| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. But first, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran who ruled over the Islamic Republic for more than three decades as it faced off with the West, is dead after the US and Israel launched airstrikes Saturday on Tehran. The attack continues on Sunday, as well as Iranian retaliation against US bases in the region. Here are key things to know about the conflict. From Bloomberg Opinion, Marc Champion writes about President Donald Trump's maximalist ambitions for the assault. You can read all the latest news throughout the day on the Bloomberg News live blog. For our weekly featured article, Cecilia D'Anastasio, Olivia Solon and Leon Yin write about the crypto casino Stake. It pays Drake and other stars to bet, with clips of big wins spreading to impressionable gamblers. The numbers show surprising luck at work. You can find the whole story online (free!) here. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. Drake just needed some juice. In 82 minutes of online slots play, the Canadian rapper's starting balance of $3.5 million worth of Bitcoin had dwindled to $422,355. The mood was grim as he click, click, clicked the spin button with tens of thousands of livestream viewers watching. Drake knew, though, that one of them could turn his luck around. "Eddie, join the call, brother," he said. Drake had been invoking Eddie's name throughout the stream: Eddie needs to fill up that balance a little more. Eddie says play roulette. Eddie needs to "make this s--- shake." It sounded like Drake was appealing to some omnipotent deity. In seconds a new window popped up near the ones for Drake and the three internet celebrities who'd been hanging out with him online that day in August. Inside was a man with staticky brown hair, a plain black T-shirt and AirPods: Ed Craven, the billionaire co-founder of Stake, the online cryptocurrency casino where Drake was gambling, and of Kick, the site livestreaming his play. From his house in Melbourne, Craven told everyone he'd been watching the whole time. Now he was appearing to deliver a public pep talk to his assembled A-team, all four of them signed to multimillion-dollar contracts to advertise Stake. "The energy here is not good," Craven said. Drake's choice of casino games, he added, had been "terrible." Drake had now navigated to Speed Roulette, on Craven's earlier advice. It wasn't long before his luck shifted. A few spins in, he placed chips on 12 and spun the wheel. The ball settled in on 12, and he won $800,000. Craven added $500,000 more to Drake's balance, telling the rapper to lock in and get those wins. Then he had some advice for Kick's most watched American influencer, Adin Ross, a sparky bad boy who'd gotten popular streaming the video game series NBA 2K: "Get those clips viral, you know. Have a few of them with the Stake logo really clear and really f---ing big." Drake decided to test his newfound fortune on Puffer Stacks, a marine-themed slot game operated by Stake's parent company, Easygo Entertainment. He leaned into his computer as colorful shells slid into place on a grid. He won another $800,000, and the word "INSANE" popped up on his screen. Over the next hour, he won big twice more on Puffer Stacks and once on a slot game called Rooster Returns, also operated by Easygo. He got his balance back up to $2.2 million. Then he kept on spinning, eventually logging off with just $730,000.  WATCH: The Math Behind Drake's Lucky Spins from Bloomberg Originals Drake's hot streak had been hot, though. He'd won big—1,000 times or more his base bet, a common goal in the crypto gambling community—four times in just one hour playing Easygo-owned slots. That kind of luck is far outside the norm, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek analysis of 500 hours of live slots gameplay by 25 Stake gamblers. And that session wasn't a one-off for Drake. When he played Easygo slots, he won big four times as frequently as the average rate—the equivalent of once every 2,500 spins, compared with every 10,000 spins, according to Businessweek's investigation. Yet on games operated by third parties, his win rate was average. And Drake wasn't the only influencer getting very, very lucky while broadcasting Easygo games on Kick. Keep reading: Incredible Luck, Comped Spins: It's Good to Be an Influencer at the Crypto Casino (🎁) Plus: How Businessweek Analyzed Slots Gameplay by Stake's Star Influencers |
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