In the latest episode of iGaming Accent, host Vakho Mdivani welcomes Liutauras Ulevičius, President of the National Gambling and Gaming Business Association in Lithuania, for a frank conversation about regulation, the growing gray market, the future of the Baltic gambling landscape, and why politicians so often get gambling policy wrong.
Liutauras opens with a career that has run parallel to the industry’s own evolution: “19 years in the gambling, I would say, would be quite a figure.” He began as a communication consultant at a PR agency – working, as it happens, with the very association he now leads.
Explaining what an industry association actually does, Liutauras describes an unusually fragmented Lithuanian landscape: separate associations for online, land-based, and lotteries, with online further split into foreign-based and national components. His association represents businesses whose primary focus is land-based.
The market data he shares tells a clear story. Land-based revenues have been broadly flat for five to ten years, lotteries grow at five to ten percent annually, and online is booming: “In the latest quarter, online grew again approximately one third of revenues, GGR, in one quarter.”
The most pointed part of the episode concerns Lithuania’s advertising ban, introduced last year. Parliament, Liutauras recalls, “were declaring very happily, very loudly that we are building public space without gambling advertising, it will be safe, nobody will gamble anymore. Nothing worked.”
He puts it in a longer perspective: GGR stood at around €150 million in 2019 and roughly €310 million in 2025 — “that means in six years, the market doubled.”
His criticism of lawmakers is blunt and specific: “They are doing loud and very bold declarations, but they don’t have experience… They don’t understand the game cycle. They don’t understand what the difference is when the minimum cycle of a game is three seconds or five seconds. What’s the difference between the one-week lottery and electronic gaming equipment in the casino? And that’s why they are making the wrong decisions.”
He also describes the futility of squeezing land-based operations while online remains one click away: “You don’t issue the permission for us to operate in the land-based place. What would the average player do? She or he will definitely go online and play there because there are no restrictions there.”
He is cautious on Germany’s cross-operator spending-limit card, which Lithuania is considering copying: “From the player safety perspective, it’s a very good concept… It has one major problem with the gray market. In case you implement it fully in your market, there are other markets which will ask you to play there without any card.”
Liutauras also touched on the scale of the gray market, the prospect of EU-wide online regulation signaled by the proposed pan-European 3% GGR levy, and his three-part forecast for the Baltics.
He also responded to a question from Dawid Pożoga, CMO at STS, and posed one of his own for the next guest.
To hear the whole conversation and gain even deeper insights, listen to the complete podcast episode of iGaming Accent.
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