Sam Kiki’s Tilt Rips Brings the Pokémon Pack-Opening Rush Online for the Card Boom

Post Malone has dropped millions on rare cards. Steve Aoki rips packs on stream. Even Shark Tank‘s Kevin O’Leary keeps a stash. Thirty years after a couple of monsters-in-your-pocket video games landed in Japan, Pokémon has turned a childhood pastime into one of the hottest collectibles markets on the planet — and Sam Kiki wanted in.

Last month, the MonkeyTilt founder and two-time High Stakes Poker record-holder launched Tilt Rips, a platform that lets people buy digital packs, open them live and have the real cards shipped to their door or sold on an in-app marketplace.

“Pokémon was the very first thing I ever collected as a kid,” Kiki said in a statement on X. “Now I get to build the platform people want to use to do the same thing.”

And he picked a good moment to jump in. The trading card market is on pace to hit $52 billion in 2026, with Pokémon leading the charge as millennials who grew up on the cards buy back in. Average values have climbed 46 percent in a year, and the high end has gone fully unhinged. In February, a PSA 10 Pikachu Illustrator card owned by Logan Paul sold for $16.49 million, the most ever paid for a trading card at auction.

That same card stopped by Tilt Rips’s booth over Memorial Day weekend at Card Party in San Diego, letting fans come face-to-face with the rarest pull in the hobby. “Booth guest of the weekend: The Pikachu Illustrator,” the company wrote on Instagram at the time. “Everybody at the booth acting like kids again, we appreciate everyone who stopped by and made the weekend special!”

Standing inches away from an eight-figure grail Pokémon card is impressive, but opening a pack and wondering what’s inside is what hooked people in the first place. “The best part of collecting was always the 30 seconds before you saw what was in the pack,” Kiki said. “We wanted to bring that feeling online. The suspense, the reveal, the chase. At the end of it, you still get the card in your hands.”

Tilt Rips offers four pack tiers ranging from $25 to $3,000, giving collectors multiple ways to chase everything from modern hits to old-school rarities.