Sponsor Spotlight - Winning the Legal Market: Superbet’s CEE Growth Playbook and Europe’s Regulatory Reality
Ahead of the HIPTHER Warsaw Summit 2026, where Superbet joins as Compliance & Operations Stage Sponsor, we speak with Adam Lamentowicz, CCO at Super Technologies. In this conversation, we explore the success stories of Super across Europe, the strategies driving sustainable growth, and the regulatory challenges facing the industry — including what needs to change to better protect players and the integrity of the legal gambling market.
Superbet has made a dynamic entry into Greece, capturing 8% of the market by turnover within just six months. What has driven this rapid success?
Superbet, our leading commercial brand, has entered the Greek market with real intent. We are now partners of the country's leading sports clubs, both in football and in basketball. We have signed strategic partnerships with iconic football brands like Panathinaikos, PAOK, alongside Levadiakos, Panionos, and the main sponsorship of Greek Superliga 2. In addition to these, we are also main partners of Olympiacos Basketball Club, the EuroLeague Champions and Greek Champions, and of AEK Basketball Club.
Sports sponsorships and activations sit at the heart of our launch strategy and reflect our long-term commitment to markets that we regard as strategically important for growth and to their sports environment.
On the product side, we invested heavily to meet rigorous regulatory standards while building a proposition centered on what Greek customers actually value: generosity, sport and casino entertainment that feels tailored to them. Customer centricity has guided every step of that process, shaping how we design products, run CRM and craft promotions around real customer behavior rather than a one-size-fits-all model. That work came to life through SuperSocial, our Content Creators Program, a broad Free to Play offering, and commercial promotions like 1UP and SuperDrop, both of which have quickly become associated with the Superbet brand in the market.
Seven months into our market entry, we are seeing over 8% share of search, with market share gains tracking closely alongside that figure according to our estimates. Client acquisition has been strong topping 250.000 registration and over 200.000 first time depositors, while retention metrics are strong - all suggesting our product and operational teams are doing something right.
What strategic opportunities does the acquisition of Maxbet Online bring to Super’s operations and market position in Romania?
Adding Maxbet - one of the oldest betting brands of Romania - into our portfolio was an important strategic milestone, completing a strategy started nearly three years ago - to create multi brand and multi channel ecosystem to ensure we continue growing market share and leverage the power of our technology stack and operational skillset and to capitalize on those strengths. In the course of the last 3 years we have first refreshed Superbet as an iconic sports brand, launched Napoleon Games as a funky igaming proposition for entertainment seekers and now we added Maxbet as a traditional casino brand which has always been focused on the High Value client segment. All connected to our 1000 shops, a large retail network branded.
Maxbet adds a new segment in online - focused on high value casino players - segment which traditionally has been of less match to Superbet and Napoleon - all three brands are powered by our operational teams, allowing for synergies, financial gearing and data-sharing between the brands for maximum market share gains and efficiency. We have already seen great value of the Maxbet acquisition and while the full potential of the brand will be unleashed when it migrates to our own technology, it already benefits from the operational and marketing synergies yet maintaining its unique character as brand and different positioning.
How does Super’s multi-brand, omnichannel strategy support sustainable growth and strengthen its leadership in the Romanian market?
Being market leader as Superbet in Romania is always a challenging spot. In a market with 94 other operating websites, the market leader is often treated as a source of market share for newcomers. All competitors are hoping to grab part of your market share and are targeting you to let go. Many operators have lost these types of battles in the past in many markets. We have implemented a multi-brand eco system to grow but also to defend ourselves. Now it's clear that during the past 3 years we have grown in absolute aggregate market share by an additional 6%, ensuring resilience towards ongoing attempts to take our market share. This can be attributed to our multi brand strategy where each brand serves clearly different segments of clients but in aggregate allows for absolute market dominance and protection.
What are the key objectives behind Super’s transition to its own technology platform in Romania, and what impact do you expect it to have on the business?
Super and Super Technologies which is our new group name isn't accidental. We have invested massively in our own technology over past years, and with the recent migration of Superbet Romania, we have completed a cycle of moving all our core markets to our proprietary technology. This allows efficiency, speed, control of our destiny when it comes to product roadmap and delivery and importantly allows for differentiation. All this becomes powerful when you control your full technology stack and economies of scale are fully created. For that, moving our largest business to this platform was pivotal - and moving 4 million client accounts in a couple hours of the migration window and ensuring that customers are served flawlessly day after isn't an easy task. I am very happy we made it happen - allowing this new chapter for our group to begin with further planned expansion and growth in the plans.
European regulators are increasingly tightening requirements for licensed gambling operators, while illegal gambling remains a persistent challenge. How do you assess the effectiveness of the current regulatory approach?
Responsible gambling is the foundation upon which the legal gambling industry stands. It is not only the basis of our daily operations, but in the long term, we see it as a huge competitive advantage over the black market. We understand that regulators are looking for solutions to address the fact that for some players, what was meant to be entertainment becomes a problem. However, we believe that much better results would be achieved by focusing attention and resources on combating illegal gambling, which is the biggest beneficiary of the regulatory fragmentation in Europe. Let us remember that no legal operator currently has the opportunity to operate in the markets of all member states, while the black market is the only gambling single market in the EU. Illegal gambling, subject to no regulation, currently poses the greatest threat to player safety, and we must all be aware that no single state can stop it on its own. It is a financial colossus worth €90 billion (including a large share of cryptocurrencies), supported by prediction markets already worth €27 billion – possessing immense power and gigantic budgets for social media advertising. At the same time, the regulated industry is constantly restricted in its ability to inform about its existence and subjected to increasing fiscal pressure. Only joint action within the EU, elements of which will include introducing a single license, forcing Big Tech companies to revise their policies on gambling advertising, and blocking payments directed outside the licensing ecosystem, offers a chance for real results. But let us not be naive – the struggle is about minimizing illegal activity, because completely eliminating it is not possible, regardless of the industry.
The second issue is a lack of understanding that excessive interference in the product and the ability to communicate with players leads to pushing some of them into the hands of the black market. The legal offering must remain attractive. The optimal level of safety is not maximum restrictions and strict bans – it is solutions that encourage keeping players within the regulated market, where legal operators are obliged to use effective responsible gambling mechanisms, and from which states derive tangible economic benefits.
With Finland and Austria moving towards changes to their gambling monopoly frameworks, what do these developments reveal about the future of gambling monopolies in Europe?
If you would be satisfied with a short answer, it is: in Europe, there is no longer an actual monopoly on online gambling anywhere, so there is all the more reason for it to have no future. However, I assume readers expect a slightly more detailed statement from me. The decisions taken by the governments of Finland and Austria show that they have understood what today is a real problem for states and players, and what is merely a pretense. The time for brandishing the false argument that increasing the availability of legal gambling games will cause a mythical explosion of interest among people who previously abstained from them is coming to an end. Today, anyone with internet access can choose from an unquantifiable number of offers whose ads they see daily on their social media. There are no effective solutions aligned with the logic of a democratic rule-of-law state that would completely eliminate the gambling black market and keep all players with a single authorized operator. In Poland, where official data speaks of a relatively small number of players, a massive registry of blocked domains was created, while in reality, illegal sites have significantly more customers than the state monopolist. Responsible public policy must therefore focus on two tasks: ensuring that as large a percentage of players as possible uses legal services, and providing them with the optimal level of protection I mentioned earlier. What is more, maintaining a monopoly has also lost its fiscal purpose – the growing value of the black market each year generates increasingly high tax losses. Some tend to forget that tax is paid on turnover generated, not on market share.
Illegal gambling advertising is becoming increasingly prevalent on social media. What measures are needed to address this growing problem?
There is only one effective mechanism that will successfully curb the presence of illegal gambling advertising online, especially on social media. Publishing them must stop being profitable. But let us not fool ourselves into thinking that an individual state will be able to penalize or tax Big Tech companies. Therefore, a model in which 27 inconsistent legal systems are supposed to respond to global challenges in the form of illegal gambling and its advertising is unsustainable. Besides, it is quite absurd that in the EU we have common regulations regarding drink straws, plastic bottle caps, or food product names, while such a sensitive and vulnerable sector of the economy remains without an EU protective umbrella. I respect the European tradition in gambling, but if we still want to have European gambling in 20 years, we must start creating legal and organizational solutions adequate to modern technologies as quickly as possible.
Nearly a decade after the amendment of Poland’s Gambling Act, which reforms do you consider most urgent to bring the legislation in line with today's market realities?
The biggest weakness of current regulations is that they prove completely ineffective in combating illegal gambling. The provisions regarding domain blocking have led to a registry containing nearly 60,000 entries, yet more Poles gamble illegally than legally. Meanwhile, payment blocking rules are constructed in such a way that they only cover financial institution processing for blocked domains, leaving them complete freedom to operate on clones of those domains. Even banks and payment service providers are calling for changes in this area that would allow them to protect their clients more effectively from illegal gaming. In the land-based segment, it is equally poor. Polish cities are flooded with illegal slot machines theoretically covered by the monopoly. The National Revenue Administration cannot keep up with removing them – a venue from which machines were seized can be ready to resume operations the very next day. In summary, the regulations created in 2016 keep pace neither with technological development nor with the brazenness of criminals.
The second issue is the adopted market model, especially in the online casino segment. In 2016, lawmakers might have still thought it possible to create a monopoly modeled on lotteries. However, today's situation proves that this is unrealistic not only in Poland, but in any European country – all monopolies today are fictional, two of them will soon cease to exist, and Poland will become the last EU country maintaining this apparent exclusivity. What is more, an analysis of gambling tax revenues in 2026 indicates a significant slowdown in the monopolist's growth momentum, so there is a risk that it will start losing market share. This is actually a very debatable question as to who holds the stronger position in this market. GGR indicates a certain advantage for the monopolist, but in terms of the number of players, the black market clearly dominates. High time, then, to ask ourselves – what is the point of continuing to maintain a theoretical monopoly that in practice has never actually existed?
Join Adam Lamentowicz and Superbet at the HIPTHER Warsaw Summit 2026 on 27–28 October at the InterContinental Warsaw by IHG. Meet the leaders shaping the market, go deeper into the regulatory and commercial realities transforming European gaming, and hear more insights from Adam and the Super team live in Warsaw.
🎟️ Secure your seat: hipther.com/events/warsaw-summit