There are a couple of ways to get face-to-face with Finnish gambling magnate Ossi 'Monarch' Ketola.
If you're a high-stakes poker player, you can reach out to your fellow nosebleed players, form a syndicate, and pool money until you have enough cash to pique Ketola's interest. That's what high-roller Dan 'Jungleman' Cates recently did... and he ended up winning $15 million in a single night.
If you're a journalist, you have to get to Ketola's right-hand man and tell him you want an audience with Monarch.
Get to that point (and be prepared for Monarch's main man to tell you, "I'm Dec, and I'm a cat") and the next step is to wait for a text from the man himself.
A few weeks later, it arrives out of the blue.
"I'm a bit exhausted, but it could be doable today."
And that's how you end up meeting the man they call Monarch and asking him how it feels to lose $19 million in one poker session.
His response will be one you will never forget: "I wouldn't gamble with amounts of money that would actually be life-changing."
Click or tap above to watch the full, half-hour interview now.
Monarch: First contact
Ketola, a polarizing and super-wealthy figure in the dizzying world of Counter-Strike skin gambling, will argue he's — if not easy to find — easy to reach. When you finally see him — after two weeks of text messages, a couple of false starts, and a final thirty minutes of waiting in which you wonder if Ketola is actually finishing dinner or you are, in fact, the victim of an elaborate hoax — he still won't tell you where he actually is.
"I don't know if we can really say the exact location," Ketola says, looking over his left shoulder at his right-hand cat.
"It's quite challenging keeping up with the time zones," Dec explains, as if that is actually an explanation.
And then you're off into a sprawling discussion spanning across time zones and tax brackets you'll never understand. Among the highlights:
- All-night poker nosebleed sessions: "My dopamine receptors are slowly coming back... it really fries your brain for a while."
- Not getting to play Phil Ivey (yet): "A little bit disappointed about that. Maybe in the future."
- His detractors comparing him to a mafia don: "There's been some deep side quests with exposing these scammers and... delivering justice to them...
- Whether he would play Jason Koon heads-up: "There's... a long queue... everybody wants to do it."
- The one poker player he's really bonded with: "We had this unspoken connection..."
'Hopefully there is going to be some side action'
Ketola and the cat are cagey about almost all of their future plans, but Monarch made one thing clear: he's headed to the Triton series in Jeju this week. "I'm going there in a couple of days," he said Tuesday. "Hopefully there is going to be some side action."
If Ketola arrives in the next 48 hours, he will have the opportunity to grant an audience to the long queue of players with the kind of bankrolls that could tickle his dopamine receptors. The crowd in Jeju isn't large, but it has a collective bankroll that could be meaningful to a man like Monarch. Here's a shortlist of notable names on the island this month:
- Jason Koon
- Isaac Haxton
- Elton Tsang
- Dan Dvoress
- Phil Ivey
- Joseph Cheong
- Bryn Kenney
- Christoph Vogelsang
- Jonathan Jaffe
- Alex Foxen
- Xuan Lui
- Jesse Lonis
- Steve O'Dwyer
- Mustapha Kanit
- Kenny Hallaert
- Mike Watson
How much money could they put together? And if they put together the roll, who would they send to the table?
"We'll see on the spot. So far these games have been fairly spontaneous," Ketola said. "There is not much planning behind it at all. I mean, that day (vs. Jungleman) I didn't know that I would go minus 19 million. So, yeah. Never know what's next."
Watch the whole interview at the top of the article and get ready for some potentially wild action over the next week.
Feature image courtesy of Triton Poker.
