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
Last year, the company claims, Bodog processed $12 billion in wagers and drew revenue of $320 million. Forty percent of the business was casino games; 30% poker; 20% sports betting; and 10% the various entertainment properties. As of March of this year, a company rep told me, Bodog employed several hundred people, including 15 bookmakers, at its Antigua headquarters (where it relocated in 2006), plus a few dozen in the U.K. and between 100 and 300 in Vancouver. The Ayre I met in Macau was feeling bullish. "I sell to people like me, who like what I like," he told me. "If I like it, there's a whole bunch of other people out there who like it too."
A real-world casino is by its very nature perspective-altering; it is engineered to make its patrons forget space and time. By even the grandest of Las Vegas standards, the Venetian Macao is a monster. Forget the gaming floor and hotel; we struggled to navigate the convention center, a labyrinth of oriental-carpet-lined halls that could easily accommodate freight trains. "I want a golf cart," said Ayre, as we made another wrong turn.
Bodog's biggest international move so far was the soft launch of Bodog U.K. in December, which was intended as a wedge into the mainland European market. But Bodog wasn't yet in Asia -- a tougher nut to crack, given its more restrictive governments, alien alphabets, and significant cultural hurdles, not the least of which is a prevalent distrust of machines among the Chinese, according to Macom, a Macau-based consulting firm hired by Bodog.
"What we're really focused on right now is Europe," Ayre said. It's an odd thing to say in front of an i-gaming expo in Macau. But it was slowly dawning on me that maybe Ayre didn't really care about the conference, or even Asia; for him, it was just a colorful setting for this story. Once we finally located the expo, with a hundred or so attendees clumped about talking shop, Ayre almost immediately looked bored.
"You'll see three things at a show like this," he said, as he returned from the bar with a glass of white wine for each of us. "Software providers, payment solutions, and licensing jurisdictions." Licensing jurisdictions -- countries and territories that permit online-gaming companies to set up shop on their turf -- are crucial to the debate about the legality of i-gaming in the United States. Uncle Sam maintains that foreign businesses must pay taxes on business conducted here. Online-gambling operators insist that their business is being conducted not in America's living rooms but on the companies' servers, wherever they may be. If a poker game has a player in Australia, a player in Spain, and a player in Cleveland, and the game is running on a server humming away in a climate-controlled closet in Malta, for example, who has legal jurisdiction? In Bodog's case, the licensing jurisdictions are Antigua and Kahnawake, a Mohawk Indian reservation just outside Montreal that holds the servers of Bodog North America, under an agreement with the Morris Mohawk Gaming Group, a tribal company run by a former Olympic-gold-medal-winning kayaker named Alwyn Morris.
The U.S. government remained mostly quiet during i-gaming's formative years, and operators based outside of the country happily did business with American customers, taking their money, via credit cards, wire transfers, and online services such as PayPal, without paying taxes. But as the industry grew and became more visible -- and as a number of companies went public in England starting in the late 1990s -- the Department of Justice grew agitated. Citing the 1961 Federal Wire Act (a relic of Bobby Kennedy's anti-Mob crusade that forbids anyone from taking bets over the phone), the DOJ began to pursue online-gaming shops.
The first major conviction was of Jay Cohen, of Antigua-based World Sports Exchange, in 2000. In 2002, Eliot Spitzer, then -- attorney general of New York, went after PayPal, which paid a fine and ceased servicing sites in the United States. Next up were publishers who carried online-gaming ads. Sporting News had to fork over $7.2 million, and Esquire was served a subpoena in 2005 over a Bodog-branded ad.
The death knell for many operators was the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), which punished financial institutions for processing online-gambling transactions. The UIGEA scared away the credit cards, as well as the public i-gaming companies, most of which were traded on the London Exchange. But it turned out to be something of a boon for Ayre, who had decided to keep Bodog private, and thus less transparent.
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