FEATURE MOBILE
Calv
yr in A
e spec
ial
Friends, colleagues, comrades! Let us all come together... er at Rayners Lane!
ere at the Gun we think differently to most people, often with dire consequences, but in this case we think Ladbroke’s chief exec Richard Glynn might just pull off his longterm plan, especially after he announced that the company’s £50m investment in a new sports betting platform would be imminently unveiled to the public. But there’s more to him than just a tough, results-focused exterior of a chief executive who runs a four-storey office of 800 staff on the outskirts of West London alongside more than 2,000 shops across the country. As he admitted in a recent results call, he cares about his personnel and the culture they work in and wants everyone to be considered equal; to be offered the same food from the canteen (there is only a newsagent's and a “greasy” curry house in Rayners Lane) where one employee told us “everything is fried” and everyone is forced to eat at their desks, as well as travel to and from work just like everyone else. So much so that he allegedly banned “posh cars”, such as executive Mercedes and BMWs, from the company car park in favour of public transport. According to staff, Glynn can often be seen making his way to the nearest London underground station carrying his trusty backpack. Of course, what many people don’t realise is that he is travelling to his large city pile in the middle of one of the nicest areas of the capital. Which reminds me, I must ?ll up the TSG learjet whenever I can make it to our private air?eld.
IN BRIEF
1
Wouldn’t bet on it
You know when someone calls you up and you dismiss it as a prank, only to ?nd out months later that they were trying to warn you about something? Annoying, isn’t it? The strange thing is even when they are trying to wind you up it might still be worth hearing them out. Last year, the curiously named independent poker station DonkDown Radio called up Bodog’s support team live on air to enquire about a bet they hoped to place. The wager in question? What odds can we get on Bodog. com being seized in 2012?
This is not the man you’re looking for
3
AND FINALLY
Alvin Care.com – on the run...
o the feds finally decided to come after me with this trumped up money laundering charge. Can’t these guys take a joke... Who hasn’t had a few too many drinks in the jacuzzi with three bikini models and taken hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal bets and spent 42 million bucks on advertising in the US? Jeez, give a guy a break. I thought the Federal Bureau of Investigations had a sense of humour... guess not. And while we are on the subject, it wasn’t my idea to have “Catch me if you can” next to my mugshot on the front cover of Forbes. And no one told me that girl was under 18 or that using models under 25 to promote gambling in regulated markets was also against advertising standards rules. Everyone is so stuffy these days... I have nothing to do with gambling. Don’t they know I am a boxing promoter, record producer, brand guru, world class marlin fisherman and legendary ladies man? Well, they don’t know who they are messing with. Dillinger, Capone, Bundy, these guys have got nothing on me. I just bought the Canadian army and we will be heading south as soon as we get the pitch forks sharpened. But it’s not about me; it’s about the freedom of the internet and the tyranny of the US gov’t that we should all stand against. They could seize any.com address which is an attack on everyone from the mom and pop team trying to do some localised groupon deals for their hardware store to huge companies ignoring domestic laws with a devil may care attitude. So I urge you all to join this cause in the name of what is right and holy.
CalvinAyre.com was also careful to set the record straight on Derrick Maloney. Derrick’s a “great guy but he ain’t much of a big deal”, the site said in December last year. The intrepid reporters were bewildered why the Feds were going after someone who “doesn’t carry much in?uence” in the industry. After all, why would a “former junior Lock Poker media buyer” come under the scrutiny of the mighty DoJ? Could this be the same Derrick Maloney who was named in the indictment alongside Calvin and two other men connected to Bodog? Surely not?
2
Prophecy of doom
So it seems all that gamblin’, drinkin’ and carryin’ on hasn’t blunted CalvinAyre. com’s keen journalistic instincts. Like an amalgamation of Woodward and Bernstein and Mystic Meg, they broke the news that the DoJ was “on the prowl”, and “preparing to make a move against some US facing gambling company to coincide with the 2012 Super Bowl” way back in December last year. They might have got the dates a wee bit wrong, but we’ve got to doff our caps to any site that can predict their own founder’s demise almost three months before it actually happens.
Spelling mistakes BeFair game
4
Here at TSG we are of the opinion that one of the ?rst rules of egaming, nay of society, is to know your own name. Eminem managed it. Dr Dre managed it. Even the Ting Tings got there by process of elimination. It was too much effort for a certain operator, however, who decided to refer to itself in a news story on its own site as Befair. Was it a subliminal message to take the heat off after December’s Voler La Vedette kerfuffle, or a simple failure to check the spelling of the company name? It wouldn’t Befair of us to make assumptions.
62
www.egrmagazine.com