When Bloomberg Businessweek’s article on Stake dropped on February 27, it attracted a lot of attention because it seemed to prove something many who’d watched Drake’s streams believed: there was no way all those jackpots lighting up the streams were just a normal run of good luck.
And for many reading the article, what Bloomberg said proved their suspicions were correct: the rapper and his fellow Kick star Adin Ross were hitting impossibly lucky jackpots on the crypto casino’s in-house slot.
After reviewing around 500 hours of live slot gameplay, Bloomberg concluded that when playing games made by Stake’s parent company Easygo Entertainment, Drake and Ross hit “big wins,” defined as jackpots worth more than 1,000x the base bet, at a rate that was more than four times as often as everyone else. However, their performance on third-party games was much closer to the average.
Stake’s response was immediate and didn’t parse words. In a statement to Dexerto, the company called Bloomberg’s findings “categorically incorrect,” and argued that “big wins” is an arbitrary metric. Stake went on to say that comparing headline ambassadors to other players ignores how different features and slots behave.
As with just about any exposé involving Drake, the story didn’t stay locked behind Bloomberg’s paywall for long. Once it hit X, fans and streamers began weighing in. Many took the numbers at face value, saying the results proved Drake’s games are fixed. However, others, like popular Kick streamer xQc (Félix Lengyel), who also gambles on Stake, accused the publication of cherry-picking its data.
Underneath all that noise is a much more basic problem: the Bloomberg report never really explains how these streams work or how bonus-heavy, house-funded sessions can make what are typically rare jackpots look completely normal.
Stake, Bloomberg, and a New Kind of Casino Story
Reading the Bloomberg article, it feels a lot like a classic piece of investigative journalism into the shadier side of the gambling industry. The only difference is that it’s playing out in a closed digital ecosystem where sponsorship, content, and gameplay all come together.
In this world, Drake and Ross are much more than just regular players; they’re brand ambassadors on a platform backed by Stake, and they’re betting on Easygo-branded titles that are only available on Stake.
One of the most colorful sequences in the Bloomberg story takes place when Drake’s Bitcoin balance goes from about $3.5 million to $422,355 over 82 minutes while playing third-party slots. As his losses start to pile up, Drake turns to Stake co-founder Ed Craven on stream, asking him to “make this s–t shake.”
Craven joins the call and tells Drake his slot choices are “terrible,” then he drops another $500,000 into the rapper’s account. After that, Drake switches to Easygo titles like Puffer Stacks and Rooster Returns, and his luck turns around. He goes on a win streak, hitting four 1,000x-plus wins in roughly an hour. That math is what Bloomberg builds its analysis on and is behind its claim that Drake’s win rate on in-house games was about four times higher than on independent titles.
If you’re watching one of these streams, you might be thinking that what you just witnessed is some sort of miraculous comeback. However, gambling experts looking at the structure see something else: a house-funded, bonus-heavy session being steered toward the casino’s own games.
In its analysis, Bloomberg captures the drama and identifies the statistical results, even documenting the specific times when the house provided “wallet refills.” But it doesn’t spend nearly as much time looking at the process that gets Drake there, or how marketing deals with repeated refills make it possible for an ambassador like Drake to keep hammering high-volatility features until they get that improbable outcome on camera.
How Bonus Buys Turn Promo Money Into Viral Wins
The first missing piece in Bloomberg’s analysis is how Drake and Ross are playing. What viewers are watching on Kick aren’t slow, one-spin-at-a-time slots. Instead, what they’re seeing is gameplay that’s dominated by bonus buys.
With a bonus buy, a player can pay up front to trigger the slot’s bonus round immediately, often at 50x, 80x, or even 100x the stated bet, instead of spinning until it triggers on its own. Bloomberg’s methodology takes those bonus buys at face value, treating a 100x bonus buy as equivalent to 100 regular spins when estimating how much action each streamer logged.
As data journalist and PokerScout managing editor Alex Weldon points out, “slots math doesn’t work like that at all.” In his article, “What Bloomberg Businessweek Gets Wrong About Drake’s Hot Streak on Stake,” Weldon explains that a feature costing 100 bets isn’t equal to 100 base-game spins.
One of the biggest reasons for this is how bonus rounds are set up. The spins inside these rounds often aren’t independent. For example, if you get “10 free spins with sticky wilds” in a bonus round, any wilds that land on the first spin stay on the reels for the remaining nine.
That makes later spins worth much more if you get lucky early on. Luck doesn’t “even out” the way it would over 100 separate base-game spins, so it’s much easier to end up either really far ahead or really far behind.
These bonus rounds aren’t the same thing as someone grinding out 100 regular spins. Basically, it’s a shortcut to a high-volatility session. That’s why you see streamers logging “spin” volumes that Weldon points out are “north of 10,000” per hour, a pace that one can only achieve through bonus buys because a standard online slot naturally tops out at around 1,200 spins per hour. Those inflated counts only really make sense once you start factoring in the bonus buys.
There’s also the money behind the screen, as highlighted in a federal class-action lawsuit filed in Missouri on October 27, 2025. The lawsuit alleges that Stake pays Drake as much as $100 million a year and gives him free gambling credits. The complaint argues that these house-funded streams make “exceedingly rare outcomes” look normal to fans who assume he’s using his own money. While stake denies the allegations, either way, it shows how six- or seven-figure swings can play out more like a marketing expense than a personal risk.
However, if you just drop in on one of Drake’s Kick streams mid-bonus, none of this context is immediately obvious. You just see a famous rapper placing a huge bet and cashing out with a gigantic win. That leaves the bigger question of whose money he’s playing with during these streams, how many dead bonuses did it take for him to get there, and how much of what we’re seeing was just built for clips. All things that are invisible to the average viewer.
Of course, all of that doesn’t mean Bloomberg’s concerns are baseless or that we should take Stake at its word. Unless Stake decides to share its numbers with the media, it’s impossible to know whether or not there’s any manipulation going on behind the scenes.
Still, looking at Bloomberg’s reporting, it’s easy to see how mainstream coverage can end up out of its depth when it tries to force these types of bonus-driven products into a simple rigged-versus-fair paradigm.
How Casinos, Streamers, and Media Shape the Same Story
If we take a step back from the Bloomberg–Stake dispute, it’s pretty clear that the debate isn’t necessarily a verdict on Drake’s luck so much as it is a window into a specific gambling culture built around crypto casinos and influencer streams.
Platforms like Stake have built their business on bankrolling ultra-volatile sessions because these big swings and the big wins can make for great advertising. From prank videos to day-in-the-life vlogs, streamers turn those sessions into lifestyle content, sprinkling Stake logos and Kick overlays onto just about everything.
When a news outlet decides to show up and investigate the numbers, they look outrageous, but there’s a story to tell. However, what sometimes happens is they flatten it into a simple story: the game is crooked, or the celebrity got insanely lucky, which doesn’t seem very likely to those looking in from the outside.
In the end, the question of whether Drake’s Easygo sessions were statistically too good to be true is something only Stake’s internal data can really settle. What’s easier to see is how house-backed, bonus-heavy play can make rare outcomes feel normal once it’s been chopped into short clips and pushed around by algorithms.
That gap between what’s really happening out of sight and what viewers think they’re watching is what Bloomberg’s report only touches upon. It’s also where crypto casinos, creators, and the media can look at the same footage and still walk away telling very different stories.
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When Bloomberg Businessweek’s article on Stake dropped on February 27, it attracted a lot of attention because it seemed to prove something many who’d watched Drake’s streams believed: there was no way all those jackpots lighting up the streams were just a normal run of good luck. And for many reading the article, what Bloomberg
The post Bloomberg’s Stake Report on Drake Raises More Questions Than It Answers appeared first on CasinoBeats.