Tony G gets in bed with blondes

For over a month, I've been trying to find time - I'm the world's WORST time manager - to tell you this, so here at last it is.

Many of you have commented upon Tony G's presence on blonde for the last month or more, & wondered what it's all about. We have always been completely "open" about how we do things, & there is no reason to make an exception in Tony's case. We made the case to you for badging the blonde Forum the "Poker 425 blonde Forum", & everyone understood why we did it, & nobody could suggest any malprictice, because we explained it all in advance.

Let's first set the scene. blonde went on air 7th January, with no money, but high hopes of providing a Poker Site that majored in putting the smile back in poker, being a force for good in poker, &, well, maybe we could make a bob or two as well. As we saw it at the time, money would come in from folks clicking affliate links. Well, in 9 months, we've yet to earn much from affiliates. That's for several reasons. 1), We don't know what we are doling. 2). We have a policy of not ramming affiliate links down peeps throats. So when we have, say, a Crypto Tourney, you don't get acres of "and sign up HERE" sorta stuff. So we took someone on board to develop the affiliate side, but it did not work out.

Meanwhile, the site traffic was growing, month after month. Some would say the site was successful because it had a lot of traffic (relative to how long we've been going), others would say if it's not earning much money - certainly not enough to even pay the bills - it's a failure. We do earn some money. We selll content from time to time, we get income from Poker 425 for "badging" the Forum, & from Blue Square who have a Betting Section on blonde, etc etc. And there is some affiliate income.

Clearly, then, if we were to realise oir dreams of making blonde into a real force in Poker, we needed a rethink.

Enter Tony G. My only prior knowledge of Tony was from the infamous Paris WPT makarky, & so I had him down as "not our type". I have always railed against poor table behaviour, & so he was never gonna sit comfy with me. But he does run what is reputed to be one of the world's most successful (measured by income) Poker Sites - i think it's called Poker News, and it's an Australia based site. Tony, at the time, spent his time between Australia & Lithuania.

Tony first approached blonde in April or May of this year - it was when we were in Jesolo, as I recall. We negotiated on & off for weeks, but it never came to fruition. The discussions surprised me greatly, as I found Tony to be the complete opposite of the impression I had formed from Paris. more than that, he is a genius - and I do mean genuis - at understanding how the web works, how you can optimise & maximise, & increase "Visits" da de da de da. But he had another string to his bow - affiliates. This man is the King of Affiliates market, he is THE bizz. He can do Affiliate deals that makes peoples toes curl, truly. To watch him negotiate is awesome - don't EVER be the other side of the negotiating table with this geezer, trust me, he'll EAT you. OK, he upsets a few folks along the way, but so be it, he gets the job done.

OK, now lets fast forward to the Luton Festival in August. We get together again with Tony, he has new proposals, at a time when we had a new problem - how to finance the upgrade of blonde we urgently need to do. blonde kept falling over, the software architectiure was not sturdy enough for the ever-increasing traffic, & we need to do a zillion things to get it right. And we need the money to do it with. Me & Dave are in for a fortune by now, we don't regret it or begrudge it, because we believe in blonde, but we've spent rather more on blonde than was sensible. And we need to pay people - to attract writers & Updaters, we gotta be able to pay wages.

So, Tony has a new proposition. He'll invest a sum in blonde - a substantial sum, way into 5 figures, to be used for upgrading the site - and ONLY for that. He has the know-how & the peeps to do it, we don't. What does Tony get in return? Nothing, bizarrely. Except....... Tony felt he coud earn us plenty of affiliate income, utilising his experience from Poker News, which, by the way, he retains majority ownership of. So we cut another deal with him. If he achieves affiliate income of $x,000 per month, he has the right to buy 5% of blonde, at a pre-agreed price. If he achieves $x0,000 of Affiliate Income per month, he gets the right to buy a bit more of blonde, & so on, up to a maximum holding of, I think, 25%. For existing blonde shareholders (the largest stakes are equal amounts held by Dave, Rhow & myself, ) it's a win-win deal. If Tony achieves his targets, we earn some money, & we sell a bit of blonde for cash. (But only up to 25%). And we have all agreed, that for the first two years, ALL the income we generate will go towards improving & upgrading the site, & bringing sexy new innovations on board - you should see the ideas we have for Live Updates, they are just stunning! And we need to be able to pay the peeps that help out on blonde - if we start making money, then the days of asking for free help are over. So Dave & I will not be taking a wage out of blonde for the foreseeable future. But we would like to be able to get back what we've invested in blonde, expenses for Live Updates, Webmasters, Salaries, Bounties, Software tools & gizmos, etc etc.

So, the Tony G deal looked a great fit for blonde. By now, i'd changed my view on Tony as a person. He'd been a perfect gent towards me, and when he's been on blonde, either Posting or Railbiirding, well, you can judge that for yourself. And i urge you to watch next week's Poker 425, where Tony gives us an In-Depth Interview, warts & all.

So, we done the deal.

Since coming on board, Tony has already struck several good deals for us, & many more are in the pipeline. And the Site Upgrade is well advanced, we will have our new look, & new software, within the next 2 weeks.

Finally, you are gonna ask about the blonde-Titan Tourney, which Tony set up. That's a separate story, & I will try & bring you the low-down on that later tonight, in a separate topic.

Tony, by the way, is in the process of moving his whole family to England - Oxford will be his new home, & he hopes to be settled in by early December.

So there you are, thats how Tony came to be in bed with the blondes.