amazing concept compared to fiat payment processing, where merchant fees simply killed that concept, with a cut on the way in and a cut on the way out (not to mention a percentage for settlement) - with operators having to naturally pass on this cost to their players.

Crypto revolutionised the real money gaming market as it allowed an operator to truly put the customer at the centre of their universe. The money saved on fiat payment processing allowed us to be more generous towards the players. But it allowed us to very honestly say to a player:

“Playing on our site, the house is a 51/49% favourite. But when you beat the maths on our coin flip, we want to cheer for you and congratulate you for beating the maths. We will win in the long term given the big data sample, but we will process those winnings to your crypto wallet in one minute, whether it be $10 or $1m and here is a bottle of champagne to celebrate your win!”

It was fun and refreshing to have this approach with our customers and many of our VIPs became close friends and colleagues (some of which we were able to invest into their crypto related businesses as well). Gambling was fun, the platform was fast, we were leading the charge and even launched sportsbet.io in under 3 months in 2016 because we thought it would be cool. I remember even one VIP at the champions league final in Kiev, insisted he pay for dinner for the whole VIP group, because he had won money on Real Madrid that evening against us.

The best thing was it wasn’t us versus them. We were all enjoying the entertainment and we all loved crypto and our common understanding how it would change the fabric and infrastructure of the banking system as we know it.

I enjoyed the opportunity to meet with many regulators to push the crypto narrative forward. I was lucky enough to be asked to consult on the introduction or indeed simply the consideration of crypto within a gaming regulation. I consulted and gave feedback to the regulators in Curacao, Isle of Man, UK, NTRC (Australia) and EMTA (Estonia). Most were hesitant, because of the then bad press around cryptocurrencies; specifically given the recent failure of Mt Gox and the rapid rise of Silk Road. Given the transparent nature of the blockchain, it should be every regulator’s dream to have absolute fiduciary and forensic visibility of every single transaction going into and out of their licensees' operations without direct intervention or control. Suppliers like Chainanalysis evolved with crypto analytics. I remember taking the CEO of Chainanalysis to a board meeting at the Net Ent headquarters in Stockholm, to put the case forward to Net Ent to have BTC and ETH as gaming currencies in their slot games.

That said, in this time, Curacao was the only regulator which had adopted crypto regulations in a regulatory framework. Crypto casinos grew quickly between 2018 - 2022 and given the freshness of the entrepreneurs behind them (Eddie and Bijan for eg, Stake’s co-founders), they disregarded all the traditional marketing concepts of programmatic, affiliate top lists, black hat SEO, paid media, CAC:LTV ratios. Being gamers themselves, they marketed their site the way they wanted it to be marketed - with streamers and influencers. We (sportsbet.io) even put a bitcoin logo on the sleeve of Watford FC when we sponsored the front of shirt in 2019!

The “established, tier 1” brands were, quite honestly, caught with their pants down and simply didn’t get it. Of course they complained and said crypto was illegal and was only used in black markets. But the fact of the matter was, just like taking your first Uber ride, and as unconfident as you may well be, jumping into a random car with an unknown driver, which was selected from an app, with your card preprogrammed to make payment at the end of the trip, it actually makes sense at the end - you even become an ambassador of the new way. It’s efficient, easy, fast, safe and changes the way you have become so programmed to think and operate.

This is exactly the same with crypto casinos and it made it so simple to deposit, play, have fun, join the community and maybe beat the maths or not, but at least be entertained. This 'new' concept moved away from the traditional gambling site operations, it gave instant gratification to players and with the help of automatic withdrawals it compensated them instantly as well.

I remember one gambling executive telling me at ICE in 2016, that they expected at least 57% of pending fiat withdrawals to be player cancelled within a 48 hour mandatory pending period; how sickening…

Fast forward to 2025. The Yolo Group has two very successful crypto sites, bitcasino.io and sportsbet.io. We aren’t the biggest site in the world but we have a hugely loyal database of players, particularly VIPs. Yet the world is changing rapidly and as Pierre from next.io said recently, “the grey market opportunity is rapidly shrinking". I look at it another way, and am very proud that we have worked in the pre-regulated market for such a long time in a responsible fashion. Our policies are strong and responsible gaming tools are by far the best in the crypto casino segment. We respect our customers and they respect us.

That said, I see a few challenges facing regulatory gaming’s future. It is becoming increasingly clear that the worlds of regulated and pre-regulated gaming will no longer co-exist in peaceful harmony. Whichever side of the regulatory table you sit on, it will soon be time for operators to make a choice and push all their chips forward onto a single regulatory colour.

Our vision is to create a future-ready, fully integrated gaming ecosystem built on compliance, innovation, and player trust. The global industry is moving towards higher standards, and Yolo intends not just to keep pace, but to lead.

For us, our next chapter this transition is about more than regulation — it is about redefining gaming itself. We are building something the industry has never seen before: a unified ecosystem that brings land-based and online gaming together under one wallet, powered by crypto and technology.

It is a step beyond compliance; it is innovation that will shape the future of gaming in a fun, fast and (regulated) fair way

I for one, along with the shareholders of the Yolo Group, are very much looking forward to our next chapter.