‘Who Is Sam ‘Señor Tilt’ Kiki? The Poker Personality Behind MonkeyTilt
Sam “Señor Tilt” Kiki is behind MonkeyTilt and showing up everywhere from high-stakes poker to celebrity partnerships. Here’s how his rise is playing out.
If you tuned into High Stakes Poker Season 15 on PokerGO last month, you saw Kevin Hart battling wealthy entrepreneurs and poker pros, DoorDash co-founder Stanley Tang shoving stacks into the middle, and Sam “Señor Tilt” Kiki dragging six-figure pots against both.
Hart is an Emmy-nominated comedian worth hundreds of millions. Tang is a billionaire tech founder who helped build a Fortune 500 company from a Stanford dorm room.
So who exactly is Kiki?
Kiki is the founder of Monkey Tilt, a crypto-forward online gaming platform designed to make gambling feel less like a solo activity and more like a social experience. The company launched in March 2024 and quickly scaled, reaching roughly $200 million in monthly betting volume, according to Fortune.
Monkey Tilt has continued to pull in celebrity names. In June 2025, Kiki revealed to OK! Magazine that the platform has worked with Ryan Garcia, Rich the Kid, Rita Ora, boxer Edgar Berlanga, and DJ Martin Garrix. “Not all of them are active right now, but each played a key role in past campaigns or launches,” he said.
Star power aside, Kiki has remained closely involved in the product itself.
On Wednesday, January 21, he took to X (formerly Twitter) to solicit feedback from poker fans on Monkey Tilt’s upcoming version of Ultimate Texas Hold ’Em, asking users to weigh in on everything from button design to chip layout and hand explanations.
Then he went a step further, posting that he’s looking for Canada-based testers for a new MonkeyTilt product, and he’s willing to pay for the help.
All of it points to the same thing. Kiki isn’t just showing up in high-stakes poker games for fun. He’s actively building a gaming brand in public, testing ideas in real time, and pulling attention from tech, crypto, and celebrity culture at once. And if High Stakes Poker Season 15 proved anything, it’s that “Señor Tilt” is positioning himself exactly where attention already lives.
Photo Credit: Monkey Tilt
