Ossi Ketola says the industry’s bonus culture exists to keep players coming back. His alternative is to hand back half the house edge at once, and to be blunt about the rest.
Few casino owners describe their own industry as a social harm. Ossi Ketola does. “It’s deeply harmful to society and to individuals. It ruins lives,” says the 28-year-old Finnish founder of Duel, a cryptocurrency casino launched in July 2025. “I have no problem telling my customers directly: ‘Don’t gamble.’”
His argument is that people who gamble anyway deserve a cleaner product, and that the industry’s favourite sales tool, the bonus, is not what it appears to be.
Online casinos compete for the title of most generous, layering daily, weekly and monthly bonuses on top of deposit matches. Ketola argues that the money is the players’ own losses, handed back in instalments to keep them returning. “They dress it up as a bonus, as if they’re doing you a favour,” he says. It is money “essentially taken from their own pockets”, he adds, then “dangled in front of them, a little at a time”.
Many bonuses also carry wagering requirements, which oblige players to bet the bonus many times over before they can withdraw it. Duel offers no deposit bonuses at all, and publishes a page on its site arguing that such offers are a bad deal for players.
Instead, it returns half of the house edge on each eligible bet as “rakeback”, credited immediately and with no wagering requirement. Ketola says rivals typically return 20% to 30% of their edge, in the form of bonuses. Duel’s own games carry no house edge at all, up to daily limits.
A second practice concerns the moment a player tries to cash out. Ketola says some operators leave money in a customer’s playable balance while a withdrawal is pending, or stall payment with repeated document requests, and that problem gamblers often lose it in the meantime. “It’s like putting crack in front of a crack addict,” he says. At Duel, funds leave the playable balance the moment a withdrawal is requested.
Britain’s Gambling Commission reached a similar conclusion in 2021, banning “reverse withdrawals” at the operators it licenses on the grounds that they tempted customers to keep gambling.
Ketola is also unusually frank about where Duel makes its money. Its own games are priced to earn little or nothing. The profits come mainly from slot machines supplied by outside studios, which he calls the company’s “real cash cow”. He says the company refers to that part of the site as the “Meth Labs”, a nod to how heavily such games are engineered for compulsive play, and that his own advice is to avoid them. Each displays its house edge on its page.
His case rests on harm reduction. “Most people gambling with us would otherwise gamble somewhere else,” he says, and would get a worse deal there. He compares it to drugs: the best advice is not to take them, but anyone who does should at least make sure what they take is pure.
Independent reviewers have flagged gaps, however. Duel does not yet offer the deposit or loss limits common at regulated operators, and it asks for identity documents only if it suspects an underage player or a breach of its rules.
Ketola frames his choices in commercial terms as much as moral ones. Capitalism, he argues, is “a kind of arms race” in which the least scrupulous operators tend to win. He says he knows he could make more money by treating customers worse, and that he is “grateful to be in a position where I can do things honestly and still make a very good profit”.
