Monarch vs Patrick Holden — what this actually is

No explanation has been given, and none is really needed. The signs were there all week: the promotion weighed in twenty of its twenty-two announced fighters on Friday and these two were not among them. A bout with no sanctioning body, no weigh-in and a 51kg gap was always more likely to be a piece of promotion than a piece of the card.

We have left this page up rather than deleting it, because the announcement was real, it was covered, and people looking for what became of it deserve an answer. The fights that did happen, with results, are on the Duel: Arena 1 hub.

On 3 September the promotion published a full fight video on its own YouTube channel titled “Ossi ‘Monarch’ Ketola vs Thomas Phillips”. Not Holden — Thomas Phillips, the same man who beat Shane King earlier on the card. Thirteen minutes of it, posted like any other bout from the night.

Two things sit awkwardly against that video, and we are not going to pretend they resolve.

• Boxing Insider, reporting on the Florida commission paperwork, states the bout was not contested, and that neither Ketola nor Holden appeared on the weigh-in results published for the rest of the card. Its count of the night is ten bouts on the commission sheet and eleven in the ring — the eleventh being Freakbob vs Kinkki, not this.
• The promotion’s own accounts disagreed about who was in the ring. Commentators identified the man walking out as Ketola. An official Duel account then posted, sarcastically, that professional commentators had been hired to tell tens of thousands of viewers that someone else was him — and the Duel: Arena account replied, in apparent surprise, “that wasn’t him?”

So: a bout was staged and filmed under the founder’s name, against an opponent who was not the announced one, and the promotion itself indicated the founder was not the man fighting it. No commission recorded it. No result was ever published. Nobody has said who was actually in the ring.

We are not going to guess. What can be stated is the shape of it: the fight that was sold did not happen, and the thing that replaced it is not verifiable as what it was labelled. The video below is the promotion’s own record — judge it yourself.

He is a 28-year-old Finn who has built two gambling companies and, in one week of 2025, lost more at a poker table than most fighters on this card will earn in their careers. He is not a fighter — which is most of the reason this bout was never going to be one.

CSGOEmpire came first. He founded it in 2016, aged 18, on an €11,000 loan. It let Counter-Strike players gamble with in-game skins instead of money, and it worked — it is the business that made his name long before anyone put it on a fight poster.

In poker he plays as Monarch, heads-up, at stakes almost nobody else will accept. In August 2025 he sat down against Dan “Jungleman” Cates for six freezeout matches with buy-ins escalating from €1m to €6m a side — the largest publicly streamed poker game ever played — and came out of those twelve hours down roughly $15 million. He streamed all of it.

Duel.com launched in July 2025, and Duel: Arena is his own promotion. Worth knowing: the Florida permit for the event was not held by Duel.com but by Ryan Toole Inc., trading as Duel Arena — a crypto casino cannot hold a Florida licence.

What does not exist is any measured physical data for him. The 92kg on the poster was promotional billing; he never appeared at the official weigh-in, and no height for him has ever been published. That is why there is no tale of the tape on this page — we would have had to invent it.

The fight was the sideshow. The casino is the thing he actually built, and that one you can judge for yourself.

Update, 29 August: the promotion ran an official weigh-in on Friday and posted the result for fighter after fighter through the afternoon and evening — twenty of the twenty-two men on this card, down to the tenth of a pound. This bout was not one of them. No figure for either man has been published by the promotion, and none appears in any fight database. So everything below rests on the numbers from the announcement rather than from a scale — which is itself the clearest evidence of what this bout is. Nobody weighs an exhibition.

The announcement gives two figures and they are the entire show. Ketola: 92kg (202.8 lb). Holden: 41kg (90.4 lb). One man weighs roughly two and a quarter times the other.

For scale: professional boxing runs seventeen divisions from minimumweight to heavyweight, and the whole ladder — every rung, bottom to top — spans about 43kg. The gap in this single bout is bigger than the entire sport's weight structure. Championship classes are separated by one to three kilograms. Fighters miss weight by three hundred grams and lose a percentage of the purse over it.

Weight classes are not paperwork. In a sport built on hitting people in the head, mass is the single biggest factor in how much damage lands — which is why nobody has ever needed a rule against this. It simply does not come up.

All of which is the long way of saying: no commission on earth sanctions this, and nothing that happened on Saturday was ever going onto anybody's professional record. It was an exhibition. A bit. A segment between the fights — and in the end, not even that.

Both phrases come from the promotion, and neither is doing an honest day's work.

The professional middleweight limit is 72.57kg — 160 lb. Ketola was billed about 20kg over it. Holden about 31kg under it. There is no arrangement of those numbers in which both men are middleweights, and none in which either one is.

Twelve rounds is championship distance — the length two elite professionals go when a world title is on the line, and a number most very good boxers never see in a career. Duel: Arena booked it for two men who had never had a boxing match at all.

The announcement also reports that “analysts are struggling to choose the favourite”, which is comfortably the best line the promotion has published all month.

None of it is hidden, and that is rather the point. The copy is winking at you. Read it the way it is written rather than the way the poster is laid out, and everybody gets along fine.

One detail deserves stating plainly, because it is unusual and it is easy to miss. Ossi Ketola founded Duel.com and runs it. Duel: Arena is his promotion. On 29 August he was billed as a competitor at an event his own company was putting on, promoting and selling.

In sanctioned boxing that arrangement is not permitted, for reasons you can probably work out on your own. It was permitted here because none of this was sanctioned — which, again, is the point. File it under things worth knowing when you decide how seriously to take the card.

Duel: Arena 1 had real matchups on it — the kind where you could not guess the ending from the poster. If you landed here from the Monarch announcement, these are the ones worth turning up early for.

All of them are on the board at Duel, the operator behind the promotion, and our sportsbook page sets out the terms before you go anywhere near it.

The rest of the bill: Gypsy Crusader vs Ben Azoulay in kickboxing, Phil Rowe vs Javanis Ross in boxing, Alex Nicholson vs Brad Taylor in MMA, plus the influencer bouts — Pownall vs Clark, Grady vs Stokan and King vs Phillips.

The bout was announced for the Duel: Arena 1 card but was never contested. Duel: Arena 1 ran on Saturday, 29 August at the Kia Center in Orlando — doors at 6:00 PM ET, first fight at 7:00 PM ET.

The card was pay-per-view at $29.99, ordered through DuelArena.tv and streamed worldwide via PlayLive. Fight week was free — the Thursday press conference and both Friday weigh-ins went out on the promotion's own YouTube and Facebook channels. The promotion has not said whether a replay will be sold or made free.

Full card and every result on the Duel: Arena 1 hub. If you came at this from a betting angle instead, our Duel sportsbook page covers the combat-sports markets and the licensing picture.