Bodogs Calvin Ayre has done Canadian Online Gambling Proud
Despite the fact that I pride myself on being a pretty well-informed online
gambling fan, I have to admit that I was surprised to discover this weekend that
Calvin Ayre, the entrepreneur who founded online gambling powerhouse
Bodog.com, is like me a Canadian. I discovered this fact when I tuned in to
watch a TV special on Saturday night called The Jackpot, which featured Calvin
Ayre and his impressive online gambling exploits. If you've ever seen
49-year-old Calvin Ayre, you would be forgiven for being a little envious,
because not only is he blessed with a sharp brain, but boyish good looks as
well.
However, long before Bodog.com came to be, Ayre revealed that he grew up on a
pig farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewa, which proved to be the basis
of his sharp business acumen. Ayre's father, it seems, gave him some baby pigs
to look after when he was young boy, with the instructions to raise them and
then sell them, which Calvin did with great success. And so Calvin Ayre, the
entrepreneur, was born. After gaining a graduate degree from Ontario, followed
by an MBA from Washington, Ayre tried his luck at building a medical company,
which failed. But as is the case with most entrepreneurs, Ayre only treated the
failure as a motivation to succeed in his next endeavour, and succeed he did.
Recognizing the potential of the internet as a platform for gambling, in 1994
Calvin Ayre founded Bodog Entertainment, an online gambling firm based in the
online gambling-friendly jurisdiction of Antigua, where over the next decade and
a half Ayre built Bodog.com into a multi-billion dollar business and himself
into one of only a handful of online gambling billionaires. Of course, Bodog's
overwhelming success came at a price, which was to p*** off U.S. authorities who
saw his business as illegal, since it was attracting so many players from the
United States, a country where online gambling has never been legal. But despite
Ayre's ongoing issues with U.S. authorities, in 2006 Bodog grossed a record $7
billion in online gambling revenues.
However, that same year U.S. authorities clamped down on illegal online gambling, which had a hug knock-on effect for most of the world's largest online gambling firms, Bodog included. In fact, leading U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein went after Bodog in 2008 by issuing a warrant for Ayre's arrest (which would see him being detained upon setting foot in the United States) and seizing $24 million from the company's payment processors. As a result, Ayre stopped travelling to the United States and announced that he was exiting the online gambling arena. But while no longer running Bodog on a day-to-day basis, he cleverly licensed the Bodog brand to various online gambling operators around the world, ensuring that he continues to earn millions of dollars from these licensing agreements.
I am just proud that an online gambling pioneer of Calvin Ayre's caliber is a good old Canadian like me.
 | Posted by Anton Johan at 07:41 on 15 March 2010 |
