How Bloomberg Exposed the House Always Wins — Especially for Drake

A Bloomberg Businessweek data investigation published February 27, 2026 found that Stake.com celebrity influencers hit jackpots on the casino’s own Easygo-operated games at four times the rate of every other player studied — while performing at perfectly normal statistical levels on third-party slots from independent providers. The exposé, titled “How to Win Slots and Influence People,” analyzed 1,500 hours of livestream footage across 25 players and manually verified more than 600 major wins. The pattern is simple and damning: Drake wins abnormally often on games built by Stake’s parent company, and completely normally on everything else. Stake has called the findings “categorically incorrect” while declining to share its own player win-rate data — data that would settle the question definitively. A Missouri class-action trial opens March 20, 2026, with Bloomberg’s numbers now part of the public record.

Bloomberg’s Year-Long Investigation Tracked 1,500 Hours of Livestreams

The investigation, authored by data journalists Leon Yin and Surya Mattu with reporting from Cecilia D’Anastasio, used custom-built software to track on-screen balances, bets, and outcomes across approximately 500 hours of slot gameplay from five high-profile Stake influencers: Drake, Adin Ross, Tyler “Trainwreck” Niknam, Ishmael “Roshtein” Swartz, and Félix “xQc” Lengyel. Twenty additional Stake gamblers formed the broader dataset, bringing the total to 1,500 hours of footage across 25 players. Reporters manually verified more than 600 “big wins,” defining the threshold as any payout worth 1,000 times or more the base wager — a standard milestone in crypto gambling culture.

The methodology was notably careful with one contentious measurement: bonus buys. When a player pays a lump sum to skip directly into a slot’s bonus round — a common feature on high-volatility titles — Bloomberg converted that purchase into equivalent spin counts based on Stake’s own pricing. A bonus round costing $1,000 at a $10 base bet was treated as 100 equivalent spins. This conversion has since become the central target of critics, but Bloomberg’s methodology also reviewed legal complaints, analyzed blockchain transaction data, and interviewed three former Easygo employees and three people familiar with Stake’s influencer contracts. Those sources confirmed that certain streamers gamble with “house money” through so-called “fill” deals where Stake supplies the balance — contradicting the widespread impression that influencers risk personal wealth on stream.

The Core Statistical Finding: 4x on Easygo, Normal Everywhere Else

The central finding is stark in its simplicity. Drake hit big wins on Easygo-operated games once every approximately 2,500 spins — four times the study-wide average of once every 10,000 spins. He won big twice as frequently as the next-luckiest gambler in the dataset. Four players who logged comparable spin counts on Easygo titles never recorded a single qualifying big win. On third-party slot games from providers like Pragmatic Play and Hacksaw Gaming, Drake’s win rate was completely unremarkable — statistically indistinguishable from the average player.

Adin Ross showed similarly elevated rates on Easygo titles. During a “Fat Camp” marathon stream on Stake’s US sweepstakes site, Stake CEO Ed Craven appeared in Ross’s chat and prompted him to switch to “Hex Appeal” — an Easygo-owned slot developed by Stake’s in-house studio. Almost immediately, Ross hit a 10,000x multiplier win. The statistical rarity of that outcome is difficult to overstate: such a result occurs approximately once every 170,000 spins. Ross achieved it in roughly 2,000.

The critical distinction elevating this from statistical curiosity to a serious allegation is the directionality: the anomaly appears exclusively on games developed by Easygo Entertainment — Stake’s own parent company. Titles like Puffer Stacks, Rooster Returns, Hex Appeal, and Drac’s Stacks — built by Easygo’s in-house studios Twist and Massive — showed the inflated win rates. Games from Evolution Gaming, Pragmatic Play, and Hacksaw Gaming showed nothing unusual. Third-party providers independently control their own game mathematics; Stake cannot alter those odds. On Easygo titles, the same corporate entity controls both the casino platform and the game software.

The August 2025 Stream That Crystallized the Pattern

One session documented meticulously by Bloomberg became the investigation’s most damning narrative. In August 2025, Drake opened a Kick gambling stream with $3.5 million in Bitcoin and began playing third-party slots. Over 82 minutes, his balance bled down to $422,355. Then Stake co-founder Ed Craven joined the call. Craven told Drake his slot choices were “terrible,” deposited $500,000 directly into his account on camera, and directed him to switch to Easygo-operated games.

Drake complied. Within approximately one hour on Easygo titles Puffer Stacks and Rooster Returns, he hit four 1,000x-plus wins — including two $800,000 payouts — and rebuilt his balance past $2 million. The contrast is the point: 82 minutes of normal performance on third-party games, Craven appears on camera, redirects Drake to Easygo titles, and within an hour Drake hits four qualifying big wins. Bloomberg did not claim to have obtained internal algorithm parameters or RTP configuration files proving manipulation. The presentation is circumstantial — a before-and-after visible to every viewer watching in real time.

“There’s no international enforcer to ensure Stake’s odds are fair.”
— Bloomberg Businessweek, “How to Win Slots and Influence People,” February 27, 2026

Drake’s $100 Million Partnership and the Economics of House Money

Drake’s relationship with Stake began organically in late 2021, when he played under the username “DeepPocket6” and climbed through Stake’s VIP program. The formal partnership was announced in March 2022, with Craven calling it a “natural evolution.” The Financial Times reported the deal at approximately $100 million per year in promotional payments and gambling credits — a figure subsequently cited in multiple lawsuit filings, where Drake is alleged to have acknowledged the sum.

The scale of house money flowing through Drake’s accounts is staggering. Bloomberg’s blockchain analysis found Drake’s wallet received $45–50 million per week in cryptocurrency from Stake, with one week’s inflows reaching $190 million. Former Easygo employees confirmed that influencer balances are Stake-funded through “fill” deals — the operator supplies the bankroll, eliminating any genuine personal financial risk. Drake first streamed on Twitch in May 2022, giving away $1 million in Bitcoin while winning $18 million on roulette before ending the night down $20 million. A July 2022 session with French Montana drew over 100,000 viewers and produced $25 million in roulette wins. After Twitch banned unregulated gambling content in October 2022, Drake transitioned to Kick — the streaming platform co-founded by Stake’s own Ed Craven — where his streams eventually peaked at 440,000 concurrent viewers.

The partnership survived a dramatic public rupture in August 2025, when Stake blocked four of Drake’s withdrawal attempts without explanation. Drake entered Trainwreck’s Kick chat calling Craven a “snake,” offered to fight him “in Walmart,” and deleted his entire Kick account. Within weeks, he was placing $300,000 bets through Stake on Jannik Sinner at the US Open. By October 2025, Stake had gifted Drake $1 million in Bitcoin for his birthday. “We never left,” the company replied. The Drake vs. Stake controversy had been building publicly for months before Bloomberg gave it statistical backbone.

There is one arena where Drake’s gambling record tells the opposite story. A dedicated tracking site, TheDrakeCurse.com, documents a 30-54 public betting record on sports with an all-time deficit of approximately $786,072. The “Drake Curse” — the superstition that any team he backs is doomed — dates to 2015. The contrast between his conspicuously poor sports betting outcomes (where he bets against independent books using genuinely fair odds) and his suspiciously exceptional casino results on Easygo games (where the house controls the math) is precisely what Bloomberg’s investigation quantified.

Adin Ross Brought a Young Audience into the Pipeline

Adin Ross’s Stake deal began around August 2022, with leaked Discord messages from March 2022 revealing payments of 335 Ethereum per week — roughly $1 million weekly at the time. Bloomberg’s blockchain analysis found accounts linked to Ross received ether worth $78 million from Stake between November 2021 and March 2025. After his eighth and final Twitch ban in February 2023 for hateful conduct violations, Ross became one of Kick’s marquee creators, claiming to be the platform’s highest-paid streamer.

What distinguishes Ross’s situation is audience composition. While Ross has claimed his average viewer is 20–22 years old, independent analysis places his core demographic in the 13–24 age bracket. Research cited in lawsuit filings indicates that 36–47% of minors aged 11–18 have been exposed to gambling streams on platforms like Kick. The platform’s minimal age verification makes underage access straightforward — a factor the Missouri class-action specifically highlights, alleging that Ross and Drake promoted a product “threatening the welfare of Missouri residents and especially its young people.”

In September 2025, Ross signed a $100 million deal with Rainbet, a Stake competitor, effectively ending his direct Stake promotion. He publicly dismissed the Missouri lawsuit as “f***ing bullsh*t” and neither he nor his representatives responded to Bloomberg’s requests for comment. His legal team stated: “We are confident that when the court applies the relevant law to the facts of these cases, Mr. Ross will be dismissed from these lawsuits.”

Stake’s Corporate Architecture Makes the Allegation Structurally Possible

Understanding why the Easygo-versus-third-party distinction matters requires a map of Stake’s corporate structure. The platform is operated by Medium Rare N.V., registered in Curaçao, but the parent entity is Easygo Group Holdings Pty Ltd, a Melbourne-based company solely directed by co-founder Ed Craven, born 1995. Craven and co-founder Bijan Tehrani met as teenagers playing RuneScape around 2010, where both earned roughly $100,000 from in-game gambling before being banned. They launched Primedice (a Bitcoin dice game) in 2013 and Stake.com in 2017. Forbes estimates their combined wealth at approximately $5.6 billion.

Easygo’s in-house studios — Twist and Massive — develop slot titles distributed on Stake and sold to third-party operators. These are entirely distinct from two other game categories on the platform. There are three tiers of trust, and only one of them is structurally vulnerable to the Bloomberg allegation:

In a 2022 blog post, Craven wrote: “We have no direct control of the odds of any of our games as these are controlled by a third-party.” But Easygo’s own games are not third-party — they are developed by the same corporate family. The company has grown into the world’s largest crypto casino, generating an estimated $4.7 billion in gross gaming revenue in 2024, processing roughly 10 billion bets monthly, and attracting 127 million monthly visits. Easygo also co-founded Kick, creating a vertically integrated ecosystem where the casino, the streaming platform, and the game studios share corporate ownership.

Provably Fair’s Fatal Flaw: It Verifies Execution, Not Configuration

Stake’s “provably fair” system is the platform’s central trust proposition and a genuine technical innovation in crypto gambling. When applied to Stake Originals, it allows players to independently verify that individual outcomes were not tampered with after a bet was placed. Our guide to provably fair verification on Stake explains the process in detail, and the deeper exploration of the mathematics behind provably fair systems makes clear why this works for Stake Originals. The problem is that it does not address Easygo slots in the same way.

The provably fair system verifies randomness of execution, not fairness of configuration. It proves “you got the outcome that was predetermined by these seeds” — but it does not prove “the parameters used to generate that outcome were identical to every other player’s.” If Easygo configured different Return to Player percentages, altered volatility profiles, or set different multiplier frequency tables for specific player accounts, the provably fair verification would not detect this. The proof operates at the transaction level, not the configuration level.

This distinction matters enormously for the Bloomberg allegation. If Easygo’s slot games use account-specific RTP or volatility configurations for high-profile influencer accounts — boosting win rates to produce the streaming content Stake needs — the provably fair system would faithfully execute those altered parameters and produce a valid, unalterable cryptographic proof for each spin. Every individual outcome would be “fair” in the transaction sense. The unfairness would be in the game configuration itself, invisible to the verification layer.

The Regulatory Vacuum That Makes This Possible

Stake operates under Curaçao gaming license OGL/2024/1451/0918, issued by a jurisdiction that Bloomberg characterized as having “never fined a casino operator or revoked a license” until the BC.Game revocation in 2025. Curaçao enacted new gaming legislation — the LOK framework — effective December 24, 2024, requiring certified RNGs, fair and transparent games, and granting the Curaçao Gaming Authority suspension and revocation powers. Whether the CGA has the will and capacity to investigate its most prominent licensee remains an open question.

The contrast with regulated jurisdictions is severe. Under the UKGC, providing different odds to different players based on influencer status would be explicitly illegal — adaptive behavior is prohibited. Under Nevada’s Gaming Control Board, all software changes require lab approval before deployment. Stake surrendered its UK license in March 2026 following a UKGC investigation into whether its ads appealed to young people and tied gambling to seduction. Australia’s ACMA blocks Stake entirely under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001. France, Norway, Belgium, and Switzerland have also restricted or blocked access.

The FTC disclosure dimension adds another layer. Updated 2023 Endorsement Guidelines require clear and conspicuous disclosure of all material connections, including cash payments and free play. Penalties reach $51,744 per violation. If Drake is gambling with $45–50 million per week supplied by Stake while presenting it as personal funds — and if the odds themselves differ from what regular players experience — this represents a potential compound violation: undisclosed material connection and fundamentally misleading product demonstration.

Five Lawsuits and a Trial Opening March 20

The Bloomberg report landed in the middle of an escalating legal offensive. The full scope of Stake’s US legal exposure spans multiple jurisdictions and theories of liability. The Missouri class-action, filed October 27, 2025 by plaintiff Justin Killham in a 34-page complaint, alleges Stake “exploits players’ cognitive biases” through deceptive marketing, with Drake and Ross accused of “glamorizing” a “highly addictive” product under “deeply fraudulent pretenses.” That case goes to trial March 20, 2026 — just three weeks after Bloomberg’s publication, giving plaintiffs powerful new statistical evidence in discovery.

The Virginia federal RICO lawsuit filed December 31, 2025 by law firm Impresa Legal Group makes the most explosive allegations: that Drake, Ross, and streamer George “Grand Wizard CN” Nguyen operated a racketeering enterprise through Stake, using the platform’s tipping features to allegedly conceal money flows and deploy automated bots to artificially inflate Drake’s Spotify streaming counts. As a RICO violation, damages would be eligible for trebling. The related third federal lawsuit against Drake and Adin Ross and the Spotify stream manipulation allegations are documented separately.

Additional class actions have been filed in New Mexico, California, and Illinois. The Los Angeles City Attorney separately sued Stake.us in September 2025, calling it “a rogue and real money gambling racket.” Harvard Law lecturer Duncan Levin, a former federal prosecutor, observed that the RICO framing “lets plaintiffs tell a bigger story — instead of focusing on one bad transaction, they’re saying the whole system was set up to make money in an illegal way.” Stake called the suit “a nonsense claim.” Drake’s representatives declined comment. Ross dismissed the lawsuits as baseless.

The Methodology Debate: Valid Critiques That Don’t Explain the Pattern

Stake and several industry analysts have challenged Bloomberg’s methodology in ways that deserve careful consideration. Co-founder Bijan Tehrani posted on X that Bloomberg “settled on smugly claiming that our Stake games are rigged… based on a sample size of 0.1 hours for Adin and 1.3 hours for Drake” of Easygo play specifically. PokerScout’s Alex Weldon published a detailed rebuttal arguing that bonus-buy features create structurally higher variance than base-game spins, making Bloomberg’s spin-equivalence calculation “fundamentally flawed.” Weldon calculated the probability of Drake’s results at 0.21–0.3% — unlikely but not statistically impossible. xQc accused Bloomberg of “cherry-picking data.”

These criticisms have some technical validity. The Easygo-specific sample sizes are genuinely small. Bonus rounds do produce more extreme outcomes per unit of cost. And a 0.2% probability, while very low, is not zero. Use our sample size calculator to assess what a truly robust dataset would require, and the variance survival calculator to model how long a 0.2% outcome takes to appear by chance.

Several factors complicate Stake’s defense. Bloomberg noted that even when isolating only Easygo bonus rounds — the methodology critics prefer — Drake and Ross still showed the highest win rates in the dataset. The pattern’s directionality is the hardest thing to explain through variance alone: Easygo abnormal, third-party normal, consistently, across two of the platform’s highest-paid ambassadors. Gaming America analyst David Evans wrote: “Bloomberg’s dataset does not ask you to trust a statement. It asks you to look at rates per spin… the optics have already changed.” Eric Raskin of Casino Reports identified the broader damage: “The average person doesn’t know the difference between an unregulated crypto casino and the most tightly regulated iCasino on the planet.” Every future clip of an influencer jackpot on Stake will now be measured against Bloomberg’s benchmark — one big win per 10,000 spins for normal players, one per 2,500 for Drake.

This Fits a Pattern the Industry Built Over Years

The Bloomberg investigation did not emerge in a vacuum. The influencer gambling controversy has been building since at least 2018, accelerating dramatically in 2022. By the first half of that year, viewers had consumed over 240 million hours of gambling content on Twitch. The September 2022 ItsSliker scandal — where streamer Abraham Mohammed admitted to scamming $200,000 from friends and fellow streamers to fuel a gambling addiction — catalyzed a revolt led by Pokimane, Mizkif, and Hasan Piker. Twitch banned slots, roulette, and dice from unregulated sites effective October 18, 2022, specifically naming Stake, Rollbit, Duelbits, and Roobet. Kick’s December 2022 launch — by Stake’s own founders — was a direct response, creating a vertically integrated content distribution channel.

The numbers that have emerged from individual streamers tell their own story. Trainwreck claimed $360 million in Stake payments over 16 months. xQc admitted to wagering $3 billion on Stake across 1.1 million bets, called himself “moderately addicted,” and acknowledged that followers lost $119 million using his promo codes — which he dismissed as “rookie numbers.” Roshtein has faced persistent allegations of playing on demo accounts, with Trainwreck presenting evidence that a $24 million win didn’t appear on the game developer’s public leaderboard. The precedent for FTC enforcement dates to the 2017 CSGO Lotto case — the first action against individual influencers for gambling endorsement — but no previous case has alleged what Bloomberg’s data suggests: that the game mathematics themselves may vary by player, turning influencer streams into advertisements for outcomes structurally unavailable to the audience watching them.

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Sources

• How to Win Slots and Influence People — Bloomberg Businessweek, February 27, 2026
• How Businessweek Analyzed Crypto Casino Stake’s Slots Gameplay — Bloomberg Businessweek, February 27, 2026 (methodology note)
• FTC Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking — Federal Trade Commission, 2023 Update
• Online Gambling — Interactive Gambling Act 2001 — Australian Communications and Media Authority
• Curaçao LOK Gaming Framework — Curaçao Gaming Authority, enacted December 24, 2024