Why I built a panel of casino personas that are paid to disagree!
An open-source AI council of iGaming experts that stress-tests your decisions instead of agreeing with you. Adapted from Zapier's War Council.
How many meetings have you attended without an outcome or a decision? We've all been there, right? But what most of us really need is a sparring partner to challenge assumptions or test new ideas. That's why I built the Online Casino Council Agent.
In the iGaming/Online Casino space we are faced with 100's of decisons about contracts, new features, roadmap priortites, platforms, affilate deals, SEO/SEA, Marketing, game providers, the list gones on almost infinelty am I right?
What isn't lacking is the breadth of topics we encounter, but sometimes there is a lack of depth, which you can summon at a moment's notice. Wouldn't it be great to tap into experts in every subject instantly? Well, that's where this journey started. At first, I tried building specialized agents for each topic, but when topics overlapped or I wanted to combine outputs, it got cumbersome. Individual agents work well, but wouldn't it be even easier if one Agent could handle it all?
The War Council has entered the chat
My First Million (one of my fav podcasts btw) was interviewing Wade Foster. A super interesting guy who also happens to be Zapier's CEO. Wade discussed how he was also having the issue of hashing out topics, so he built the War Council.
The War Council is a panel of opinionated expert advisors to critique your thinking, stress-test decisions, and surface blind spots. Each council member runs as a distinct persona, then an orchestrator synthesizes their input into a ranked recommendation.
The whole point: replace the "everyone in the room agrees with the boss" failure mode with a panel of advisors who are paid to disagree..
I teed up the podcast just to this moment where Wade talks about the War Council here:
Insert the Online Casino Council
Based on Wade's work, I adapted the War Council for my use case: online casinos. So I (actually, we, when I include Claude) dissected the War Council skill and repurposed it for Online Gaming. I cleaned up the Online Casino Council and added setup questions to help dial it in for your use case. It asks about jurisdiction, products and marketing structure, goals, and baseline unit economics.
Don't worry, the entire project is open source and located here to show you how to install the skill and review everything if you are skeptical: https://github.com/vegasbrianc/online-casino-council/
The goal: replace "everyone in the room agrees with the boss" with a panel that is paid to disagree.
What Online Casino Council is good for
Here are just a few use cases that you can use the Online Casino Council for. I burned a ton of tokens stress-testing a ton of different scenarios to ensure it worked correctly. But here are a couple of topics to help you with some inspiration to get started
- Market entry and license applications
- Game provider contracts, exclusives, aggregator versus direct
- Bonus, loyalty and VIP program design
- Affiliate deal structures
- Marketing budgets and channel mix
- Platform, PAM, CRM and vendor choices
- Payments, withdrawal policy and fraud
- AI initiatives and vendor pitches
How does it work?
I updated the council members to better match iGaming/Online Casinos. The idea was to have standing members who would always be present for every conversation.
The council has three separate bodies. First are the standing members, who are always present at each discussion. Second are dynamic seats, which are invited based on the topics being discussed, typically up to nine, with ten being a full house. Third are occasional seats, based on how you set up the council during the initial questionnaire.
That's it; the council is set. Now, when you invoke the council, it will run through a decision tree on who should be invited to the conversation.
First, the tier
| Tier | Seats | When |
|---|---|---|
| No council | 0 | Reversible within a week, cheaper than a month of one person's time. It answers directly and tells you it isn't worth a council |
| Quick | 5 | The five standing seats only. Operational choices, tooling, process — anything one team owns and can reverse |
| Standard | 7 | Standing plus 2 dynamic. The default for a real decision with money or players attached |
| Full | 9 — hard cap | Standing plus 4 dynamic. Irreversible, market entry, licence application, a contract over a year, or spend that shows up in the annual accounts |
Standing members (5) — present at every tier
| Seat | What they bring |
|---|---|
| The Hard Number CFO | Unit economics. NGR after bonus cost, duty, provider and payment fees — never GGR alone |
| The Casino Director | Growth and speed. Zero to scale more than once. Pushy, lives in a spreadsheet, wants to ship every feature first |
| The External Consultant | Cross-operator base rates: how often this worked elsewhere, and at what cost |
| Head of Product & Game Portfolio | The lobby and the journey. An offer rents a player, the product keeps one |
| Head of Compliance & RG | Ex-regulator, on your side. Hunts a compliant route to yes and trades scope to find one |
Dynamic experts (11) — only the slots the tier allows
| Seat | What they bring | Seat when |
|---|---|---|
| The Gaming Board | The regulator, not your compliance lead. Rules on the plan — and must be able to clear it | ⭐ Default-on in a regulated market when a licence condition is touched |
| CTO — Viktor | Built slots, a CRM and a PAM. Spots a white label sold as proprietary. His own build ran 3× over | Platform, PAM, CRM or vendor choices, migrations, data ownership |
| Affiliate Manager — Kasia | CPA, rev-share and hybrid deals. Once paid CPA on 2,000 incentivised FTDs | Affiliate terms, brand bidding, paid content that is really placement |
| Head of Retention — Mateo | Churn, segmentation, bonus cost. Built loyalty that trained players to wait for bonus days | Bonus design, loyalty, CRM, churn, reactivation |
| Head of Acquisition — Sofia | Builds channels that do not exist yet. Defends brand spend, because a platform once banned her category overnight | Budgets, channel mix, brand versus performance |
| Head of Customer Service — Priya | Lives in the queue. Survived a payout-delay weekend that became 3,000 tickets | Anything changing withdrawals, T&Cs, verification or stability |
| Head of Data — Lin | Metric definitions cause more fights than models. Built a churn model right two days too late | Attribution, measurement, any decision resting on a dashboard number |
| Head of Payments & Fraud — Diego | PSPs, approval rates, withdrawal SLAs, bonus abuse. Had a reserve frozen for six months | Payments, new markets, welcome offers, deposits and withdrawals |
| VIP Manager — Yusuf | Hosts the top 2%; each has a rival's host on speed dial. Lost one over a four-hour withdrawal | VIP programmes, withdrawal or limit changes, RG policy |
| AI Strategy — Dr. Chen | Three hype cycles deep. Knows where AI earns its keep and where it is a demo with a budget | Any AI initiative, vendor pitch or "AI-powered" claim |
| The Player — Marco | Recreational, monthly budget, burned by slow withdrawals. The only seat that is not an operator | ⭐ Default-on for anything a player will see or feel |
Occasional seats (3)
| Seat | What they bring | Seat when |
|---|---|---|
| Sportsbook Trader | Margin, liability management, in-play, arbitrage abuse | Only if you run sports |
| Game-Studio Commercial Director | The other side of the provider table: how studios price, why exclusives rarely pay | Provider negotiations, exclusives, minimum guarantees |
| Gaming Lawyer | Licensing, M&A, contract exposure, cross-border structuring | Licence applications, acquisitions, anything Compliance says needs counsel |
Installing the Online Casino Council
The council is available for both ChatGPT and Claude. I'm still waiting on Claude to make it part of the official plugin directory. Have a look at the install documentation on how best to get started based on what LLM you are using.
How to use the Online Casino Council
/online-casino-council:online-casino-council our aggregator wants to renew for 3 years
at 12% rev share with a EUR 40k monthly minimum guarantee. Alternative is going direct
with our top 6 studios. We have about 5,000 games in the lobby.
Installed as a plain skill rather than a plugin, the command is /online-casino-council. You don't need the slash command either way. Any of these will convene it:
- "run the casino council on this"
- "stress-test this plan"
- "should we launch in Ontario?"
- pasting a plan, a budget or a deal term sheet
What comes back
- A framing it asks you to confirm before anyone speaks
- The tier and the seats, with who was left out and why
- Each seat in turn — ~200 words: their take, the holes they see, the risk nobody is pricing, an alternative, the number that would change their mind, and a $100 bet
- A verdict — one-line answer, positions table, where they agree, where they clash, regulatory exposure, the numbers it turns on, a conviction-weighted recommendation, and a bet
Verdict
Set up your Online Casino Council and provide as much background detail as possible. Once your Council has enough background information, the results keep improving the more background data you provide.
Council is in session!
