The Rise – and Epic Fall – of Goalpoker

By Harry Lang

Prologue

This is a story that has been filed away in my head, for various reasons, for nearly twenty years. This is the story of the rise and calamitous fall of ‘Goalpoker’.Strap in, folks.In 2005, I was in the death throes of an agency job overseeing the Budweiser account in London’s Soho. Long hours, a paltry (by today’s standards, at least) salary and a disgruntled team meant I was running out of gas. I was relieved of my duties before I could quit and spent the summer taking freelance roles between trips to Ibiza, planning an eventual move to another job – and another life – in Sydney. One of my contracts was for an online poker startup,

Goalpoker dot com

A skin of the high-flying US brand Absolute Poker, 'Goal' was led by an erratic, deranged CEO and funded by an equally imbalanced (but significantly wealthy) backer. I was offered double my then salary to jump on board and, having spent a week checking out my potential life in Sydney via NYC, joined the business as a young, naïve and hopelessly underprepared Marketing Director.

What followed was a year of some of the most batshit insanity I – or anyone else adjacent to this horror show – could ever wish to see in a thousand careers.We built a small team and found an office in a Redhill business park, possibly one of the least impressive dot com HQ in existence at the time.

All the back end, dev and the poker platform were looked after in Costa Rica and Vancouver by the frat boys at Absolute. We were only charged with marketing, mainly brand and customer acquisition. At the height of the online poker boom. How hard could it be? It’s been twenty years, so rather than butcher the chronology, I’ve just cherry picked some of the best/ worst stories from this utter shitshow of a business that I’ve shared in weekly chapters on Friday mornings as a newsletter on LinkedIn and also on my website here, BrandArchitects.co.uk.

I won’t be naming names, nor will I be responsible for slight inaccuracies. This is how I remember it, and I firmly believe, in real time, it was much, much worse. Take from it what you will – but I suggest you at least A/ laugh at the gross ineptitude of all involved, myself included and B/ take it as a warning of what can happen in business when ego meets money, narcissism and greed. This is 'The Rise and Epic Fall of Goalpoker' (Sometime between 2005 and 2006).

Enjoy!

Harry

Chapter 1/ The Average Week at Goalpoker

There wasn’t an average week at Goalpoker. If the CEO showed up in the office at all, he was addled, excitable and wearing shades, usually reeking of booze and clutching some scribblings on the back of a casino napkin pertaining to some new deal he’d ‘negotiated’ over the weekend.

·       Sponsoring Dream Team on Sky for several hundred thousand pounds? Check.

·       Sponsoring a football conference in Dubai (more of that week to follow)? Check

·       Creating a  number 1 hit song (definitely more on that disaster to follow)? Check.

·       Private 737 for the World Cup in Ibiza (there could be a book on that weekend alone)? Check

He’d usually rock up in his green Mustang at around 11 and by midday, the six of us would be enjoying a spritzer in the pub before adjourning to Frankie & Benny's for a ‘strategy lunch’.

We had a lot of strategy lunches.

Sometime in mid afternoon, he’d take a taxi to London for ‘meetings’ – usually in one of his three favourite venues:-

The Café de Paris, any number of casinos within a mile of St James or Spearmint Rhino, a famed strip club on Tottenham Court Road.

We got to know Rhino pretty well, not least because the CEO would host our weekly status meetings there.

As Marketing Director, I was joined by the Commercial Director (who was also my flatmate at the time) and the Finance Director. Being a naïve twenty-eight-year-old, I thought this was all fairly normal for a tech start up in the gambling space, so I religiously prepared my marketing strategy and budget, updating it weekly in the hope that one week, our sole investor would have produced the necessary cash to actually pay for some marketing.

It never came.

Which was probably for the best, as I had no frickin’ clue where to find online poker players. My strategies were based on learnings in agency land, and as such weren’t worth a pot of mince. However, by the second bottle of Verve, everyone seemed to be pretty excited by what I had planned. And so it continued, for months.

And months.

The CEO brought in new deals (which were supposedly paid for by the investor. Many weren’t). We all updated our plans. We hired new people. We engaged a PR agency. We went to our Christmas Party in a stretched Hummer with a poker table in it and Champagne lining the walls.

It was fun. It was crazy, but in the ‘yay, this feels like we’re building something that could go stratospheric’ crazy. Instead of the ‘padded walls, crayons only’ crazy that it actually was.

Realising that I was about as much use as mirrored shades at a poker table, the CEO decided to send me to Vancouver to meet the founders of Absolute Poker and learn how to find players.

It was there that I realised how much trouble we might be in…

Chapter 2 / Vancouver or Bust – When You Realise You Aren’t The Only Sucker At The Table (Just The Poorest)

No matter how inept the Goalpoker CEO was, I was trying my best to challenge for the title. I had literally no experience in running a marketing department, let alone the intricacies of running one in an online poker startup. I didn’t know what Affiliate Marketing was, let alone how to engage with affiliates. As such, in one of his rare moments of clarity, the boss sent me to meet the Absolute Poker founders in Vancouver for a few days to learn from ‘the best’.

Our games were hosted on the Cereus Poker Network, home of both Absolute and Ultimate Bet. The guys at Absolute had already made it, so in theory I had everything to learn from my three-day trip to the west coast of Canada.

I left the team in Redhill to untangle the mess of A/ a Sevilla FC shirt sponsorship deal and B/ a completely nonsensical sponsorship of Dream Team on Sky One that the CEO had signed and then forgotten about and ran away to the other side of the world.   

Excited to be meeting this bunch of (by now, extremely successful and wealthy) young Americans, I flew over the pond with a keenness to learn and anticipation about what they’d be like.

It turned out that my level of expertise was roughly on a par with theirs. In my first meeting, in an ostentatious board room atop a tower in downtown Vancouver I met the Marketing Director, who was younger than me, and equally clueless. The CEO of Absolute (who was around twenty-three) was the clever one, and the rest of his frat buddies from College got a massive win when he invited them to join his fledgling business, funded through an investment by one of their dad’s.

Decamping to a compound in San Jose, Costa Rica, they’d built a poker product and launched it in the USA, where there was (in around 2004) no clarity on licensing, due diligence nor player protection.

It was the Klondike Gold Rush all over again, and with extraordinary good fortune, Absolute timed their run perfectly alongside Party Poker. With simplistic, Stars and Stripes filled TV ads featuring bikini clad models, they swept through the States, hoovering up players, paying a few cents in CPA (cost per acquisition – how much you pay to get one depositing player). With the country obsessed with playing their favourite card game online, very soon the business was worth hundreds of millions of Dollars. The Marketing Director, to give him some credit, acknowledged that they’d got lucky with their timing. Unbelievably lucky. Before asking me how digital marketing worked.

I laughed off the question, but he was serious. He had no idea what digital media was, now how to use it. But he’d read Google was a big deal, so wanted me to help him navigate the medium.

I met the whole team over three days and aside from an experienced affiliate manager, the fraternity of Chads was, to a man, thick as mince. We’re talking high fives for breakfast and chest bumps for dinner, all carrying the same Ivy League bro-niform of backwards baseball caps twinned with obligatory Chinos. Most of the time they were our partying or playing poker online.

It was clear that cocaine was powering many of the team, and I witnessed one C suite executive playing online poker, using a master account on the Absolute site, so he could see his opponent’s hole cards.

Dodgy doesn’t even come close, and latterly such behaviours put a few key people behind bars. In 2012, the Head of Payments at Absolute was jailed for fourteen months for wire fraud, and Federal prosecutors latterly charged eleven more people at the three biggest online poker companies: Absolute Poker, Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars. Absolute’s ‘Superuser’ cheating scandal was one in a series of issues that shot a bullet into the head of the entire business.

When I finally met the young CEO, his Costa Rican girlfriend was out cold on the sofa in his expansive office, and he had his white-socked feet up on a mahogany desk. He waxed lyrical about how clever they’d all been and how easy my job should be before ushering me out of the room. That night, he took me to an exclusive restaurant, dropping five hundred bucks on a bottle of wine like it was nothing. I asked him if he had any words of wisdom for me to take back to Goalpoker in the UK. He laughed, adding through immaculate teeth:-

“This business is easy – anyone can do it”.

When the business finally collapsed under the weight of its nefarious behaviours, the CEO ran away to the Bahamas and only latterly paid a $300k fine and spent seven days in jail as part of a plea bargain.

I left Vancouver with literally one page of useless notes, no clearer on what I should be doing but with the distinct feeling that to build a multi-million Pound poker business, all you really needed was to be first and to be lucky.

Back in the UK, the CEO wasn’t done with his irrational plans. To make Goalpoker famous, he told us we were going to make a hit pop song with a video starring him, his mates, a gangster, a builder and a bloke from Eastenders…

Chapter 3 / “You Gotta Know When To Fold ‘Em” / Trying (and Failing) To Make Goalpoker’s Hit Pop Song

The CEO returned from one of his regular jaunts to the investor’s villa in Marbella, where he often decamped with his girlfriend. He’d had another brilliant idea, and mine wasn’t the only groan of concern around the office.

“We’ll record a number 1 hit song and shoot a video!”

The groans intensified.

“Why the hell would we do that?” I ventured, hesitant as to which ego-serving answer he might give.

“Because it’ll be seen by millions of people on TV, we’ll get free promotion and loads of new players. Why else would we do it? Anyway, the deal’s done. We’re meeting the producers tomorrow”.     

So with that undeniable logic, we met a high-flying music production company who managed to get the rights to remix The Gambler by Kenny Rogers.

“You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run” – the Texas Hold‘em-themed lyrics still play through my head and were a ridiculously apt warning for all of us (one that we sadly didn’t heed).

It’s a classic, which we did our very best to butcher.

Apparently, you can effectively buy your way to a UK number one song with a mix of distribution, PR and

behind the scenes back handing. But what you unequivocally need is a good video – MTV was still a major influence in 2005. Luckily, our erstwhile CEO had become friends with Michael Grecco, AKA Beppe from Eastenders who was an aspiring poker player on the celebrity circuit. Michael was a delightful man, and a decent card player, so I was hesitant to meet him on set for what was sure to become an unmitigated, potentially fatal, blight on his CV.

We decamped to a barn near Dorking in Surrey for the shoot, the supporting ‘cast’ not having one day of professional acting experience between us. My flatmate the Commercial Director, Neil from our team, the CEO, his mate, an East End bloke with the nickname ‘The Butcher’ (he wasn’t in the meat trade), The Butcher’s wife and our resident poker pro, a wide boy arsehole (of whom more later). It was an ego trip masquerading as a marketing exercise and like most things Goalpoker touched, destined to turn to shite.

Beppe (as he was called by everyone) shot some external scenes while the dancers warmed up and we did as we always did when we had time to burn – we played poker for cash.

Late in the afternoon, the Director attempted to herd the above posse of reprobates, and the twenty-odd seconds of total screen time we enjoyed in the final cut is testament to how dreadful we were.

This whole shambles was a joke too far, and it was during the shoot that I stopped pretending that Goalpoker was a proper business and my position was a real job. It was a vainglorious fantasy brewed in the last remaining braincell of the CEO and manifested through the pretence of investment from an anonymous millionaire – nothing more.

I should have bailed then, but if I’m honest, we were genuinely having fun, plus we were still being paid on time (in my case, way more than I would’ve got anywhere else). So I made a very conscious decision to go along for the ride and enjoy the insanity as much as I could.

Nobody was getting hurt, at least not then, and it was better than flogging Budweiser for a living. So I did what is now known as ‘quiet quitting’. I stopped pushing back on the bad decisions, not that I’d made any difference previously. I stopped worrying about the stupid projects the CEO came up with and I actively dove into the murky, exciting world of online gambling, intent on collecting as many funny stories as possible, even if it meant spending time with the utter tool that was the CEO and his fart-catching hangers-on.

The song was never released, because neither the production company nor Kenny Rogers were ever paid and as a result, neither the track nor the video ever made it onto Top of the Pops. Which is a shame, because it might have done quite well on cheesy dance party merit alone.

Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately for my self-esteem) somebody kept a copy of the finished article, which you can ridicule at your leisure here (unless you’d prefer the frankly stalkerish behind the scenes edit here). Yes, that’s me at 1 minute 31 seconds, attempting to hide my identity…

It’s a cracking tune, to be fair, and both Beppe and the girls were brilliant in their efforts to deflect attention away from the other amateurs in the video’s ensemble. Somehow, the rest of us made it look worthless – like a school play acted by narcissistic adults – and worthless is exactly what it ended up being.   

The number of unpaid creditors left in Goalpoker’s slipstream was mounting. I refused to engage with any of my old agency contacts, recognising that my already tarnished reputation would be incinerated by association. Instead, we focused on creating our own events in-house, with everything paid for on the investor’s credit card.

Which is how ‘Goalpoker’s World Cup of Poker’ came about. Having read this far, you can probably guess how well that went, but if you want the grimy details, you’re in luck – they’re laid out like a rancid fish counter, alongside half the criminals and glamour girls in Essex, in Chapter 4.  

Chapter 4/ Employing Half the Glamour Models in London - The Disastrous ‘World Cup of Poker’ Tournament

Hosting a poker tournament online is easy. You just type in the prize money, the rake (the amount you want to collect from each winning pot) and the minimum number of players and hit enter. Hosting a live poker tournament is hard bloody work and should only be attempted with a highly skilled team and a decent pot of money. We had the first two parts in hand, but we had little certainty of the latter, which was problematic when the CEO told us he wanted to host ‘The World Cup of Poker’, a PR event designed to put Goalpoker on the radar of players across the UK.

The best thing that can be said about the CEO’s strategic vision and work ethic was that he was never predictable. He’d had a trophy custom made with a dog called Pickles sat atop of our ball logo, which in turn was mounted on an Astroturfed wooden plinth. ‘Pickles’ was the famous Collie dog who’d found the stolen Jules Rimet Trophy in March 1966, four months before England won the World Cup.

So far, so normal.

While he obsessed over the trophy (that was his only contribution) it was left to the rest of us to find a venue, get a license, source some pro players, transport the branded poker table from our meeting room in Redhill and pull together a media friendly party. 

Being 2006, and being the bonkers patriarchy that was online poker, the CEO invited literally every glamour model he could find. Some of the more famous ones (I use that term very loosely) were paid a fee. I’ve no idea how much, nor where the money came from as we still hadn’t received a penny of the actual marketing budget from the investor. Others wee invited on the promise that it would ‘raise their profile’ and that there’d be loads of celebrities at the party – brazen lies on both counts.

I ended up collecting the poker table with two of the team and driving a transit van from Surrey to the Embassy Club, a sleazy Mayfair haunt of some renown amongst football players and thirsty gold diggers. In that respect, it was perfect for our low rent, high ambition operation.

The night was exactly as turgid as it sounds. D-list UK poker pros, our resident poker professional (a builder from Croydon who’d won a Million Dollar tournament the year before and who displayed literally every negative human trait it’s possible to exhibit whilst still breathing) and numerous girls wearing as little as is possible to wear without going hyperthermic in a British winter. I think a couple of footballers turned up later on, but nobody of any note – think Accrington Stanley rather than Chelsea.

It's hard to describe exactly how disappointed the glamour models must have been to see A/ no millionaire footballers to ensnare and instead B/ a bunch of sweaty, overweight poker players drinking free Prosecco like it was last orders on the Titanic. 

You see, this is the thing about poker – it’s a confidence game. Outsiders assume it’s all about bluffing, whereas its actually about maximising gains from strong hands and minimising losses from weak ones. Even the lowliest player like me can beat the best in the world if the cards go their way, meaning even the

part time poker players at our party shared one irrefutable trait – unattributed confidence.

And when you add one measure of confidence and two measures of alcohol to a group of portly, middle aged white men in a room full of attractive young women well – you can imagine how well that went…

I’d invited some close friends – in part as a jolly so they could enjoy the open bar but also, if I’m honest, to scratch my own ego, as I was still clinging onto the pretence that what I was involved with was pretty cool.

The fact that they all left early suggests I was paddling in a sinking canoe.

The night descended, as all our parties did, into a fairly debauched mess, with gate crashers, hangers on and a few hammered journalists ensuring the investor’s credit card was royally exploited behind the bar.

The hugely expensive (and incredibly odd) trophy went to our in-house pro and at least one pair of glamour girl breasts were on display by the time I made my excuses. The sad thing was, I don’t think the event delivered a single new player to the site, and as I passed the intoxicated CEO draped over an inappropriately young model on the way out, I realised that this whole charade was for the benefit of his ego only, and as such was now, irrefutably, a joke to be ridiculed by everyone except him.

I think we managed to get the poker table back to Redhill but in all honestly, we may have left it there. Like most things at Goalpoker, there was very little that wasn’t deemed disposable, including the people. Nobody was too worried about it, since we were constantly reassured that “The money’s in the post”.

Anyway, there was no time to dwell, as within days we were escaping the chills of November and heading off to Dubai, where we had apparently sponsored an international football conference called Soccerex.

It’s not often you get to meet a Billionaire entrepreneur and a former leader of the free world over dinner, but by now I was getting accustomed to Goalpoker putting me in unusual - and often uncomfortable - situations.  

Chapter 5/ “After you, Mr. Clinton”. When Goalpoker Tried To Buy Its Way Into Football

I don’t remember seeing the CEO on the flight to the Middle East, so I can’t be sure, but if I was a betting man I’d wager that he was living it up in business class whilst the rest of use squeezed ourselves into our budget economy seats. He was that kind of guy.

It was late November 2006 and we were on our way to The Most Ostentatious Pit Of Fakery On Earth Dubai for the week-long Soccerex conference, supposedly a gateway for brands to intermingle with the great and the good of the global football industry. For once (because it came free with the nose-bleedingly expensive sponsorship package) we were staying in a decent hotel. In fact it was more than decent – the Jumeirah Al Qasr sits on a private beach in the shadow of the Burj Al Arab, has more staff than guests and, as a 6 foot 3 man, it’s rare that I can’t touch the sides of a bed at full stretch.

You travel around the hotel’s luxurious gated site on Venetian gondolas, which on first glance is pretty cool.

However being Dubai, where nothing – and I mean absolutely nothing - is authentic, they’re powered mechanically on underwater rails, leaving the local Gondoliers looking and feeling somewhat redundant. As a metaphor for Dubai’s existence on a plane somewhat north of reality, this is pretty high on the list.

My one and only meeting in the diary was on day one, with Sir John Hall and his family, the then owners of Newcastle United. We were negotiating a deal to become the team’s official poker partner, and most of the work had already been done, so this was the ‘cherry on top’ get together to meet the owner and break bread.

On the way through the hotel lobby, I passed FIFA President Sepp Blatter before being accosted by a young man in an incredibly shiny suit.

“Harry!” he called out “How’s it going? We met at the beach party last night!”

I had no clue who he was, but said hello and carried on into the meeting room. I was therefore a little

surprised when he followed me in.

“Are you in this meeting too?” I asked.

I got my answer when a burly security guard blocked his path, and twirled a finger in the air to suggest, quite clearly, that the bloke should turn around and fuck off.

He was a football agent, Sir John informed me. Apparently they hung around events like this and tried to blag their way into meetings. If they could be present when, say, a £20 million shirt sponsorship deal was discussed, they’d claim they were part of the process and at those levels of money, it was easier for team owners to just chuck them £50k to make them go away rather than deal with the hassle.

So at least there was one other industry as ethically bankrupt as the one I was working in.

As part of our deal with Soccerex, Goalpoker was sponsoring the beach football tournament that afternoon. I was on the sidelines enjoying a beer when one of the organisers came over and asked me who was in our team. Apparently, that was part of the deal, so I pulled together the three other Goalpoker employees plus one of the football agents (who were still floating around like a turd round a U-bend) and went on the pitch, hoping for a friendly kickabout in the midday sun.

These hopes were dashed when I saw who we were up against – the All Star Team, featuring Brian Robson, Ian Dowie, World Cup winning Brazilian Leonardo, and a couple of former internationals. To rub it in further, they were being ‘managed’ by Sir Bobby Robson…

Leonardo started banging in volleys from the halfway line, and I was more focussed on not throwing up than getting in his way. I think they stopped scoring at 20-0, by which point out team was near dead.

Our rivals were magnanimous winners to a man and invited me to join them for dinner that night. The hotel had a series of mini islands dotted around the fake lagoon which you could book. After drinks on the beach we crocodiled over the bridge to our island table, covered in a tent-like awning and enjoyed a fantastic menu, fuelled by champagne. Dowie and Sir Bobby, two of the most amusing people I’ve ever met, weren’t shy in keeping the ice buckets loaded, probably because Goalpoker was footing the bill.   

“Here, Harry – you wanna take two bottles of fizz to my friends over there?” Sir Bobby called over the table, pointing to the island next door. Keen to please our esteemed guest, I dutifully trotted over our bridge armed with two loaded ice buckets, and over to the neighbouring bridge where I was stopped by two significant security guards. I explained what I was up to, and they checked with a further two heavily armed security guards on the island side of the bridge before giving me the nod to proceed.

I ducked under the awning to present the ‘gift’ from Sir Bobby, only to realise I knew the two gentlemen inside. Not as friends or even acquaintances, but because they were Sir Richard Branson and Bill Clinton.

Keen to make friends in the highest places I introduced myself before presenting the fizz to the UK’s most famous Billionaire and the former leader of the free world:-

“Good evening gents – My name’s Harry, and this is with the compliments of Goalpoker and Sir Bobby Robson”

…before scuttling back to our island, where the great and the good of English football were pissing themselves laughing.

The rest of the week was a blur of parties, dinners and casual meetings. On the last day and in an effort to woo one of the event managers, I invited her to play golf. Halfway around the course, we had to drive through a tunnel under one of the fairways only to encounter a fleet of buggies carrying yet more heavily armed guards coming the other way.

Clearly losing that particular game of Top Trumps, I reversed back to let them pass, before seeing Mr Clinton emerging into the sunlight.

“Hey Harry, how you playing?” Bill called out as he passed.

“So, so Bill” I replied, giving him a wave. My date looked at Bill, then looked at me. Bill winked at her, the utter legend.

It was that kind of week, probably my favourite in that bonkers year at Goalpoker. Sadly, pride always comes before a fall, and the CEO – MIA somewhere in Dubai - was already cooking up his next catastrophe as without me knowing he’d signed a hugely expensive deal with Newcastle United.

I was going back to my Alma Mater for several weekends in The Toon.

Chapter 6/ Goalpoker Goes To The Champions League Final - Before Making A Mess In The Premier League

One of the few – in fact, the only – campaign success I had as Marketing Director of Goalpoker was right at the beginning when we launched the site in October 2005. I’d previously flirted with viral videos and games for the likes of Sony PlayStation and Penguin in my agency life, so wanted to replicate that success to put our brand on the map, which led to the birth of ‘Penalty Strip’.

Through the optics of hindsight and a modern, post #MeToo lens, it was a pretty grimy way to garner attention. You shot penalty goals on your screen, and for every one you scored, a girl to the side would remove an item of clothing.

Yeah, that level of icky.

We were still twelve years away from the #MeToo movement going global, but that’s little excuse – it was grubby and exploitative, but hugely popular. It topped the viral charts with FHM, Loaded and that stable of lad’s mag media which were just finding their digital feet, and at the last count had passed thirty million players globally. It was a massive, misogynistic hit of a game, the type of which will never exist again.

Which is for the best.

As a ‘poker site for football fans’, this was a good start, awareness wise, but the CEO had much loftier ambitions.

Ridiculous sponsorship deals negotiated by him whilst pissed had become a stock in trade for Goalpoker. Right at the beginning, in the Summer of 2005, the CEO had sponsored a movie called ‘Goal’ (before our site was even live!!) because he wanted to hang out with celebs at the Premiere and play billy big bollocks. The film was one of the worst pieces of creative art in history, and likely they didn’t get paid anyway. Soon after, he started treading on other people’s IP without even offering to pay, which is where things got interesting.

We’d been running ‘The Champions League of Poker’ as an online tournament for some time. Despite warnings from me and many, many others that we shouldn’t be squatting on FIFA’s trademarks at any cost, the CEO turned a blind eye, as was his way. Players were competing to qualify for a final table in which the prizes were a VIP trip to the UEFA Champions League Final in May 2006 at the Stade de France in Paris.

Being a fledgling poker site with poor player liquidity, these tournaments had a habit of being won by the same people, all playing freeroll games against each other. As such, the majority of the winners I ended up hosting in Paris knew each other already, mostly from an online gambling community called Punter’s Lounge. In other words, it was yet another massive waste of money.

Imagine if you will a plummy-voiced 28-year-old in a suit (it was a work trip – and I had standards) trying to persuade eight shitfaced amateur poker players to pace themselves as the Eurostar trundled out of Waterloo International. By the Chunnel, the bawdy singing had started, and by the time we reach Gare du Nord, it was like the last days of Rome. Ever the professional (and having run out of patience months before) I gave them their tickets and hospitality details and left them to it.   

79,500 people watch Barcelona overturn an early Sol Campbell header to win the match 2-1, and I was all set for a night strolling the nightlife of my favourite European city.

No dice – somehow, inexplicably, I bumped into two of my guests in a bar in the 10th arrondissement, doing the most damage to Anglo French relations since Agincourt.

Back in the UK, our football joyride continued. As you know from Chapter 5, the CEO had signed a nosebleed deal with Newcastle United FC, so Goalpoker was their ‘Official Poker Partner’. I don’t know how much it cost, and to this day I don’t know how much they actually got paid, but for a few months at the end of 2006 we had access to ten VIP tickets plus corporate hospitality for every home game at St James’ Park.

In an effort to extract some – any – value from the deal, we ran online tournaments and PR campaigns with the Newcastle tickets as prizes, which meant somebody had to go up to the North East every other weekend to host the guests. That person was me, which was problematic for a few reasons:-

1/ Newcastle were going through one of their worst seasons in the club’s history. Their talisman Alan Shearer had left at the end of the previous season, while the new ‘star’ Michael Owen was about as reliable as a ten-year-old Citroen, only playing the final two games of the season. They finished 13th, and their form was so bad that manager Glenn Roeder had to resign.

2/ Newcastle in winter is cold, and by that, I mean plum-numbingly Baltic. Even in the posh seats, a north sea wind would shoot up the Tyne, around the Town Moor and into the stadium, making for a less than pleasant viewing experience (although Geordie fans, being legends, were often resolutely topless, moobs on show - no matter the weather).

3/ Despite my enduring love of the city, I’m not a fan of football. Spending my weekends hanging out with drunk poker players in these conditions and watching poor quality football whilst trying to defrost my behind wasn’t  particularly fun, so I used to leave at half time, abandoning my guests to go and see friends in Harrogate for a night out instead.

There were flirtations with other clubs, both home and abroad. like the one-off Sevilla FC shirt sponsorship and something to do with Barcelona. I remain convinced the CEO just used these negotiations as an excuse to fly around Europe meeting famous football clubs and having a jolly. I dread to think how many Commercial Directors were left hanging, on a promise that a new, wealthy gambling partner was in the post.

One plus side of his frequent jaunts was that I got to borrow his Mustang one weekend to drive to a party in Devon. Unfortunately, an elderly lady left her handbrake off on a single-track lane near Totnes and put a Ford-Fiesta-shaped dent into the rear fender. I promised the CEO I’d repair it, as I should, however to do so, I needed some of the sixteen grand I was owed in back salary and expenses.

This stand-off lit the fuse to one of the increasingly frequent and infantile temper tantrums from the deeply unstable CEO. However, it’s hard to be shamed by a man who was dating a stripper behind his wife’s back, stealing money from the company accounts and actively avoiding numerous creditors, including at least one East End gangster.

Remember, this is a man so pathetically insecure and unstable, he once hit a journalist at a party for being better looking than him…

Approaching the end of my tether and needing to leave the sweary boss, damaged car, mounting debt, shitty football and shittier weather behind, I had a bigger problem to contend with, albeit in a slightly warmer climate.

Goalpoker was going to Ibiza.

Chapter 7/ Q:- How do you get 150 people to a private beach party in Ibiza? A:- You charter a 737. On a credit card.

By July 2006, it was clear Goalpoker was never going to be a thriving business. In fact, we’d known it was a sinking ship with an alcoholic captain being chased by pirates for a while, but the speed with which it was nosediving to the chasm of bankruptcy was accelerating. Chased by creditors, vilified on poker forums and largely ignored by the media, it was a Titanic fuck up for everyone on board.

Many of the suppliers, partners and team members were owed money and I was down more than £16k in back salary and expenses. Two grand of my debt had been from a single night when the CEO had invited his cronies to join our weekly status meeting in Spearmint Rhino. By 11pm, he was unconscious in a booth and the manager, who I’d come to know quite well over the course of the year, asked me pleasantly – but firmly – to cover the tab.

The Commercial Director and I knew the writing was on the wall and were already planning our exit (and subsequent legal proceedings) to try and recoup our lost cash. However, we had one last hairbrained mission to complete:- a private jet would take 150 guests, including twenty glamour models, numerous journalists, our chippy poker pro, ten of his mates, Beppe from Eastenders and associated hangers-on, liggers and blaggers to a Goalpoker beach party on the White Isle, culminating with the World Cup Final being shown on a giant day screen.   

Having instigated the plan, the CEO had booked the plane before heading off to yet another ‘meeting’ in town, leaving our office manager and the rest of us to work with an events company – together, we coordinated the ridiculous party and, with some much last minute crisis management, we were good to go.

Except we weren’t.

Chartering a plane is easy, but actually getting a 737 to take off for a return flight to Ibiza whilst filled with a bunch of random punters and Page 3 girls is significantly harder - more so when the CEO had forgotten to pay for both the plane and the fuel. I hurriedly emailed the investor’s PA in Spain, got hold of his Black Amex card details and paid over €70k to ensure our flight could actually take off the next day and the beach party could go ahead.

In an attempt to recoup some of my sunk costs, I’d invited some friends to come along for this one last hurrah, one of whom only hopped in our taxi at 4am having grabbed her passport and flipflops after a night out. She woke up in Ibiza wondering how the hell she got there. That was the least strange thing to happen over the next two days.

Having dumped our bags at the hotel in Playa d’en Bossa, and left the freeloaders by the pool, my friends and I joined some of the GP team and legged it to Old Town where we had an excellent dinner before boarding the boat to El Divino, the notorious club across the marina. Somehow, I ended up on my own in Privilege, a Superclub in the middle of the island before realising at 8am that the party that I was supposedly co-hosting started at midday.

I walked the two hours back to Bossa beach just in time to grab a restorative glass of Sauvignon before boarding the coach to our private beach.

Which is where the wheels properly fell off.

Most of the 150 partygoers were still hammered from the night before, and since I and my fellow team members didn’t give two shits anymore, we just let it play out. There was a modelling competition down the jetty for the ‘glamour girls’, judged by our Eastender’s celebrity, poker pro and CEO who were sitting, cheek by jowl, in a tiny rowing boat. There used to be a video of this travesty on YouTube and in the background you could see me paddling a Lilo out to sea, literally running away from the whole sordid mess (You can still see a snapshot of this all time career low in the picture above).

The bar was instructed to serve booze for as long as it was wanted, the tab to be paid by the CEO. Yeah, right. It went pretty nasty from there, and the last days of Rome would’ve looked like a village fete by comparison:-

Perspiration, overstimulation, intoxication, loss of reputation, Class A inhalation, upside down vegetation, urination, flagellation, fornication and copulation – and that was before the sun went down over Ibiza’s famed white cliffs. It was a ballistic missile of bad behaviour, followed by a depth charge of misogyny I’d like to pretend through the lens of hindsight that I ran away and escaped the carnage, but in all honesty, I can’t remember. I was broken, emotionally and physically, and just wanted to go home.

The party went on all through the night and into the next day, and soon enough we were back on a bus to the airport. I’d never seen such a sorry bunch of wasters in all my life, and I’d happily admit to being in as bad a shape – both morally and actually - as any of them.  

The CEO was nowhere to be found, nor where a number of the glamour girls, a few of the journalists or Beppe. Our plane eventually took off half full.

I tried to catch up on some much needed sleep at the front of the plane as everyone else kept the party going out back. The flight attendants were patient to a fault, probably because it was a private flight, and ignored the casual racism from the Croydon contingent. They even forgave the topless ‘models’, although I’m not certain they had that many clothes on when they boarded the plane.

What they couldn’t forgive was the copious amounts of cocaine that was being liberally racked up on the tray tables from row 25 and beyond. The chief steward gave them a warning, and was told, resoundingly, to fuck off - so he woke me up, suggesting that the Captain would land the plane to a waiting police presence in France unless every item of contraband was immediately flushed down the loo.   

“Leave it with me” I wearily told him as I went down the aisle. I was actually quite looking forward to this bit.

Finding the airborne equivalent of Studio 54 at thirty thousand feet, I gave an ultimatum to Goalpoker’s dickhead poker pro and his crew:-

“You guys need to flush the drugs– or the Captain will land the plane and the police will get involved. Thank you”.

“Piss off” came the response, followed by jeers from his dickhead mates.

“Thank you so much” I replied, a glimmer of a smile on my face as I returned to the cockpit to speak with the chief steward. I genuinely meant it, too. I’d had to deal with this chippie brickie and his over inflated sense of self-worth for months, and finally I was able to hand deliver the comeuppance he and his wanker mates deserved.

“Land the plane mate – and call the police - they’re not listening to me”.

Nothing will ever satisfy me more than seeing that bunch of pricks, supposedly hard geezers, soil their collective knickers in unison at that moment.

No matter how tired I was, it was a delicious slice of schadenfreude that was almost worth the £16k hit I was about to swallow.

We landed in Luton and I ran off the plane, leaving a flight full or reprobates, bimbos and tossers in my wake. I knew that was the last thing I’d have to suffer as an employee of Goalpoker.

Goalpoker’s Ibiza Beach Party was the last straw – the final absurdity that broke the camel’s back.

Personally, I was broke. Professionally, I’d been dealt a shit hand, played it badly and was folding far too late for it to matter, but at least I could get out of Goalpoker’s fetid orbit before we were bankrupted, or worse – jailed.

A week later, the Commercial Director and I walked into our lawyer’s office in Redhill to start proceedings against the CEO to try, vainly, to recoup our losses. The business was in its death throes, and it was time to call bullshit on him and his failed ego trip.

Chapter 8/ Time to Fold – The Beginning of the End for Goalpoker

Shortly after the Ibiza weekend from hell, the Commercial Director and I received the paperwork from our lawyer which allowed us to resign and start proceedings against the CEO and the business. Not that there was any money to go after, as the only things that had actually been paid for had come in the form of a wire transfer from the investor, usually several weeks after the lawyers had started chasing bad debts.  

Of course, we never saw any money – the business officially folded a few months after we left with the remaining five employees losing out on several paycheques before the lights finally went out for good. There was one final exuberance – a  week-long poker tournament in the Turks and Caicos islands. Our Marketing Executive Neil was allowed to go, and he and a mate had a free entry to the tournament worth $10k each (on the proviso that they gave 90% of any winnings back to the business). He came 12th, just outside the money, but by all accounts, it was a pleasant week in the sun, a sure sign that the Goalpoker fire had finally burnt out.

The CEO disappeared, but not before his Mustang was lifted onto a flatbed truck by one disgruntled creditor. Another wasn’t so subtle, and rumours of a GBH threat prompted the CEO to shove the Finance Director out of his chair to make a last ditch wire transfer, lest he be divorced from his kneecaps as well as his wife.

He'd had a dream and gone for it in the most haphazard, self-serving and ineffective way possible - which would’ve been fine, except he burnt a lot of people as he went down in flames. As far as I can tell, the only creditors to get their money were the ones he was scared of – with legitimate reason. For the rest of us, we were left to lick our wounds and earn back thousands of pounds we knew we’d never see again.

He never expressed any regret nor remorse to those he did over, and I expect he now lives in anonymous, irrelevant obscurity, where he belongs.     

I only met the investor once, and that was an hour-long strategy presentation in the Redhill office around the time the site went live. Apparently, he drowned trying to win a bet by swimming to a buoy off Nikki Beach in Marbella.  If the rumours of his inappropriate behaviour towards young models at his bikini business in Brazil were to be believed, at least by sinking he was going in the right direction.

The Commercial Director and I ran away to Mykonos armed with the last of our savings and a credit card in an attempt to wash away the grime of Goalpoker. We rented a quad bike and a decent hotel, but ran out of money after a week, and ended up camping behind Paradise Beach in a tent with a cuckoo clock painted on the side, which felt apt.

On our last night we left the clifftop Paradise Beach Club with a group of friends, hitching a lift, as an acquaintance followed on our quad bike.

Unfortunately he was as hammered as we were, and decided to drive down all the way to the sea.

We watched, powerlessly, from the back of the jeep as he drove the bike over the dunes, down the beach towards the rising sun and straight into the water. Our quad – and our deposit – sank under the waves to join Goalpoker as a ridiculous and stupid sunken cost.  

As a visual analogy for the business we'd been a part of for the 18 months, it seemed a fitting end.

Chapter 9 / Epilogue

In common with the explosive demise of many startups in the Dot Com era, the Goalpoker team disbanded to lick our wounds and refill our empty bank accounts. Luckily for me, I’d become friends with the founders of Pentasia, the igaming recruitment powerhouse whose office was over the corridor from ours in Redhill. They managed to find me a position as Marketing Director at CWC Gaming, the original live dealer casino operator.

With offices in Vancouver and a studio set up in Costa Rica I was charged with acquiring new clients in EMEA, meaning I spent a year pinging back and forth between the insanity of Costa Rica and the former Portuguese colony of Macao, now ingested by China.

San Jose had its quirks – the Del Rey Casino has the dubious honour of being a gambling den, restaurant and whore house all at once and yet Macao made it look like a picnic in a nunnery. The only thing more unnerving than being served a bowl of a hundred duck tongues at dinner in the New Lisboa Casino is being served a hundred more at a second dinner at 3am by your Triad client who, unsurprisingly, you don’t want to say ‘no’ to…

My boss decided we ought to wave goodbye to Macau in style, so he paid for three of us to do a bungee jump. Off the top of the 240 metre-high Macau Tower. That was the least worrisome thing I experienced on that last visit.

Goalpoker wasn’t the only online poker casualty in 2006. The Federal Government in the USA snuck in the UIGEA Act, AKA the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA). It was added as Title VIII to the something called the Safe Port Act, effectively slipped under the radar by politicians who wanted to ban something to win over conservative voters, but realised that petrol, guns and pharmaceutical drugs were as American as a weaponised eagle drinking Buddweiser – so they picked poker.

Within 24 hours, shares in the world’s biggest online poker brand Party Poker (owned by Party Gaming, where I ended up working in 2012) fell 60% as it, being listed on the London Stock Exchange, had to exit the USA immediately. The other big guns including Full Tilt Poker, Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker started feeling the heat and eventually Ultimate, Tilt and Absolute were litigated into nothingness.

This left Pokerstars to clean up in the U.S. online poker market, and in 2014 it was sold by the Scheinberg family to Amaya Inc. for $4.9 billion in cash, of which founder Isai Scheinberg and his son Mark forfeited $547 million to American authorities, effectively buying their way out of any future prosecution. TL;DR – they made ALOT more than that from the years they operated, competitor free, in the USA between 2006 and 2011.

As a side note, I interviewed with Pokerstars for a job in London in around 2008, leveraging my past history with Absolute to try and get a lucrative marketing position. After seven rounds of interviews, I spent a week prepping a strategy to present to the CEO (who was, coincidentally, the son of the founder) Mark Scheinberg who listened for five minutes, decided my data assumptions were incorrect (Stars was privately owned, so nobody had access to their real numbers) and the interview ended shortly afterwards. He’s a weapons grade penis, but since he now swans around the planet on a 74 metre, $100 Million yacht called Synthesis, I don’t imagine he cares what I think.    

Online poker changed forever on the morning of April 15th 2011, now known as Black Friday. Off the back of the 2006 UIGEA bill, the US administration decided to take decisive action and that morning in 2011, poker players across the USA woke up to discover the domains for four main poker sites - PokerStars, DFull Tilt, Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker - had been seized by the US Department of Justice because they were operating “…an illegal gambling business".

In the aftermath, players tried to recoup the money in their accounts which, in some cases, added up to millions of Dollars.  For the most part, this went OK, except for Full Tilt customers. Tilt’s management, including some prominent and globally recognisable pros, had been running, effectively, a Ponzi scheme, with player funds flowing into the same accounts as operating funds.

 Suffice to say, it all went to shit from there, and you can read more about the aftermath in this excellent forensic article on PokerNews.

The early days of online poker saw massive innovation in both digital media for customer acquisition, unattainable bonuses to induce deposits and iffy CRM activities to retain players and get them back to the tables at all costs. Remember, this was long before licensed jurisdictions enforced player protection measures, anti money laundering technology was ineffective (or ignored) and GameCare, GambleAware and their ilk were still in the infancy.

I moved on with my career, working for US gaming powerhouse WMS on their Jackpot Party startup before hitting the big time as Head of Marketing at bwin.party in Gibraltar, looking after 16 casino brands plus Foxy Bingo and Cheeky bingo. I then worked at Mecca Bingo whilst still living in Spain before moving back to London as CMO of grey market sportsbook Pinnacle in 2015. After 17 years in the industry, I migrated away from online gambling in 2020 having done stints with Genting and Buzz Bingo, glad that the industry had, for the most part, matured and some of the early bad behaviours were rarely seen in regulated markets.   

Online poker in the US – and elsewhere - was a Wild West when it started, and many of those in charge, provably now, had only one intention: – to get rich, players, ethics and laws  be damned.  

That was all over ten years ago. The world’s moved on, and luckily nothing as nefarious as the Goalpoker debacle nor the US poker crimes would be allowed today to take advantage of customers online. Could it?

Of course it could.

As poker exited stage left (or rather, became highly regulated and grew up), fintech bros entered stage right, flogging gambling dressed up as Forex trading. Next came the crypto currency boom, led by Bitcoin, then NFTs. The list of bad actors, scammers and ‘get rich quick’ schemes will only grow alongside the popularity and reach of the internet and social media. The rise and fall of Goalpoker was just one blimp on the road to ruin.

Online poker just opened the door and showed everyone the way.