Helllllo
Though i'd throw a little update out there if anyone cares
Betting site ( dotabet.com ) when live in early August. This has been taking the vast majority of my time up, one thing about the gambling business is, people never EVER stop gambling
this is good because obviously we don't want people stopping (!) also means when you only got a small team you are all on it round the clock, software going down, weird bets coming in, customer issues, payment problems - things never happen at 1pm on a Tuesday.
Given that we're not taking customers from England, most of our customers are speaking in different languages and therefore I very rarely deal with customers - most of my work is taken up on commercial aspect of the operation, dealing with different providers, licenses, changing markets etc, myself and my partners have a pretty amazing working relationship where we each have our own area and tend to just get on with our various things. Occasionally biggish problems crop up that need some overlap - payments processing and money movement tends to be the vast bulk of these and that requires more teamwork. For the most part though my days are made up of quietly getting on with my things, i like it - it's good to work like this.
I always knew money flow was a tricky thing for all businesses, but I had no idea the depths of trouble it causes, and the expense, the expense is just relentless. So many headaches this causes, would be great if the whole gambling world accepted one e-wallet and everyone used that! We were accepting bitcoins too which is a real dream, the volatility is really the only drawback, but our bank came back to us and said that if continued to accept BTC deposits they would close our account...so looking for a way round that now. The other problem we're facing is being a new site players are naturally concerned about safety of funds, so no one tends to keep big balances on the site, so people are depositing 300 300 300 300 cash for 1500 withdraw 1100 lose that deposit 300 lose it etc - now we're straight level with about 75 in fees. This type of stuff is cutting into our clean edge pretty hard at the moment, hopefully as our reputation grows people will be more confident to leave 4-5 figure balances on the site.
We did a couple of big promotions which ended up being quite funny.
1st one was a match coupon with 8 games every day - simply you have to make any ticket with 100/1 odds and if it hits 50k bonus (on top of the winnings) we ran it for 1 week (tues-sun) and someone hit it late late on sunday. Very next week we ran the same promotion but with 200/1 odds and 100k bonus... Tuesday the same guy who won the first one hit it again!!! Only amazingly he did it by 8:20pm on tuesday - all his selections were BTTS. O1.5 1st half goals. O1.5 team goals etc and somehow he'd pinged em all in less than 40 minutes!!! Pretty sick for him!
End of the week 2 more people also hit it at the death on sunday night costing the guy 66k
Roller coaster week for him!!! 1 person than won that bet won it on a X to score first (the left back!) and correct score (2-4) was his only bet of the whole week! Felt rigged that did!!
We had another (funny afterwards) incident where we made mistake on the limits and accepted a 14k euros Overs bet on U17 Ukrainian basketball game...the providers trading guys came back with some reassurance about us having a 10% margin on this market... Good job he was 1500 miles away or he might have had a chair flying at him.
Everyone says this but it's a big learning curve all this and it's a lot of fun - always stuff to be thinking about and changes to be making, lot of trial and error going on - seems to be going well so far, last month we exceeded 1.5m euros in turnover, which in month 2 of a brand new site...I'd say is pretty good
In other, very exciting news I decided finally to join all these chirpy charlies in the bitcoin game. I'll say this, I know absolutely nothing about Crypto Currency, Adam Picken (bless him) has been explaining it too me on a bi-weekly basis for best part of 4 months, I've joined a chat group on skype where people talk about BTC and CC all the time, and I had dinner the other day with one of my partners in another project who is a computer scientist and he explained it to me as well. I'm just clueless, totally clueless. I decided though that I was fed up of hearing all these guys bragging about how much money they made this year from BTC so I invested a modest (ish) amount @ £2700 per coin a cpl of weeks ago and as of today we're looking at £3600 a coin!
I would describe my BTC experience so far as highly pleasant
I've been working on a host of sportsbetting projects throughout the last 4-5 months as well, which has lead to some hilarious situations - can't give out too many details of this incident, but I ended up having to try and lose £250k for someone on pornhub roulette and ended up going on a sick run and winning over £1m
I was up all night and Laura came down to go to work at 7am and asked (not unreasonably) why it was I was playing roulette with topless women, I think I wasted my one big roulette spin with what was effectively play money
.
We went on holiday at the start of September to Portugal with Franky and Kat (his GF) and had a pretty awesome time, sunbathing...eating...drinking...eating...drinking, those two even went off rock climbing but that's a little too much exercise for me and Laura so we stayed by the pool and drank margaritas - best that everyone does what they are best at I find. On the final day me and Franky talked about poker - I haven't (or I should say, "hadn't") played a sinlge hand all year. Franky said that there is a £1k tournament at the Vic the day we got back, and I should play. I got home, Laura went out and for some reason, and I really didn't see this coming, but I really fancied it. I went down, had a great evening, saw loads of people I not seen in forever, and through a combination of mad skills and white magic i found myelf HEADS UP!!!!!
Against Franky! Unfortunately he had 3-1 chips, a significant skill disadvantage and I think maybe slightly worse of the cards so had to settle for second, but a fun evening and +£9k can't argue with that. The "ali-like" return to the ring wasn't as triumphant though - as the next night my Turkish business partner is in London and obviously living in Istanbul there is no casinos/poker games so he's intching to play - so I take mew found £9000 and attack some 10/25 PLO and promptly set fire to about 7000 of it
. I have made a couple of trips to the palm beach since for some NLHE (which statistically in 2017 is my best game) and won my PLO losses back + some
Conclusion, must be the best poker player in London
Seriously though i enjoyed playing was fun - I didn't feel too out of my depth either, I am under no illusions though, i'm not a particularly good player any more, the old like poker spider senses don't tend to leave you though and I play infrequently enough that whether I win or lose will almost exclusively come down to if i make good cards or not. If the games are fun I don't mind taking the chances that I might lose as long as I've got my gambling roll in tact. I played a high stakes monopoly and UNO game last night with Jake, Moorman and JP so i'm doing my best to try spew it off! Fucking hell though does Jake run like god in monopoly
Laura has quit her job and is going to start her own business selling clothes on eBay - I'm buzzing for her as getting out on the streets in business is so much fun, she'll love it. Hopefully we will spend a bit more time together too as all this working in London has been really great for us but sometimes we go a week without really spending any quality time together and that's not the London dream. I'm older now - there's things more important than working. With any lucky business doesn't take a downturn and we end up broke again
but it's a good time to take a risk, and this was the London dream after all.
As far as life in London goes, I really love it here - so many friends here, business is so much easier here, Laura is rejuvenated and I already feel like something of a local. The area we live in isn't THAT nice (just between bermondsey and l'don bridge) its sandwhiched between 2 really nice areas but it feels a little ropey - Laura doesn't like walking home from the tube station in darkness etc. Lease is up at the end of the year, perhaps move, perhaps not - be cool to buy somewhere but no where near enough money
. Best get to work!
That's mostly me! Pretty braggy update all in all but lifes great so don't really have anything bad to report on.
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