Every industry has its rebels — people who arrive uninvited, break the unwritten rules, and force everyone else to either adapt or watch from the sidelines. Steve Jobs did it to the phone industry. Elon Musk did it to the auto industry. In the world of online gambling – an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars, built on a simple principle that the house always wins — that rebel turned out to be a 28-year-old Finn with a gamer past, a provocative mouth, and a business idea so radical that his competitors allegedly paid to have him silenced.
This is not a story about a saint. Ossi “Monarch” Ketola has cheated, has insulted people, has lost tens of millions at the poker table without flinching. But it is precisely this cocktail of genius, audacity, and controversy that makes his story impossible to look away from. Whether you end up respecting him or despising him by the end of this article – that’s entirely up to you. But you will remember his name.
Ossi Ketola was born in 1997 in Finland – a country more commonly associated with Nokia and saunas than with gambling. Yet this very Finn, now 28 years old, created one of the most talked-about crypto casinos in the world and, along the way, became the most controversial figure in modern poker. Under the alias Monarch, he built an empire generating hundreds of millions of euros per year, lost $15 million in a single evening – and claimed it was all part of the plan.
To understand who Ketola is, you have to go back to the very beginning – to a teenager who was already running his first business at the age of 14.
At 14, while his peers were playing video games, Ossi founded Helpot Huvit – an entertainment equipment rental service. It was a small but real business that gave him his first taste of management.
Two years later, at 16, Ketola dove into the world that would define his entire career – online gambling. Together with a partner, he created BigBoiBets, a betting platform built around RuneScape’s in-game currency. Ketola owned 30% of the project. The venture ended in a dispute with his partner, after which he launched his own version – RSGambling.com – which was quickly shut down.
Ketola later openly admitted that in his youth he was involved in some less-than-honorable activities: DDoS attacks on competitors’ websites, in-game currency fraud. He doesn’t hide his past – if anything, he uses it as part of his personal brand, setting himself apart from what he calls the “hypocrites” of the industry.
The year is 2016. Ketola takes out a loan for €11,000 and launches CSGOEmpire – a platform for betting with skins from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Roulette, coinflips, case openings – all using virtual items that carry real market value.The timing was perfect. The skin-gambling market was booming, and CSGOEmpire quickly became one of its leaders. The platform attracted over 5 million users and, by various estimates, generated over $100 million in annual revenue for nine consecutive years.
CSGOEmpire made Ketola genuinely wealthy – and gave him the resources for his next, even more ambitious project.
In 2025, Ketola launched Duel Casino (duel.com) – a cryptocurrency casino that challenged the fundamental business model of the entire industry.
The concept sounds almost absurd: 100% RTP (Return to Player) on the platform’s proprietary games. That means zero house edge – the house doesn’t take a single percent. Dice, Crash Games, Plinko, Blackjack, Mines, Keno – in all of Duel’s original games, the player is mathematically playing at even odds.
For comparison: traditional crypto casinos operate with a 3–4% margin, and conventional brick-and-mortar casinos take even more. Ketola essentially offered the market a product where the casino doesn’t profit from the core gameplay.
The business model rests on several pillars:
Duel operates exclusively with cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether (USDT), Solana, Dogecoin, and others – more than 16 coins), requires no KYC for most users, processes withdrawals within 2–5 minutes, and employs a provably fair system with dual-seed cryptographic verification that any player can audit independently.
The platform is registered under the legal entity Immortal Snail LLC (Nevis) and licensed by the government of the Autonomous Island of Anjouan (Union of the Comoros).
Alongside his business ventures, Ketola burst onto the high-stakes poker scene. In 2024, he began competing in the biggest tournaments and heads-up matches, quickly earning a reputation as a fearless and unpredictable player.The numbers speak for themselves:
But the defining poker story of Monarch’s career was his match against the legendary Dan “Jungleman” Cates in August 2025 in Cyprus, as part of the Onyx Super High Roller Series. A series of six heads-up matches with escalating stakes (buy-ins of €5–6 million each) stretched over 12 hours. The result: Ketola lost approximately $15 million in a single session, and his total losses for the week in Cyprus amounted to roughly $19 million.
For anyone else, this would have been a catastrophe. For Monarch, it was a marketing campaign. The match was broadcast, discussed in every poker media outlet, and the names Ketola and Duel Casino received enormous exposure. He lost $19 million – and gained the kind of advertising that money simply cannot buy.
In October 2025, an event shook both the poker and gambling communities: the accounts @Monarch, @Duel, and @CSGOEmpire were simultaneously blocked on X (formerly Twitter). The platform offered a terse reference to “rule violations” without elaborating.
Ketola put forward his own version: the ban was paid for by competitors and deliberately timed to coincide with the launch of zero-house-edge games on Duel. “Someone spent a significant amount of money to get these accounts banned,” he declared.
The theory sounds conspiratorial, but context lends it some plausibility: Ketola was genuinely threatening competitors’ business models by offering 100% RTP, and the timing of the ban coincided with Duel’s aggressive marketing push.
On the other hand, Ketola had repeatedly made racist remarks on social media, defending them as “freedom of speech.” This drew sharp criticism from the poker community and could easily have been a standalone reason for the ban – even on Elon Musk’s platform, known for its liberal approach to content moderation.
Ossi “Monarch” Ketola is a living paradox. He created a casino that takes no commission from players – and simultaneously makes a fortune from it. He loses millions at poker – and calls it an investment. He openly talks about his fraudulent past — and positions himself as a champion of transparency.
He is 28, commands a multimillion-dollar empire, holds a poker track record that seasoned professionals spend decades building, and carries a reputation that inspires admiration in some and revulsion in others.
You can admire his entrepreneurial instincts. You can criticize his statements and methods. But you cannot ignore him – and, by all appearances, that is exactly what Monarch is after.
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