Break The Ice

How to play Break The Ice

“Customers seek personalised experiences, extensive player proposition bets and the ability to build highly customised wagers in real time,” Lamb says. “Meeting these modern expectations through manual trading is no longer realistic at scale.”

AI also helped Kambi reduce the delay between a customer selecting an in-play bet and being able to place it. Its dynamic live delay technology enables it to set bespoke live delay on an individual bet level, optimising the UX and alleviating friction. Across the Premier League and World Cup, Kambi reduced live betting delay by more than 40% between August 2025 and July 2026.

The result for customers was more choice, shorter suspension periods and faster bet acceptance. For operators, those improvements can support both customer retention and profitability.

What is Break The Ice?

The pair established Sanum Investments and partnered with Laotian conglomerate ST Group. Baldwin later testified that the investors initially committed around $7.5 million to the venture, which envisaged two casino resorts and several slot clubs.

Their biggest success was Savan Vegas, strategically located near the Friendship Bridge linking Laos with neighboring Thailand across the Mekong River. A planned second resort, Paksong Vegas, was never built.

Within several years, however, the partnership had soured.

How to play Break The Ice

Referencing an Australian study on direct marketing and its link to gambling harms, Dr Philip Newall, senior lecturer at the University of Bristol noted that “causality was established by getting a random subset of participants to opt-out of receiving direct marketing offers”.

It was found that “this group then self-reported significantly lower expenditure and harms [ … ] over the next two weeks”.  

They recommended banning direct marketing by operators and affiliates except for essential account or safety communications.