Why Esports Betting Breaks the Rules, With WiseWager’s Rohini Sardana

[00:00]  1. Intro: Welcome to Bet It Drives

Host:  Welcome to Bet It Drives, the show that takes you for a ride through the iGaming world. I’m Eugene, your driver and conversational partner. Let’s get this journey started.

Guest:  All right. Okay, I’m ready.

[00:32]  2. Meet Rohini Sardana, founder of WiseWager

Host:  Today’s guest isn’t just a member of the industry, she’s a front woman. Rohini Sardana built her skills at Inspired Gaming, started her own competitive-gaming venture, and led the launch of Pinnacle Solutions’ esports betting platform. She’s now founder of WiseWager, helping global brands understand product, tech and esports, and make betting easier. Welcome, Rohini, to Bet It Drives.

Guest:  Thank you for having me. It’s a beautiful day to be out and about in London.

Host:  It’s an iconic city, and iGB is in London. It’s a top-five global event and we’re lucky to be here. You’re the founder of WiseWager, a consultancy helping new startups and experienced iGaming companies do something new.

Guest:  That’s right. We’re at a moment where technology is changing rapidly thanks to AI, and how people consume digital products is changing too. So it feels like the right time to be in the centre, connecting startups with brands that need relevant product and want to capture a different audience than before. The industry is dynamic and constantly changing, and that’s what I love about it.

[02:09]  3. Bingo: top things you’ll always see at iGB

Host:  Imagine we’re going to iGB. What are the top three things you’d normally see, that newcomers should expect?

Guest:  Definitely somebody will get really drunk and forget where their stand is, for sure, probably on day one, because they’re either excited about networking or anxious, and then go all out in the evening. We’ll definitely have a panel on next-gen engagement, or next-gen something. Other than that, expect lots of people, an international crowd, good energy. And come 4pm, you might hear loud music and free cocktails.

Host:  And we know where that will be coming from.

[03:04]  4. Network or Not Work: VIP events and side parties

Host:  Our industry and its conferences are famous for the side events and the parties. Which are the top events you should attend, and which to avoid?

Guest:  To be fair to iGB, I’ve typically enjoyed most of their side events. A lot tend to be affiliate events, like AffPapa, and GR8 Tech also ran an amazing one last year. Having said that, the actual VIP event by iGB itself, in my experience, wasn’t that great. It was very un-VIP, so probably try and avoid that one. That’s my hot tip.

Host:  Overall, do you see value in those?

Guest:  Socialising, yes. One thing I love about our industry is the energy, and I’ve been to a fair few other industries’ events, you can’t match it. But from an ROI perspective, since we’re all here to do business, attending an event should be less about closing a deal and more about building momentum. You never really know who you’re going to meet. You and I met at an event, remember? So using networking as momentum to strategically align with your business goals is always a good idea, rather than treating each event as a deal-closer.

[05:04]  5. Do startups need big expo stands?

Host:  How do you see these conferences generating value, especially for smaller businesses versus the big ones with huge stands?

Guest:  Does it make sense for startups to have big stands? Probably not, because that’s wasted money you could pump back into the product or marketing. One could argue being at an event is marketing, sure, but you could have a smaller stand and spend that money other ways. As a startup, I’d really use the event for meeting potential clients or distribution partners: look at the attendee list and plan in advance. I always plan ahead, I don’t want to be aimlessly walking around. It’s expensive to be at events, so you have to be mindful of your marketing budget and where you are in your journey as a business.

[06:07]  6. Rohini’s dream dinner guests

Host:  Who are the three people you’d most like to meet?

Guest:  We’re in the UK, so it has to be Denise Coates. Nobody’s met her, right? You’ll probably only meet the CEOs she’s hired, so I’d love to have her at the dinner table. I’d also have Paris, an industry legend, ex-Pinnacle, with great one-liners and really good experience in betting. And the final person, I don’t know if she’d ever attend, is Daisy Ho. She’s the CEO and chairwoman of SJM Holdings, I think around a five-billion-dollar company. She inherited it from her father and has done great work modernising it. All three women have contributed to our industry in a significant way, and that’s who I’d want at my table.

[07:00]  7. Putting women at the table matters

Host:  All three names are women, and you clearly stand to support giving women more authority and influence. What’s your specific approach?

Guest:  Let’s go back to the influence and inclusion of women at tables where decisions are made. I picked those three women purposely, because they’re women. I could have picked plenty of men, but I didn’t, because it’s about giving women the opportunity, which a lot of the time they don’t get. From my own background: I was born in India, where typically you just get married at 21. I had to work my way out of that, using education to propel myself, and I did that strategically, knowing I wanted to be independent. What controls a lot of us is money, so once you start making your own, you have a lot more control. You see this in other industries too, where they don’t give women the opportunity. So start there: just give women the opportunity. I’ve had this throughout my career, because I was a software engineer, and you didn’t see many female software engineers at the time, let alone in gambling. It was a double-edged sword. So yes, I’d promote women more, give them the chance to do something, and then see how they perform. Don’t default to men.

Host:  Much respect.

[08:57]  8. Feel the beat: Rohini’s victory soundtrack

Host:  Switching gears, literally. Enough business, let’s talk music. What’s the song that plays in your head when you’re signing a deal?

Guest:  It’s got to be the Rocky theme, “Eye of the Tiger.” I love that song, it’s got really good victory vibes, and it’s played in my head a number of times.

Host:  Is it the same song when you walk into a high-stakes meeting with the big tables?

Guest:  No, different. Not even a song, actually, more of a tune or a sound, usually soft jazz or a Hindu chant, the “Om” sound. It’s about good vibrational energy to keep you calm. I’m a high-energy person, and if I go into a meeting with lots of high energy it could go the wrong way, so I keep it calm. Jazz or the “Om” sound keeps me less anxious.

[10:24]  9. Three things Rohini would steal from competitors

Host:  A little twist: what are the top things you’ve noticed from your competition that you’d want to steal?

Guest:  First, making it really easy: one-click onboarding for affiliate partners. Whoever cracked that, smart, I wish I could steal it. I don’t need to talk to anybody; if I’ve got the product and I can bring you traffic, I just sign up. So easy. That’s actually converting gambling into a true e-commerce idea, where you just sign up and both parties win. The other one is crash games: simple games that make really good money. So yes, I wish I’d come up with a crash game where I owned the IP. It’s a growing trend.

[11:32]  10. Gen Z, TikTok, Twitch and YouTube

Host:  What’s your take on Gen Z promotions and which platforms work?

Guest:  I love TikTok, I’m on it for at least an hour a day, avidly consuming content, and there’s some useful information out there. But it’s restricted and age-gated, so from a gambling perspective you won’t get very far. The day before, I saw the UK National Lottery advert on there with no sound, and most of it was blocked. I tried searching for sports betting or anything related to gambling and casino, and couldn’t find much. So it’s entertainment, and we leave it at that. Then you have Twitch, which did really well, but now seems to be suffering from having worked with gray gambling brands and not protecting the vulnerable, and again it’s not age-gated. So as good as Twitch is, it’s suffering from some of its legacy deal-making. What is evergreen, though, is YouTube. If you look at the usage, it’s there, so that’s the platform I target. In terms of volume, it could even be number one.

[13:12]  11. Why esports betting is nothing like sports betting

Host:  Have you come across stakeholders saying they don’t get esports?

Guest:  The first thing I’d say is that esports, and specifically betting on esports, isn’t the same as sports betting. Football, the game, its rules and format haven’t changed since it was invented. You can build models around it, do your pricing, and get sharper over time. Compare that to esports. In 2024 the version of Counter-Strike was CS:GO; it no longer exists as a game. Overnight, the publisher deprecated that version and released a new one that changed the format, which meant your existing algorithms didn’t work. So it’s a completely different beast. Then you layer on the target demographic, which is also different. They don’t consume content the same way, the pre-match and live split is significantly different. The number of components in a video game is very different, and a lot more, than any sport. A person who bets on horse racing doesn’t always translate to betting on darts or football. In racing you have non-runners, the weather, the trainer, so many elements that don’t exist in another sport. When you’re building products you have to understand these nuances, which stakeholders don’t see at an overview level. It’s about educating them in a way that resonates, in cost or revenue terms. Players do recognise those differences, and they want to see it, it’s a huge market. Esports as a betting product is still being built out, because it’s all about the skill in the game. Rocket League is a great example: you’ve got football, ice hockey and car racing in one game. That’s three sports in one. How do you build trading models around that? It’s not about the sports, it’s about the skill in the game. So at a high level you might treat it as another piece of content, but it isn’t.

[16:10]  12. iGaming hell: the empty room disaster

Host:  We have a couple of minutes left before we reach the destination, and a fun question I saved for last. If there were an iGaming hell, what would it look like?

Guest:  Honestly, we might have already had one. I turned up on the day to a conference and the room we’d booked, which was meant to have a table, seats, a coffee machine and a TV, was completely empty. There was one Ethernet wire in there, and I had a meeting with a very big brand in an hour. Some of the stands around us were really helpful. I don’t know if they stole some of it, but they found tables and chairs and helped us pull it in, and a guy gave us a free coffee machine. Lovely, and well respected, instead of being competitive.

Host:  They were friendly and partnering.

Guest:  That’s right, and I really appreciated it. But I did not go back to that conference for another four years. So it had its impact. That was hell. The other hell is crap, uninformative panels. Such a waste of time.

[17:28]  13. Another hell: useless panels

Host:  Useless panels, agreed.

Guest:  People genuinely turn up at these panels trying to learn. I appreciate you can’t give secrets away, but equally you can share relevant information without giving away the keys to your kingdom.

Host:  Okay, Rohini, I think we’re done. Thank you again.

Guest:  Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

[17:56]  14. Wrap-up

Host:  Our ride with Rohini is over, but the engine is still running. Stay tuned and keep driving forward.