EvenBet Gaming Interview on How Spins Poker Is Transforming Modern Online Poker Ecosystems

EvenBet Gaming Is Redefining Modern Poker Through Hybrid Innovation, Alessia Smirnova, Business Development Executive Explains

Poker is changing fast, and hybrid formats are now redefining how players and operators engage with the game. At the center of this shift is EvenBet Gaming, a company with more than 20 years of experience building full-scale poker ecosystems. In this exclusive DivaJackpot.com interview, Alessia Smirnova, Business Development Executive, explains how modern poker is evolving beyond traditional cash games and tournaments. She shares how EvenBet’s standalone infrastructure, global networks, and innovative Spins Poker format are helping casinos and sportsbooks boost player acquisition, retention, and revenue while making poker faster, more accessible, and better suited to today’s casino-first audiences.

In essence, Spins Poker is a trend, but you are one of the first to make it a dedicated product, not just an add-on inside poker software. Can you please explain how it works?

The principle is very simple: players choose the desired prize, enter the game, spin the wheel to possibly multiply the winning and enjoy the game! For operators, we stripped the format in a way that they wouldn’t need a dedicated poker team to manage the tournaments. The seamless integration is easy and straightforward, and due to the clear mathematics of the winnings and the revenue, they only need to create the settings for Spins Poker once.

Poker has traditionally required dedicated environments and long-form gameplay. What motivated EvenBet to build spins poker as a casino-friendly offering rather than another standalone poker vertical?

Indeed, traditional poker requires more effort to be managed from the operator's side, while Spins Poker is quite lightweight in that aspect (few options for fraudulent activities, less liquidity is required, etc.). If the operator is not interested in managing poker as a separate vertical but still wants to offer poker to their players, then Spins is a perfect choice.

Most importantly, if we are to understand how it works from a player’s perspective, can casinos offer spins poker alongside other casino games, rather than as a separate poker vertical?

Absolutely, this is the goal of the product – it comes as part of the package together with other casino games. At the same time, it may become a part of the unique offering: while other casinos provide a similar choice of slots and player-against-casino games, with Spins, an operator can easily tap into the player-to-player games category, providing something truly different. The format works exactly like a game, but a very special one.

Spin-style games have become a trend. Yet no one has carved out a purpose-built solution like yours. What gap in the market did you see that others overlooked?

We just noticed this trend and decided to act without waiting too long. We live in a very fast world, so we have to adapt our products to the modern speed, and "hybrid solutions" are one of the efficient ways to do it.

Also, we are listening to our customers and partners and catering to their needs. Numerous operators would like to benefit from poker’s unique advantages – longer player lifetime, better retention, and its perception as a game of skill – but they have serious business concerns. They don’t want to invest significant time and money into creating a dedicated team, acquiring enough poker liquidity, managing the poker players’ ecosystem, and working through all the AML [anti-money laundering] and fraud-related issues in player-to-player game formats. Spins Poker is free from all these concerns.

How do you position Spins Poker within the broader casino product mix? Is it more of a player acquisition magnet, a retention tool, or a revenue accelerator?

Traditionally, poker is known as a good acquisition and retention tool at the service of marketing activities. If we speak about the new product, it's a perfect mix of "traditional benefits" and an additional revenue-generating channel.

In cross-product marketing campaigns, Spins work perfectly as a tool to increase retention and player engagement. In the markets where the audience knows poker games, they can work as an additional acquisition tool. And as an example of the French market shows, this format can generate up to 60% of the total poker revenue even in a full-scale poker room.

Do you expect Spins Poker to attract new demographics who may have never sat at a poker table, or will it mostly convert existing poker fans seeking faster action?

I believe it can definitely attract attention from the side of casino players who have never played the game, and eventually, some of them might develop a future taste for classical poker too. In sportsbooks, for example, we see up to 30% of players trying poker games, and many of them start with formats similar to Spins, not with classic cash tables.

Spins Poker is a beginner-friendly format: they have minimal risks, fast-paced games where quick decisions matter more than long-term strategies, and the attractiveness of 1000x multipliers.

Not every player has time for a poker tournament. How did you optimize the fast, 3-player format to feel exciting while still preserving real poker skill?

Exactly, as I mentioned above, the audience of classical poker and Spins is different – Spins Poker is exciting because of its format, while traditional poker is more about strategy, community and competition. Both formats are exciting, but the source of excitement is different. In Spins, you must act quickly, the seats at the table are random, the prize multiplier is random, so there are more surprises and unpredictability and less analysis and observation. Yet, it stays a poker game: to win, luck alone is not enough, and more often than not, you win more as your knowledge of the game grows.

The spin-the-wheel multiplier adds an unpredictable, slot-like buzz. How do you balance that excitement with maintaining the traditional skillset poker requires?

The casino-like elements end as soon as the cards are dealt. Even with the turbo levels and short time to bet, call, or fold, Spins Poker still requires a good estimation of a hand’s strength, a capability to make decisions with limited information, and the boldness to apply pressure to opponents if needed. Yes, you can’t use strategic and statistical advantages or your bankroll pressure as you would in a classic poker game, but a player needs at least some poker-specific skill to win regularly.

Many casino games reward instant decisions. What player behaviors have you observed when poker skill suddenly intersects with casino-style randomness?

First and foremost, it makes poker more attractive for casual and entertainment players who don’t care about their VPIP [voluntarily put in pot] or 3-bet statistics as poker sharks and semi-professional players do. For operators, it is the number one reason to try this format: most of them struggle to retain entertainment players with slots, classic promotions, and loyalty programs.

With Spins Poker and other fast player-to-player formats, we often observe a rapid increase in the game volume, while the average buy-in size stays relatively low. Players bet low but play more often and longer.

From an operator’s standpoint, what are the most overlooked business advantages of spins poker?

Aside from being a good players' acquisition channel, it can generate very decent revenue. Since the game is faster, it means that players play it more often and buy in more often, too. In addition, there is a well-calculated revenue model behind the format. Even if the prize multiplier is random, the operator sets the probabilities for each value, and it allows for predicting the revenue and the profit from the game, making any promotional campaigns easier to set and assess. While setting up Spins Poker for a client, our customer success team explains this model and helps to adapt it to the operator’s needs.

How does EvenBet ensure smooth table settlement and fairness when players are joining from different operators within the network?

That's not an issue, as we have a dedicated anti-fraud team that uses a whole range of tools to prevent any possible issues - starting from AI instruments to professional players from our side, keeping an eye on every game. When it comes to financial reconciliation, we have the advantages of using a long-tested and well-regulated poker network management system, where each operator receives the share of profits corresponding to their players’ activity and the money they bring to the tables. Here, Spins Poker isn’t different from any other poker games: the more active players you have in the network and the more games they play, the bigger the revenue.

What KPIs do operators see improving first with Spin Poker? Is it session frequency, turnover, cross-game engagement, or lifetime value of a player?

The advantages are multilateral - new players, better player retention, higher revenue and casino players conversion.

Spins Poker is currently offered within a casino’s existing game catalog. What are the advantages of that from a player and operator point of view?

I would say that less effort from the operators' side and more simplicity for the players. It creates good cross-selling potential.

As skill-plus-chance hybrid formats continue to rise, how do you see them reshaping responsible gaming frameworks and operators' duty of care?

If anything, skill-plus-chance formats are easier to fit into the responsible gaming frameworks. The biggest concerns for most of the casino games in terms of responsible gaming are volume-based promotions and loyalty programs, and poker, including Spins, creates a different dimension for increasing engagement. An operator may reward not just the money a player deposits or spends in a game, but also skill: winning certain games or certain hands, kicking out opponents, creating specific poker combinations. That is one of the strongest drivers of longer poker player lifetime and, at the same time, fewer responsible gaming issues around poker rooms.

Do you think Spin Poker can become an esports-style entertainment format, namely short, competitive, and highly streamable? Is that something you are looking to develop in the future?

Personally, I am not sure about this point. There is surely a potential for this format to become streamable, since it is fast-paced. And should this happen, we won't miss the chance to take active part in the process (smiling).

Looking ahead, what innovations in multiplayer poker do you believe will define the next five years, and is Spin Poker a first step toward that evolution?

Spins Poker is only the beginning, we foresee some upgrades in the future, but for obvious reasons, I can't reveal the details. It's definitely a promising product that has already been proven as very successful in the French market, and now we aspire to conquer the world with it.
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But if speaking in general without revealing sensitive information, online poker in the next five years will be developing in two directions at the same time: enriching the game for pro and semi-pro players and big poker rooms and simplifying it for the casual audiences. EvenBet Gaming will be working with both.