Читать книгу You Bet: The Betfair Story and How Two Men Changed the World of Gambling - Colin Cameron - Страница 7

‘There was an old fellow from Ealing

Who had a peculiar feeling.

He read on the door,

Don’t spit on the floor.

So he lay down and spat on the ceiling’

‘That kind of sums up me’

– Andrew ‘Bert’ Black, creator of Betfair

Ed Wray was born in 1968. He has a thirst for all sports though he admits to no great ability at any. Comfortably over six feet tall, he often finds himself in houses where the ceiling is a general threat to his wellbeing. Andrew Black was born five years before Wray in 1963. He is passionate about horseracing. Indeed, having been taken, aged eight, to Goodwood by his father, Tony, a property developer, one imagines that he could be sustained by this alone (though he does have a near encyclopaedic knowledge of past Wimbledon winners and their paths to the final).

Apart from the decade of their births and physical scale – actually Black has even more to fear from ceilings than Wray – the pair would appear to have little of substance in common. Maybe also the card game, bridge. Wray, if not quite as sharply dressed as Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street, has the look of a seasoned City man, with well over a decade of high-wire finance to his name. Black’s wardrobe is eclectic. He once collected an entrepreneur’s award at a black tie event in his trainers – candidly acknowledged on his Internet blog – having forgotten to change into the more accepted patented style. Black’s employment record is the antithesis of Wray’s, whose focus and drive carried him up to Vice President rank at financial giants, J.P. Morgan, which he joined straight from university.

The CVs of Black and Wray are perhaps the most striking contrast of all. Black, or Bert, as his best friends know him – reputedly, at King’s College, Wimbledon, a teacher mistakenly referred to him by this name – lists golf caddy, professional bridge player, and a spell at the government spooks and spy centre, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), among his jobs since leaving university. Unlike Wray, he also stacked shelves at B&Q.

Until 1998, the pair, despite significant shared family ties, were at best acquaintances, a state easily explained by the lack of a substantive common denominator between the two. In truth, they only came together meaningfully as a result of a conversation that year. The thirtysomethings were at a garden party of Ed Wray’s brother, Jeremy, a bridge partner of Black’s, which was the principal overlap in the families. On this occasion, Ed Wray – no common nickname, the schoolmasters at Tonbridge being less prone to memory lapses – and Black spoke for perhaps a little longer than normal for two men who knew each other through an extended family network.

There did exist the slenderest of common threads, that of gambling. This probably sustained their social chat into overtime. Wray, who describes himself as an ‘enthusiastic punter’, mentioned to Black that he was disappointed with the amount of money he had won recently betting on a particular horse. Black remarked back that, in the future, on the basis of an idea he had for Internet gambling, he could expect a better return for his money. ‘Tell me more,’ invited Wray, whose brother had previously mentioned that his bridge partner and best friend had been thinking about an idea that might amount to something in the gambling world. So Black, sensing growing serendipity, explained; offer gamblers the chance to bet with each other, directly, via the Internet.

Today, as a consequence of this conversation, both Black and Wray are multimillionaires. Betfair, the company they set up in 2000 now stands proudly on the north bank of the Thames, just down from Hammersmith, home to nearly 1,000 of Betfair’s global workforce of 1,350. The company is worth in excess of £1.5 billion, a valuation based on the sale in 2006 for £355 million of 23 per cent of the company. The valuation since has gone up. What’s more, as a result of this unlikely pair collaborating and colluding, attitudes towards betting, horseracing, sport everywhere, and the stance of governments worldwide, have changed immeasurably.

There is a new global culture of gambling and a growing constituency, worldwide, that bets as a form of leisure. There has also been a corresponding change in government attitudes to betting with a raft of measures deregulating the industry since 2000. A reflection of this is that across Europe, the names of bookmakers – indeed many of them Internet-based – grace the sports shirts of a steadily increasing number of professional clubs in a range of disciplines. In Britain, where betting topped £91.5 billion in 2006 and was estimated to have exceeded £14 billion with William Hill and Ladbrokes alone in 2007, gambling has, from September 2007, been advertised on mainstream TV and radio for the first time. It has never been easier to play roulette, either, through the many websites – including Betfair – offering the game online to casinos themselves.

Betfair has been at the forefront of betting’s transformation from a sleazy, illicit habit into a mainstream pursuit. The Internet is the growing method of betting in countries ranging from Afghanistan to Zambia (just two of the eighty-plus countries in which Betfair boasts clients, using ten different currencies to bet via Betfair.com, available in seventeen different languages). In Britain, nearly one in ten of the population, according to Gambling Commission – a body created in 2005 to regulate the industry – bet regularly in 2007 using remote devices from Internet to mobile phone. But Betfair has done more than simply meet growing demand in a relatively fresh, new market. The world of information has been permanently altered by the emergence of Google, and rival search engines. The website, eBay, has changed the way we buy and sell personal possessions. Because of Amazon we purchase books, CDs, and DVDs differently. And Betfair has changed how many gamble and bet. In simplest terms, an eBay for gamblers, sharing the stock market’s ability to aggregate buyers and sellers, has changed its own world, and in the process ones beyond.

What is revolutionary about Betfair? The website enables gamblers to cut out completely the middleman, otherwise known to those in Britain as the bookmaker, so that effectively gambler deals directly with gambler, via Betfair.com. What Black and Wray developed is a concept handling in 2008, the company claims, five million transactions daily – more than all of Europe’s stock markets combined – that a new breed of worldwide gambler seeks to place round the clock. The significance of this is that Andrew Black and Ed Wray have enfranchised the world’s gamblers. Simply this allows betting on your own terms. What’s more this is betting at high speed, in tune with the pace at which many live their lives in today’s high-tempo world.

By way of illustration, take a football match. During the ninety minutes, Betfair markets constantly fluctuate reflecting the precise state of play at any time – even in which half the ball is. Say that Manchester United are 2-0 down after ten minutes but you still fancy them to come back and win. Someone else logs on to Betfair who believes the opposite and offers you odds against your prediction. You take the odds on offer, then watch your screen as others enter the market offering different assessments with every subsequent throw in, free kick, corner, yellow and red card, save, near miss, and goal. At any stage you can bet again on the same outcome, or offer odds yourself and take – or, as a bookmaker would say, lay – a bet. At the same time, you could bet on what horseracing is taking place. The odds on that are traded as soon as the runners are known, right up to the last few yards of the final furlong. The market fluctuates with every stride until the field is in the shadow of the winning post. Betting-in-running; a different risk altogether.

This is also betting that is much more acceptable, both socially and to governments. The latter are happy to sanction freely consenting adults betting with each other. Eliminated from proceedings is an element that to many represented not only a middleman, but – with apologies to all respectful bookmakers – a pretty unreliable, unsavoury type, with doubtful ethics and a reputation for dishonesty, topped by a pork pie hat. Using Betfair.com, I bet with you, you bet with me. Or I make the odds – again, lay the bet – for you to take, or you make the odds and I bet. An altogether more civilised means of staking – and of course, potentially losing your shirt. Or as Betfair’s marketing campaign of 2008 maintained, betting as it should be.

For all the concept’s simplicity – Betfair takes up to 5 per cent of winnings as commission, shades of ‘neither a lender or borrower be, be a broker and take your fee’ – this is betting but not as we had known it before the millennium. Clean and fresh, person-to-person. You start with, say £50, and you can churn this amount through a day of gambling, taking bets, making bets, engaging with your fellow speculators. Meanwhile, a man – statistically that is overwhelmingly likely – walks into a betting shop with the same £50, or enters a parimutuel (mutual betting) café in France, or a TAB-licensed bar in Australia. He has a bet. And waits. He either wins or loses. Eventually, if he wins and once he has been paid out, he might have another bet. Or he might have to go to the bank cashpoint first. Win or lose, the process is pedestrian by comparison. And with the British betting shop in mind, even allowing for home improvements, all in an environment which is rightly deemed inappropriate for minors.

But if you don’t bet (apart from the Grand National, of course, or the Melbourne Cup if based in Australia, also in the grip of Betfair, as we will see) so what? Let us leave aside for a moment the scale of trade for which Betfair is responsible. On their own, annual revenues of £239 million for a company only eight years old should command interest from even those prejudiced against the nature of the business. To many, Betfair’s true significance over and above offering an alternative way to gamble is how the operation has proved to be able to affect both its own industry and beyond. As well as being part of what has been a huge upheaval in betting since 2000, what Black and Wray created has been more than simply a reflection of the Internet age superseding an otherwise largely Luddite world. Betfair has driven market changes since 2000, as well as met growth in demand as a result of the global spread of affluence, credit crunch and recession notwithstanding. Much of what has been reformed or altered by the power of the market has been as a result of Betfair, a catalyst for broader changes affecting gambler and non-gambler alike. A company capable of this demands attention.

Of course, Betfair is most relevant to those who do bet. Customers of betting industries from Britain to Australia have been directly affected by Betfair. In Britain, for example, where betting giants such as Ladbrokes have enjoyed nearly fifty years of relatively unchallenged domination, Betfair, with a model that takes retail overheads out of the market, cuts into profits. Existing giants of the betting world were motivated to introduce betting-in-running and improve web access to counter this, and to consider revamping licensed premises on high streets, nationwide. As far as Britain is concerned, with about 8,000 betting shops, some of them beyond restoration, you may not have noticed a change yet. But a revolution began in 2000. The latest generation of gamblers are as likely to enter an Internet café as a betting shop.

However, you don’t bet. You may even live in a remote location, and have no high street to speak of that is changing, nor enjoy spending time on a computer. You may, though, follow sport. That has changed as a result of Betfair, from the sponsorship of shirts. Betfair’s deal with Fulham for the 2002-03 Premier League season opened up the possibility of betting organisations taking space across players’ chests previously denied them because of fears of corruption. There have been Memorandums of Understanding, (MOUs). These were originally agreements that Betfair made with sporting bodies to facilitate exchange of information in suspected cases of corruption. Ultimately the government in Britain legislated to make the custom of cooperation universal, meaning that sports bodies are now intimate with betting, in the past more a shadow than enlightening. Indeed, in Britain, the government, which had previously taken the view that betting was a potential social evil that needed to be strictly supervised, changed its attitude. It began, thanks to Betfair, to see person-to-person betting as an acceptable pursuit offering opportunity for gainful employment and legitimate revenue stream. Betfair was the first-ever betting operation to win a Queen’s Award for Enterprise.

However closed you are to betting, you are still touched by Betfair. Only if you don’t bet, vote, ignore sport and take no interest in the worlds of business and commerce can you rationally feign disinterest. Indeed this is true globally. As the company has grown in Britain, so it begins the same journey of expansion in Australia, starting from Tasmania. Likewise in Malta (a corporate outpost), Italy, Germany, and Austria, where Betfair is formally licensed. Meanwhile, in the world beyond the giant kingdoms of betting and sport, Betfair has been inspiration, even as a template, for new innovations.

An extreme example is the market for gold. Bullion-Vault.com was set up in 2005 to allow traders to bypass the traditional market for gold and speculate directly, leaving brokers redundant. The creator of BullionVault was also an investor in Betfair, which yielded both handsome dividends on an initial stake that bankrolled the set up, and the idea to adapt to other markets. What’s more Betfair has inspired others. The business model is increasingly being successfully adapted. You may indeed not bet, but Betfair has touched the lives of many beyond its core endeavour.

This book is the story of Black and Wray from 1998 to the present day, the story of the path Black and Wray took to unimagined wealth by tapping into the changing landscape of global betting, and how exactly they were the catalyst for many changes the world over – both related directly to betting or otherwise.

The basis for Betfair’s success is that in Britain the company offers a huge improvement on what was the traditional smoky interior of the high street betting shop (and, it being an Internet outfit, better value free from expensive overheads). You are in charge. Elsewhere in the world, the service for consumers is preferable to state-run monopoly pool betting which, because of high tax and duty levels, offers an even poorer return on winning bets and successes.

What’s more, with Betfair, the pace of gambling is faster and more furious, more commensurate with the modern age. Betfair clients hammer away on their keyboards making bet after bet after bet at a speed which makes the process of filling in a betting slip and taking it to the betting shop counter, or even placing a bet on the phone, seem pedestrian. During the 2003 Rugby World Cup, a French-based gambler, trading in stakes that meant liabilities were never greater than £400 a time, was personally responsible for turnover of over £116,000 in less than two hours. Since then, the pace has only quickened.

Betfair grabs those for whom old-style gambling was simply too sedate. For example, the speed of trade that Betfair facilitates has meant that betting-in-running has a growing following by any of those who may previously have opted not to bet on an event but now seek to enhance their experience of live sport by taking out a financial interest. This trade can then be graphed to show how the market fluctuated from starting stalls to winning line, from kick off to final whistle. Football, rugby, cricket, American sports like baseball, and F1 all lend themselves to this type of betting; namely sustained and, during high drama, frantic. Equally, a five-furlong horse race, over in less than a minute, can now sustain any number of bets during the sixty seconds the race takes to run, and not just before the start.

This cyber pursuit’s popularity means that growing numbers of serious, full-time gamblers – like shoppers who skip visits to the supermarket by ordering provisions online – no longer bother actually to attend race meetings, the greyhounds, and major sports events other than for company. Likewise, spectators previously enthralled only by the game itself, also stay away. For them betting with Betfair while watching the game at home greatly enhances their enjoyment. Satellite coverage of sport means that you can glean pretty much everything via telecommunications then trade through the web. If you have been able, lately, to get a ticket for the big games, it may be because, along with satellite television, Betfair’s appeal has freed up a seat.

From start to chequered flag, first ball to stumps, round one bell to knock out, Betfair handles literally millions of bets, with a financial turnover into tens of millions. This is a stock market for gamblers. Actually, many players derive as much pleasure from simple vindication as they do from outright financial gain. In today’s affluent society, being right is as much valued as being even more rich. Betfair offers a chance to test your theories and expectations against the beliefs of others, betting with them directly on anything from the Grand National to the Eurovision Song Contest. With no middleman, betting is hand-to-hand. Protagonists gather in the Betfair Forum chat room both to boast of successes and to unite against injustices outside their own empowered world. For those who think there is something nerdy about Internet betting, time in the Betfair Forum should dissuade you of the notion. This is not a cyberspace for retiring types. Nor the faint-hearted.

The idea that enabled this range, scale, and rate of trade was Andrew Black’s, originally. The thought occurred to him while he endured another boring evening after a day’s work at GCHQ, in Cheltenham. Away from his friends and family for another working week, Black had time to think and after a few hours had what seemed, not uncommon for him, a reasonable enough notion. The difference with this thought was that, the following morning, the idea still seemed a good one. At the same time, Ed Wray was rooted in J.P. Morgan’s prestigious and rewarding debts and capital markets division. Wray was committed to the Square Mile. The City was equally committed to him, and paid accordingly. Black’s plan was good enough for him to break completely the ties with all that he had known professionally and draw him away to another world (he even abandoned a cookery course). Then with Wray’s help, Black’s idea became a reality.

Today, the pair are partners and co-founders of one of the greatest modern success stories of the current business age. Betfair is the multibillion dollar gambling world’s own version of Google based on a solid business foundation that will endure long after other web gaming operations have imploded. If Google is the number one ranked Internet enterprise, Betfair claims top-ten status by the yardsticks of growth rate, revenue, and profit. By value, some reckon that of the globe’s digital start-up success stories there are only two others worth more of which you have probably heard: Wikipedia and Facebook. All this in less than a decade.

Black and Wray originally teamed up because both have a taste for making money. Wray has always been particularly thirsty for a profit. He saw the potential of Betfair and, after venture capitalists snubbed him – most just couldn’t understand the idea that Betfair allowed gamblers to bet with each other, directly and legally – simply invited favoured colleagues to bankroll start-up costs.

A sign that those who invested would be rewarded by being part of a successful business was in the reaction to Betfair of traditional bookmakers. While continuing to attack Betfair on the grounds that allowing punters to take as well as have a bet is a deregulation too far, a steep improvement in shop comforts was not entirely a coincidence. Above that, bookmakers then looked more to the web to shore up a business encumbered by having a portion of retail outlets in poorly-sited inner-city locations. Indeed, for new bookmakers, the Internet is now a point of departure. The web has advantages. For starters, once up and running the overheads are lower. Plus the anonymity allows women, previously put off gambling by the old-style, testosterone culture of the traditional casino and betting shop, to become major players and, in some cases, when finally happy to go public, millionaires and poker world champions. In addition, the Internet allows players to gamble at their convenience. The web is always wide open with broadband. Blackberrys and WAP phones enabling gamblers to bet on the move. Companies like Betfair never close, which in turn is great for business.

According to figures published by the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities, betting on the sport alone reached €89 billion in 2008, up 3 per cent on the previous twelve months. Gambling has experienced extraordinary growth in recent years, and Betfair has been both a contributor to this and well placed to profit. Since the millennium and Betfair’s arrival, gambling has tapped into an era of unprecedented disposable income – although this has been tempered by the recession from 2008. Betfair was brilliant marketed, so what is, after all, a simple concept, took a significant and growing slice of the cake; moreover it can claim credit for increasing the size of the cake, itself. Betfair also utterly prevailed over betting exchange market rivals. The most established, Flutter – which just predated Betfair but was a blunt instrument by comparison – fought to the end until the inevitable occurred and Betfair bought them out, absorbing them into the Betfair fold. In a market where there should have been room for any number of companies, one stands alone, at the top, without a serious threat to market supremacy in sight.

In Britain, the collaboration of Black and Wray has been widely acclaimed. In 2008, a second Queen’s Award for Enterprise followed the first in 2003. Further afield, between the two gongs, Betfair secured a foothold in Australia with a view to cornering a slice of the market for gambling in Asia where the passion for betting exceeds that in Europe many times over. Considering the Australian nation’s rich reputation for ‘have a go’ culture that has spawned some of the world’s most powerful entrepreneurs this proved more of a struggle than you might expect. Resistance to Betfair setting up in Australia proved even more vitriolic than back at the mother country where established bookmakers like William Hill, Ladbrokes, and Coral challenged Betfair’s legality and integrity. In the end Betfair prevailed in Australia thanks to the strength of the company’s business model and the same arguments that persuaded British officials, reshaped and refined for use there. In Britain the company has successfully lobbied sometimes unenlightened government departments that Betfair’s new way of gambling is a win-win situation of more taxes and jobs, as well as personal profit, and that government should at the very least not hinder progress and development. With the argument for deregulation articulated by well-versed, socially-aware entrepreneurs, official eyes were opened to the wider merit of general liberalisation of domestic betting and gaming restrictions. Most important, the Treasury was convinced of the merit in blessing Betfair.

To the west America remains untapped, offering scope for yet further exponential growth. Gambling on the Internet hit a pothole in the Fall of 2006 when George W. Bush signed legislation banning betting with foreign bodies like Betfair through the web. That said, taming the Internet by government statutes is easier said and signed than done. Blocking access to a website is little more than an inconvenience to the determined gambler with resource to the necessary reroute software. The side door remains ajar. That said, while other Internet operators have ended up facing criminal charges for alleged breaches of the Wire Act, 1961, Black and Wray have approached American interests with offers of investment, collaboration and partnership – along with a warning that if gambling goes underground, governments kiss goodbye to billions of dollars in duty. This is a lesson for likeminded entrepreneurs facing similar statutory obstacles. America may not be able to resist Betfair. When the time comes for America to liberalise online betting coast-to-coast and open up borders, Betfair hopes to have remained an eligible suitor.

The story of Betfair, of Black and Wray, is a story of our cyberspace age. Even after being wedded together for over ten years now, they remain a most unlikely pair. In the same way that the web can unite contrasting strangers many thousands of miles apart, their differences merge behind Betfair’s slick, uniform corporate image. The inviting open-plan offices at Hammersmith spread over two floors with riverside views for open-minded thoughts convey a sense of togetherness. Their respective strengths do come together in a way that means the whole greatly exceeds the sum of the parts.

Black is a warm, avuncular family man – four children and counting – albeit with an eccentric side that can leave someone meeting him for the first time feeling unexpectedly detached at any point in a conversation as his thought process departs on an unexpected tangent. As good a companion, especially against a backcloth of live sport, Wray is rather more direct. There is a greater urgency in him to reach the point of a conversation. He has just the two children but might leave them with his in-laws while he travels. (He did on a trip to South Africa in 2007 to attend a wedding and ended up, to his amusement, with Chris Bell, chief executive of Ladbrokes, for company, instead). There is little ceremony with Wray. When they met at that garden party in 1998 it was perhaps only the strength of Black’s idea that held them together for long enough that the pair agreed to talk again. Otherwise, there would be no partnership, no corporate identity. Black and Wray would have disappeared back into their own worlds, as if they had simply brushed shoulders amid the bustle of bookmakers on Britain’s racecourses, at the casino, or found themselves temporarily facing each other across a poker table. At bridge, with the money down, they might even have been rivals, which could have added an edge to Jeremy Wray’s annual summer party. Instead, today they remain a study of contrasts, individuals who still exist apart but bound together, Wray as Betfair’s chairman, Black as a board member, with a shared founder’s stake.

Of course, both Black and Wray are gamblers by nature. In general, Andrew Black wins. He only ends up in the red when he becomes bored or sentimental. When he loses interest or focus, he also loses his edge, and likewise, his money (which also, incidentally, is as likely to underwrite a horse’s supply of Polo Mints as burden the beast with expectations of a weighty bet). Now nearly a decade since he and Wray set out together in business, and although now not involved with day-to-day matters, he remains a totem to Betfair’s future. His association with the company – he is still on the board – is comfortably the longest one of his professional life.

Wray’s big gamble was to back Black in seeking to introduce technological innovation that brought stock market computer software systems to the worlds of betting on racing and sport, and, along with brilliant marketing, made the pair multimillionaires. Wray gambled with his own time and at a sizeable opportunity cost. He gave up lucrative returns in the City for a tiny office space in Wimbledon, without trappings of his former corporate world. There was no guarantee that he would make a living from his new berth, and if not, be accepted back into the financial comfort of the City. He literally bet on Black.

Black and Wray won handsomely. Those venture capitalists who passed on the chance to invest in Betfair stock have reason to rue their poor judgement in not bankrolling the pair. Thanks to friends and contacts who, along with some of the more enlightened City institutions – in all 170 shareholders – came up with the multimillion pound funding, in seven years Betfair grew from a company with about ten clients to one with a turnover of billions returning a profit of £27 million in the 2006 financial year. Their stakes increased in value over 130-fold. In March of the same year, the 23 per cent stake in Betfair bought by the Japanese Internet group, SoftBank, for £355 million valued the company, overall, at £1.54 billion. This netted Black and Wray, who sold 1 per cent of their stakes, an initial £15 million each, still leaving them with a shared 26 per cent of the business. Others took the opportunity to convert holdings into real money. This is not a story of paper millionaires. The 330- acre farm in Surrey that Black today calls home is proof of the true substance to Betfair’s success. In September 2008, customer number two million – a 59-year-old Swedish national, wanting to bet on John McCain in the US presidential race – signed up for Betfair, less than two years after the one million barrier was broken. Others like him generated revenues in the 2007 financial year of £181 million and profits of £19 million, up from £32 million and £7 million, respectively, in 2003.

Both Black and Wray have already registered significant profit from Betfair, namely when 23 per cent of the company was sold, yet still leaving them with the biggest stake. What’s more, this initial private sale may be also simply a prelude to a wholesale flotation in the future. Then their return from the company will be worth many times more than what they have already redeemed, to date.

Ultimately, few begrudge Black and Wray their spoils and whatever else they clear when the company does eventually go to market. In particular, few begrudge Black. In his case, money will never compensate him for the double tragedy of his life. Two decades ago, his brother, Kevin, died of a brain tumour. In 1984, Black, at least now blessed with a wonderfully extended family, had dropped out – or been kicked out, depending on whose version you accept – of university and spent the two years nursing his sibling. The decade that followed claimed Black’s father, to whom he was particularly close. He contracted MRSA after a routine operation. Black was devastated. He resorted to a life that was simply eating and sleeping. He retreated socially. He felt numb. He stayed indoors watching television, listening to the radio, reading. On reflection he might well have been depressed. At the very least, he went into traumatic shock. Then, he snapped out of his trance. At this stage in his life, Black had already hit on the idea of Betfair. He had been devastated by his brother’s death and was also hit hard by his father’s passing. In the case of his father, the sadness actually served to galvanise him. He kicked himself up the backside. His refreshed thinking became: if I do nothing Betfair will end up just another idea, and when my own time approaches, nagging away would be the thought that perhaps the greatest opportunity of my life passed me by. His brother and father would have expected more of him, he thought. Then he met Wray.

That so much has ultimately stemmed from the initial meeting between Black and Wray – to them and to the world in which they live – cannot be underestimated and is perhaps hard to comprehend. It may be easier to understand by considering that had Black and Wray not been behind Betfair they would have both been clients. Both fit a modern-day profile of a new type of gambler that is a growing constituency of well-informed, technologically proficient, affluent risk takers. Betting is as much an investment hobby as speculation to them. Most important for Black and Wray was that the timing proved to be perfect. Betfair both coincided with, and helped to create, an upheaval in betting, the way we bet and the way we see betting, the way government perceives betting, and how betting engages with world sport. This book will encourage you to consider how much of this was the serendipity, foresight, and planning of two free thinkers meeting at a garden party at the right time, with the world ripe for change and hungry for innovations, and how much was what everyone who gambles needs: luck.

Walk into the second-floor reception of Betfair’s Hammersmith offices and, as well as chairs that look suspiciously like they have been removed from the Big Brother diary room, there is a window into an office space. Above this window are the words ‘Global Network Operations Centre’. Through the window you can see a wall of screens, clocks telling you the time in London, New York, Johannesburg, Hong Kong, and Sydney. Central is a television screen showing whatever sport at the time happens to be the most significant in the world, from a betting perspective.

Behind two long desks which cover nearly the width of the room and face the screens are casually dressed staff who seem the essence of calm. That is despite their principal job being to monitor the smooth running of the systems and online status of accounts held by clients who in Betfair’s years of business have emerged as the biggest fish in Betfair’s sea. When the screens show green, all is well. When they become coloured in orange, there is a problem, which the team methodically resolves seemingly without breaking sweat.

Going back to 2003, the scene in London’s Old Whitbread Brewery, off Chiswell Street, was, in contrast, altogether more testosterone-fuelled and thick with perspiration. Up to this point, I had only a vague awareness of Betfair. Having accepted a commission from Esquire magazine to write about the growing popularity of betting exchanges, I also accepted, along with around eighty others similarly uninitiated, an invitation from Betfair to road-test the concept.

That night, a fag-end Champions’ League group game between Chelsea – already certain to qualify for that season’s knockout stages – and Sparta Prague was transformed into an epic encounter taking those present on an experience which will have changed many of their gambling habits, if not their whole social lives, permanently. What’s more the game was 0-0. Still, there was an intensity in the room. It was then illegal to trade or bet in real money at such a gathering. Instead, each table had an imaginary stake to invest and computers set up for gambling at high speed. Halfway through an otherwise drab goal-less draw in front of a largely lifeless, under-capacity crowd, you might have thought someone would actually be walking out with a real pot of gold, such was the intensity of trading and feeling contained in the room. An IT engineer on hand to fix any screens mid-match received an ear-bashing from one guest for the rate at which his computer was rebooting. From this reaction, you might have imagined that life-changing money rather than a Monopoly version was on the table.

Something was obviously afoot. And yet, some of betting’s shrewdest thinkers – Stuart Wheeler, who set up and ultimately floated the spread betting firm, IG Index; John Brown, who worked up from the shop floor to the chief executive’s desk and chairman’s office at William Hill; and the Tote chairman, Peter Jones – considered betting exchanges to be short-term, or with a minimal future ahead. The consensus at the start of the millennium? Betting exchanges generally were considered no more than niche potential. Betfair was underestimated on two fronts; as an example of a new concept in an industry full of potential for innovation, and as the company that would become the completely dominant market force in what quickly became substantively more than simply a ‘niche’.

Hindsight is, of course, a wonderful thing. No one who bets needs to be told that. Nonetheless, there was enough evidence in the many theories of why we bet, or are drawn to gambling, to suggest that person-to-person betting might indeed catch on with those already entrenched in the habit-forming world of gambling. Then there are those with a predisposition for what Betfair was offering – of a certain age and affluence, comfortable with technology and in circumstances that meant speculation was harmless. They may have begun the new millennium with little interest in high street outlets offering a product that had changed little, if at all, in forty years since betting shops were legalised. Yet, when offered the chance to try their luck through a different medium, drawn to something new and contemporary, they joined die-hard gamblers to ensure the success of Betfair.

The numbers tell the basic story. For the newly-born Betfair, revenue in 2001 was £480,000, profitability in the negative to the tune of almost £2 million. The first part of this book explains how technology that drew on the IT system of New York’s Stock Exchange and brilliant marketing – on relative shoestring budgets – established a company that was robust enough to absorb these early losses and Flutter, seemingly the only genuine rival in this newly-created market. In the space of under three years Betfair registered revenue figures topping £32 million and a profit of £1.76 million, carrying the company into the black where it has firmly remained. Then in part two of this book, we consider the reach of Betfair beyond its own dedicated world. How the company has been both part of the growth in betting and the revolution that gambling – from basic bookmaking to high-ranking casinos – has undergone, and the reason for changes in what was for decades a business which showed little or no appetite for change. Also considered is how Betfair has changed government thinking on betting, how Betfair has been cause for sport to reassess its ‘at arm’s length’ relationship with betting and how Betfair has proved an inspiration to other start-ups and the potential that exists for growth both domestically and internationally.

How did this all come to pass? Spread betting, the innovation in gambling of the 1990s, never managed to establish a foothold the like of which Betfair can boast today or induce wholesale changes to the betting and gambling industries both in Britain and beyond. How then did the world of sport, historically suspicious of betting, end up working together with a betting company? What compelled the International Olympic Committee to set up a network in Beijing for the 2008 Games with a brief to monitor betting on events over the two weeks of sport? For the answers to that and the rest, first, we have to go back to the start of the new millennium.