Duel’s in-house games are priced to break even. By the account of its founder, Ossi Ketola, the crypto casino still made just under $100 million in its first year. The explanation is a classic retail strategy, applied with discipline and described in plain terms. 

Every retailer understands the loss leader. Few casino operators have built a company around it as deliberately as Duel.com. 

The crypto casino, founded by the Finnish entrepreneur Ossi Ketola and launched in July 2025, is best known for in-house games that are designed to earn the house nothing. Dice, crash, plinko and the rest of its originals carry a net house edge of zero on the first $50,000 a player wagers each day, so over time the house expects neither to win nor to lose on them. By Ketola’s account, the business made just under $100 million in its first twelve months all the same. 

The two facts are not in tension. Together, they are the strategy. 

An old idea, newly applied 

The textbook definition of a loss leader is “a product sold at a price below its minimum profit margin to stimulate other sales of more profitable goods or services.” Printer makers have long sold the machine at or near cost and earned their return on the ink. Game console makers have often launched new hardware as a loss leader to build market share and, with it, an ecosystem of games. Costco has held the price of its hot dog and soda combination at $1.50 since 1985, a figure widely believed to sit below cost, because the shoppers it brings through the door spend on everything else. 

The classic loss leader shares a few traits. It is something customers buy often, so they recognise a bargain when they see one, and retailers commonly limit how much any one shopper can take, so the offer cannot be stockpiled. Duel’s originals fit that profile closely. They are the games experienced players return to most often, their prices are easy to compare, and the zero-edge offer runs to a fixed daily allowance per player. 

The anchor products 

Duel’s originals do the work that milk and bread do for a supermarket. Shoppers judge a store by the prices they know best, so a handful of staples are sold keenly, and the margin is earned across the rest of the basket. For experienced gamblers, the originals are the staples: simple, transparent games on which operators can be compared like for like, and on which Duel has set its price at zero. 

The range is wider than the headline suggests. Duel’s lobby lists a dozen originals, from dice, mines, keno and limbo to rock paper scissors and a game called Beef, and every tile carries the same label: “100% RTP”. Castle Roulette, a live original, carries the same rate. 

The basket 

The margin is made across a deliberately broad catalogue. Around the originals sit more than 5,000 titles, most of them slots from established third-party studios, priced at the edges those studios set. Alongside them run a live dealer casino and a sportsbook covering more than 50 sports. 

Ketola is clear about which part carries the commercial weight. He calls the slot catalogue Duel’s “real cash cow”. 

The site’s own promotions point the same way. Where the originals sell themselves on price, the engagement spend is directed at the earning side of the catalogue: a banner across the site announces

“$3m monthly and $25k daily leaderboards now live for slots and live games.” The prize money sits precisely where the margin is made. 

The price of the originals wins the attention of the customers who compare most carefully; the breadth of the catalogue gives them reason to stay. A player drawn in by a zero-edge dice game has thousands of other titles a click away, and no reason to take that business elsewhere. 

The cherry-picker question 

Any grocer could raise the first objection. A loss leader pays only if shoppers fill the rest of the basket, and some never do. Even the standard reference on the tactic concedes that “some customers may have the discipline to only buy the loss leaders.” A casino pricing its best-known games at zero, the reasoning goes, should attract exactly those customers. 

The answer lies in where Duel set the price. A supermarket’s loss leader is sold below cost, so every cherry picker leaves the store a little poorer. Duel’s originals are priced at break-even rather than below it, and beyond the daily allowance a scaling edge applies. On a player who never strays from them, the house expects neither to gain nor to lose, and the allowance caps the volume the offer covers. What the grocer treats as a leak is, on Duel’s terms, a neutral outcome, while every player who moves on to the slots, the live tables or the sportsbook adds margin. 

The scale of the business suggests plenty do. Deposit data gathered from the blockchain, independently of the company, places Duel second among crypto casinos, behind only Stake. By Ketola’s account, the year’s revenue came in just under $100 million, and with the originals priced to earn nothing, that money can only have come from the rest of the catalogue. 

Candour as a selling point 

What sets Duel apart from most loss-leader businesses is that it says so. Retailers rarely advertise that their cheapest lines exist to sell something else; a familiar tactic is to place the bargain at the rear of the store, so that shoppers must walk past the higher-margin goods to reach it. Duel sets out on its own pages what the 

zero-edge offer covers and where it ends, and its founder discusses the economics of the catalogue in public, in terms most operators would reserve for the boardroom. 

Profit and principle 

Ossi Ketola frames the design in ethical as well as commercial terms. Capitalism, he has argued, is “a kind of arms race”, one in which the operators most willing to treat customers badly tend to make the most money. His answer was a structure in which fair treatment and profitability point in the same direction rather than pulling against each other. 

By his account, it has delivered. “I’m grateful to be in a position where I can do things honestly,” he says, “and still make a very good profit.” 

The games that made Duel famous were built to break even. The nearly $100 million, as he tells it, came from the basket.

Written in partnership with Tom White

For years, Mayeli Alonso was known to millions as a reality television personality — a recognizable face in the Latino entertainment world whose personal life often became part of the public conversation. But today, that identity tells only a fraction of her story.

Behind the cameras, Alonso has been building something much bigger: a business empire rooted in wellness, confidence, fashion, and the growing economic power of Latina women in the United States.

Her evolution is not simply about a new chapter. It is about changing the narrative around who she is.

The transformation is visible. Alonso has undergone a significant physical transformation in recent months, drawing attention across social media and prompting conversations about her evolving lifestyle. But focusing solely on her weight would miss the more important story. Her most significant transformation has been professional — moving from being recognized primarily as a reality television personality to establishing herself as an entrepreneur with a clear vision for the modern Latina consumer.

At the center of that evolution is Evolution Fit, the activewear and lifestyle brand she created from her own experience.

“I got tired of not feeling good about myself, of not recognizing who I was,” Alonso says. “I realized that change had to start from within.”

That realization became the foundation for a business designed to speak directly to women who, like Alonso, are navigating careers, motherhood, personal reinvention, and the pressure to constantly become something more.

From Reality Television to Entrepreneurship

The transition from entertainment personality to entrepreneur is not always an easy one.

Public figures can become defined by the characters audiences associate with them. For Alonso, breaking beyond that perception required building something that could exist independently of television.

Evolution Fit became part of that answer.

Alonso identified what she saw as a gap in the fitness and activewear market: products and messaging that genuinely connected with Latina women and their realities. Rather than creating another fitness label focused exclusively on aesthetics or performance, she wanted Evolution Fit to represent something broader — a lifestyle built around confidence, discipline, wellness, and personal evolution.

“A lot of brands talk about fitness, but they don’t connect with the reality of a woman who works, who is a mother, who has so many responsibilities and still wants to feel good in her own skin,” she explains.

That distinction is important.

Alonso isn’t selling the idea that women need to become someone else. She is building a brand around the idea that women can evolve without abandoning who they are.

The Business of Becoming

The word “evolution” is particularly fitting for Alonso’s current chapter.

Her own journey has become inseparable from the philosophy behind her company. Fitness introduced discipline. Personal change introduced patience. Entrepreneurship demanded consistency.

The lessons overlap.

“Nothing changes overnight, and that applies to everything in life,” Alonso says. “I learned to stay consistent even when I don’t feel like it.”

That mindset has become central to the way she approaches both business and personal growth.

Her recent physical transformation has consequently become part of a much larger conversation about reinvention. Rather than treating transformation as an endpoint, Alonso presents it as an ongoing process — one that begins mentally before it becomes visible externally.

For an audience that has watched her evolution publicly, that message carries particular weight.

She is no longer simply documenting a transformation. She is building a business around the philosophy that transformation is possible.

A Brand Built for Latina Women

Evolution Fit also reflects something happening far beyond Alonso herself.

Latina women are becoming an increasingly visible force in American entrepreneurship, fashion, entertainment, and consumer culture. Yet Alonso believes representation needs to go beyond visibility.

It also means ownership.

Creating a company, developing products, building a community, and controlling the narrative around her own identity have allowed Alonso to participate in the Latino market from a different position: not simply as talent, but as a business owner.

“Being Latina means having character and history,” she says. “I feel a responsibility to represent that in a positive way and to show that we can build, create, and lead. That we are not limited.”

That philosophy extends to the women who follow her.

Through social media, Alonso has built a direct relationship with an audience that sees more than the polished side of entrepreneurship. She shares routines, personal experiences, challenges, and moments of imperfection — creating a form of connection that feels less like celebrity-to-fan communication and more like one woman speaking to another.

Her message is consistent: there is no universal timeline for transformation.

More Than Activewear

What Alonso is building with Evolution Fit may ultimately extend far beyond clothing.

She envisions the company evolving into a broader wellness ecosystem — one that addresses physical health while also incorporating mental and emotional well-being.

“I would love to continue growing the activewear side, launching new collections, and collaborating with Latino talent,” she says. “I also want to expand into a more holistic wellness concept, not just physical, but mental and emotional.”

That vision positions Evolution Fit as something larger than an apparel company.

It becomes a community.

It becomes a philosophy.

And, potentially, it becomes one of the ways Alonso’s influence continues to expand beyond entertainment.

The New Mayeli Alonso

There is a tendency to categorize women according to the chapter in which audiences first discovered them.

For Mayeli Alonso, that chapter was reality television.

But entrepreneurship has given her the opportunity to write a different one.

Today, the conversation around Alonso increasingly extends into business, wellness, fashion, personal development, and Latina representation. Her physical transformation may have sparked renewed public attention, but her business evolution is what gives the moment staying power.

She is demonstrating that reinvention does not require abandoning your past. It requires building something that reflects where you are going.

For Alonso, that next destination is clear: more brands, more collaborations, more community, and a larger platform for Latina women who want to build lives and businesses on their own terms.

Her advice to the next generation reflects the philosophy behind everything she is creating:

“Use your story as your strength. Everything you’ve been through has value.”

That may be the clearest description of Mayeli Alonso’s evolution.

The reality star is still part of her story.

But she is no longer the whole story.

Written in partnership with Tom White

Photo courtesy: Shubham Gosalia

For cinematographer Shubham Gosalia, the road that eventually led to sets with Taylor Swift and Patrick Mahomes started with a weekly ritual: Friday nights at the movies with his parents in Mumbai, in the same seats no matter what was playing. It wasn’t until high school, when a friend asked him to help shoot a short film about a man’s relationship with his cup of tea, that Gosalia began to suspect filmmaking might be more than a habit picked up in a theater seat.

That interest eventually took him thousands of miles from home. Choosing a film school meant a six-month search that moved from Mumbai to Pune, Dubai, London, Miami and Canada before landing him in Los Angeles at the New York Film Academy. It also led him, a few years later, to a chair in a Los Angeles studio that happened to be occupied by Taylor Swift.

Gosalia was accepted into Gold Rising, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ summer fellowship for early career filmmakers, on the strength of a submission he describes as unpolished but sincere, a collage of his work rather than a traditional reel. He recalls a program coordinator later telling him he was chosen because he was eager to learn, even without a finished showreel. The eight-week fellowship put him in rooms with producers from Disney and Marvel, took him to a private screening of “Top Gun: Maverick” at the IMAX headquarters, and got him a seat in the audience at the 2023 Oscars.

At the end of the program, the Academy paired him with a mentor, Jess Hall, the ASC and BSC-recognized cinematographer behind Marvel’s “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.” Gosalia’s first assignment shadowing Hall arrived with a stack of contracts so heavily redacted that the artist’s name had been scrubbed throughout, save for one unremoved reference to Taylor Swift Productions. Days later, he was on set in Los Angeles, camera assisting a music video shoot with Swift over four days. He recalls introducing himself to her without meaning to, by accidentally bumping her chair before the two had been formally introduced, only realizing who she was afterward. The second production Hall brought him onto was a Super Bowl campaign for Subway featuring Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce.

Those two projects, Gosalia says, reshaped how he thought about a career that, until then, had mostly meant student productions in Los Angeles and India. “It is not even in my dreams, because I don’t know what to dream at that level,” he says of the run of work.

Now splitting his time between Los Angeles and Mumbai, Gosalia has started his own production company, Sure Shot, built around a concern he says is reshaping the industry: the instability of a career built entirely on freelance camera work, as AI tools and tighter budgets change how and where productions get made. Sure Shot is built around story-led commercial work, music videos and podcasts rather than straightforward product shoots. Its first campaign, in production this month, is for a Mumbai-based vegan leather footwear brand that has built a following across the Middle East and London and is now expanding into the United States and Canada.

Gosalia has also spent recent months shooting for the vertical, mobile-first format that has taken over platforms like TikTok, a discipline he describes as fundamentally different from traditional cinematography. Vertical productions move fast, often covering multiple pages of script in a single day across two or three cameras, prioritizing coverage and pace over the composition choices that define feature and music video work.

Gosalia’s most recent on-screen credit remains Diljit Dosanjh’s music video “Saanvle,” shot across a single day on a Beverly Hills property, where he served as cinematographer.

Written in partnership with Tom White