A Dog's Life: Ayre in Macau with his friends, before he "retired." | Photograph by Mark Leong
Work, Work, Work: Ayre builds his with Zara Taylor and a gaggle of Chinese models, at the Macau club Cubic. | Photograph by Mark Leong
The company's history has become something of an industry legend. Calvin Ayre, son of a Saskatchewan farmer, who showed up at school "with pig shit on my shoes," was kicking around Vancouver in the mid-1990s, going from one failed Internet startup to another, when he read a story about a bookie named Ronald Sacco (aka the Cigar). The Cigar had done an end run around the law by setting up shop in the Dominican Republic, where he was taking bets by phone. The story served as Ayre's epiphany, as it did for many in the industry after the Cigar bragged of his lush life on 60 Minutes (an excess of candor that would later lead to his arrest). Ayre recognized that the nascent offshore betting scene was gravitating to the Web, and he saw an opportunity. He invested $10,000 to buy an existing software platform, then moved to Costa Rica in 1995 and began supplying software solutions to bookmakers before realizing he could make more money taking bets himself.
Ayre hung out his own shingle in 2000 and began building what would become one of the world's best-known online-gambling sites on the back of a ridiculous name: Bodog. What does it mean? Nothing, actually. Ayre just wanted a name that was easy to remember, fewer than six letters, and vague enough that it didn't suggest a specific product or industry. He says he knew from the start that Bodog would expand beyond gambling, and that to name his company something simple and clear like his competitors -- Sportsbook.com, say, or BetonSports -- would constrain the sweep of his vision.
Ayre saw his business as an e-commerce venture that sold gambling, rather than a gambling operation that just happened to be online. Internet casinos typically license software and then cough up 10% to 25% of profits to the developers, but Bodog's proprietary platform allowed for higher margins and thus more attractive odds for bettors. Ayre also emphasized customer service and swift processing of payments, neither of which was exactly a strength of the bookies-in-exile who made up much of his early competition.
But what Ayre did best was marketing. Instead of lying low and counting his dollars quietly, he plastered his face all over Bodog's Web sites and tied the brand to his own lifestyle. Collaborating with his friend Christopher Costigan of Gambling911.com, a popular industry news site, he created a public alter ego, Cole Turner the CEO, and faked elaborate adventures that Bodog users could follow online. There was a 2003 party excursion to Cambodia pitched to the Web audience as an expedition gone awry, involving hookers, terrorists, opium smugglers, and, ultimately, Turner's kidnapping. Ayre dressed hotel employees as gun-toting rebels and posted the photos. At least one concerned customer phoned to plead for the release of Bodog's beloved faux CEO.
"I said, 'Man, it's kind of embarrassing, but I'll do it,' " Costigan recalls. "I remember people asking if it's really happening. I'm like, 'Are you kidding me? You actually believe this stuff?' "
In 2004, Ayre outed Turner, then picked up the old boy's fedora himself, flaunting a playboy lifestyle under his own name and modeling himself after his two idols, Hugh Hefner and Richard Branson -- hiding nothing while exaggerating everything. "There is no personal in my life," he told me.
Ayre posted photos, videos, and blog entries from his bachelor pad in Costa Rica, where he threw wild parties overstuffed with bikini-clad women who jiggled around in the pool. He bragged of a bulletproof Hummer and a team of "snipers" assigned to protect him.
"[My customers] don't dream of being boring -- that's not who they want to be," Ayre explained. "I think of it like James Bond. You're soaking up a little of it. You're a voyeur. There's a bunch of people who know they'll never be me -- but that doesn't mean they don't dream about it."
Business boomed. Bodog showed 100% growth its first two years. By 2005, according to Ayre, the company was processing more than $7 billion a year in wagers, pulling revenue in excess of $200 million.
Ayre began diversifying. He filmed his own poker tournaments, and Calvin Ayre Wild Card Poker debuted in 2006 on Fox Sports Network and Bodog TV, his Web-based channel. He added a sports and entertainment Webzine; a music label that distributes artists such as the rapper DMX and the platinum-selling punk act Bif Naked; a million-dollar Battle of the Bands competition that drew more than 7,000 bands in its first season; and an international mixed-martial-arts series called Bodog Fight that is staged in arenas, broadcast on cable in the United States, Canada, and Russia, and sold on DVD. The entertainment properties may never turn a profit, but even as loss leaders, they amplify the brand. "All roads," Ayre told me, "lead to Rome."
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