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Doc's Sports Picks

@DocsSports

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Las Vegas Katılım Nisan 2009
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Doc's Sports Picks
Doc's Sports Picks@DocsSports·
@CalvinAyre A bunch of us "old timers" were just talking about those epic parties last week. Y'all were disruptors long before it became a tech buzzword.
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Calvin Ayre
Calvin Ayre@CalvinAyre·
Success in business requires taking risks that others are afraid to take, and being willing to stick your nose into areas some people would prefer you didn’t go. In 2003, Bodog was asked to help launch a ‘sports betting festival’ in Las Vegas. The organizers wanted to assemble North America’s top handicappers, each of whom was to bring along their 20 biggest clients, to discuss what these clients wanted/needed most from sportsbooks. Bodog’s staff parties were already (in)famous, so we were asked to host the kickoff party. It proved a major success but the conference was a bust. None of the cappers brought their clients for fear of losing them to rivals and the panels were thinly disguised sales pitches by those running them. People who attended our party said it was the only part of the ‘festival’ that worked. We decided to take this conference idea and run with it, but control all aspects of it to ensure the highest quality possible. (What can I say? I’m a vertical integration guy.) We put a whole year into our prep, including convincing industry figures that, while this was a Bodog-branded event, it wasn’t Bodog-specific, and everyone who attended would come away thinking they’d gotten some value out of it. We were told that hosting the conference in Vegas was a bad idea given that the casino industry viewed online betting like the buggy whip industry viewed Henry Ford. But I always thought online/land-based gambling were more symbiotic than antagonistic, so we plowed ahead. We picked the Mandalay Bay Hotel as our venue. We hoped for 150 attendees so when 200 showed up we were over the moon. Everyone said the panels were informative and everyone who got to catch a Bodog-branded football from our special guest Joe Montana went home elated. We also threw another kickoff party, this time poolside at the Palms. Owner George Maloof even showed up and didn’t seem to mind that we’d projected the Bodog logo nine stories high against the Palms tower. (Guess he was having too much fun.) The day after the 2004 event, we started planning an even bigger one for 2005. We’d come through okay but there were a lot of areas for improvement. Also, expectations were higher, reflected in the fact that we presold three times more tickets than our first event. Our special guests for 2005 included Reggie Jackson and Mike Ditka. Mike was an absolute joy to work with behind the scenes, signing over 500 footballs to distribute to attendees and he gave a truly inspiring speech that literally brought a female member of our team to tears. We’d learned a valuable lesson from previous events: partying the night before the conference got underway meant sparse attendance at the next morning’s panels. So in 2005 we scheduled the big bash for the final night of the event, again at the Palms, this time at their Rain nightclub. I’d recently returned from my first Carnival experience in Rio de Janeiro, so we did a similar party theme, with fire dancers, stilt walkers, Capoeira practitioners, the whole shebang. Ditka later told us that it was the best party he’d ever been to (and this guy won a Super Bowl). We were planning to up the ante again in 2006 but the event was cancelled at the last minute after the U.S. started arresting U.K. online gambling CEOs transiting through America to Costa Rica. The rest of the industry was now too scared to attend, so we refunded everyone’s money and ate the considerable upfront costs ourselves. It’s a pity it ended there but we elevated the Bodog brand’s profile and our team learned a lot about planning and promoting events. We also proved our point about the synergies between land-based and online gambling, as the current market reality makes plain. Plus it was one helluva lot of fun.
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