PA T R I K S E L I N I N T E R V I E W
PROFILE
Patrik Selin
> FORMER CEO
Bodog Europe, UK, Bodog Poker Network
It came as no surprise to Patrik Selin when Shuffle Master’s €19.5m deal to acquire Ongame fell through after the US ?rm realised the costs of running it would outweigh its investment. Then again, he did sell it to bwin for close to £500m. Tom Victor meets the former Bodog Europe and UK CEO to discover what he plans to do next
would not personally have bought Ongame for that cash,” Patrik Selin re?ects from his local Italian restaurant in Knightsbridge. Little did we know that just two weeks after his comments about Shuffle Master’s proposed €19.5m acquisition of the network he once sold for 20 times that amount, the American company would pull out of its deal, with CEO Gavin Isaacs suggesting Ongame’s operations post-acquisition “would not achieve the near-term results” he initially expected and would “require a larger ongoing investment than anticipated”. “It would take a long time to get that money back with the industry going in the direction it is with more separation, tax issues and different systems,” Selin explains. “Maybe they’ve seen something there or maybe they just had to [buy Ongame] because they needed something – it’s like a lottery ticket, as long as you have it you can win.” When Selin built up Ongame in the ?rst half of the 2000s, the online poker environment was very different. The US was a core market even for listed European operators, and the boom was only just beginning to take hold. In late 2006 however, less than a year after Ongame was sold to bwin for £474m, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) was signed into law. Bwin closed its Pokerroom.com brand not long after and now regularly peaks at fewer than 4,000 players on any given day, in comparison to the 260,000 active players it boasted mid-decade.
I
More recently, Selin has orchestrated another sale, offloading the Bodog Poker Network to Philippines-based brand licensee Bodog88. In the meantime, things have hardly improved for the ?rst network the Swede brought to prominence. “When we looked at the ?gures, we saw Ongame was losing about €20m per year,” he notes, and bwin.party’s pledge to move its entire poker player base onto the PartyPoker platform means this should continue. “We know on top of [the losses] you will lose the liquidity from bwin – my guess is that is around 50%. Now you have a network with half the liquidity, and with a high cost-base that is only going to get higher,” explains Selin, adding that progress towards US regulation is showing few signs of moving at a fast enough pace to justify Shuffle Master’s proposed outlay. “With US poker looking like being state-bystate, and a similar thing happening in Europe with the dot.country markets, it’s going to be very difficult as you have to take such a long-term view – it depends how long term you want to be: ?ve years? 10? 15?” Asia: a question of trust So, if Selin’s eyes are currently far from the US, where does he think future growth will come from? For anyone paying attention to his three years with Bodog – where he led the operator’s UK and European operations as well as its poker network – the answer is clear.
www.egrmagazine.com
39