Читать книгу Millionaire Within - E. Brian Rose - Страница 14

CHAPTER 6

ASK DANIEL NEGREANU

Fast forward a few months. With a little money in my pocket from the George lawsuit settlement, I was in no hurry to find another real job. Instead, I occasionally built websites for local businesses and played a lot of poker.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sleeping on my couch. The phone woke me up. It was my mother asking if I had seen that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. I immediately turned on the television, just in time to see a second plane crash into the second tower. Like most of the world, I spent the next several hours glued to the TV. When I couldn’t take anymore, I headed out to the casino. A bunch of us sat around the poker table talking about the events. All the TVs were on news channels. I felt the need to go back to my couch and watch more.

I have always been a news junky. Producing video in Somalia was the rush of a lifetime for me. I knew what had just happened in New York was going to change the world forever and I wanted to somehow be a part of it. News would be a good way.

The next morning, I called the news director at WLOX, the ABC affiliate in our area. We met that day and I started producing the 5:30 news a couple of weeks later.

A producer decides what stories will go into the newscast. In a small market, the producer also does all of the writing. I bang the words out on my keyboard and the anchors read it on TV.

I loved creating a newscast, but I kind of felt like behind the scenes wasn’t the place for me. My anchor, Dave Elliot, encouraged me to make a demo of me reading the news behind the desk. I did and thought it went well, but it didn’t matter. The news director wouldn’t look at it. He said I was hired to be the producer. I was ok with that, as just loved being a part of the news team. However, it was taking its toll financially. The job paid dismally. My take home wasn’t enough to pay my bills. I was using the George money to make up the difference The work days were long, so there wasn’t enough time to do freelance stuff on the side. After just a few months, I had to quit and there went my career in news.

I went back to building websites and playing poker.

Back in 1991, when I found out Uncle Sam was stationing me at Keesler Air Force Base, I was a little uneasy. I grew up in Boston. We had everything from professional sports to enormous shopping malls and everything in between. There was always something to do. What would there be to do in Biloxi, Mississippi?

The answer was “not much”. At least for a little while, anyway.

Shortly after I settled in, there was a statewide vote to allow gambling. Literally, one day after the measure passed and went into effect, the first casino opened its doors. Biloxi got interesting, fast.

I was the kid in fourth grade that got in trouble for making Super Bowl squares.

I was the kid in tenth grade that got in trouble for sneaking into the dog track.

I was a born gambler and Biloxi was now a gambling town.

Poker was always my big interest. You aren’t playing against the house and skill always outweighs luck. It’s the only casino game you can consistently beat, if you are the smartest player at the table. It’s a game where your status means nothing. Doctors and lawyers can sit down and get outsmarted by high school dropouts.

Poker is also a subculture in its own. Poker players understand other poker players. It doesn’t take years to bond with another poker player. Sharing a couple of bad beat stories can form an everlasting friendship.

I had decided my next online venture was going to be a combination of something I was passionate about and something that was profitable. Poker was both of those things.

My timing was perfect. It was about two years prior to the big televised poker boom, but there was an online poker revolution coming. I just felt it.

Despite the growing popularity of the game, there were very few websites dedicated to poker, at the time. My first step was to come up with a suitable domain name.

Every casino I played in often made announcements about their “live action poker games”. I was pretty psyched to find that LiveActionPoker. com was available. I snagged it and began brainstorming about what to do with it.

Even though there weren’t many dedicated poker websites, there were a couple of well-established authority sites that got a lot of visitors. I knew I had to do something to stand out and to show I was an authority in the industry.

Back then, the poker world was still small enough to where you could find a way to contact anybody, even the rising stars that were winning tournaments and writing books. That was my plan - to get together with the big dogs and gain authority by association.

This was the first time I used the “association” strategy, but certainly not the last. Throughout my career, I have gained authority in whatever niche I was working in, simply by associating myself with the rock stars of that field.

The first person I reached out to was a young Canadian who had won his first World Series of Poker bracelet a few years prior. His name was Daniel Negreanu.

Daniel agreed to do a podcast interview over the phone with me. After the interview, I talked about my plans for a chat forum and asked him if he would man a section of the forum called “Ask Daniel Negreanu”. He loved the idea.

I set up a website that had a few articles and added a forum, using some free software. Word quickly spread throughout the poker community that you could chat with Daniel Negreanu at my site. And the people came.

Years later, when Daniel was an international television celebrity, I was speaking to him on the phone. He was with Toby Maguire at a tournament in Los Angeles. When I got off the phone, I told my young son the guy I was talking to was with Spiderman. He asked who the guy was. I told him it was Daniel Negreanu. His jaw dropped and said, “You know Daniel Negreanu?” Who would have thought there would come a time when little kids would be more excited about a poker player, than a super hero?

I followed the “Ask Daniel Negreanu” move by reaching out to more poker celebrities. Linda Johnson and Lou Krieger both manned sections on the forum and I conducted many interviews with poker royalty.

As traffic increased, I had to find a way to monetize the site. Online poker was still very new, but was gaining ground fast. I decided to sign up for a few affiliate programs and place their banners on my site. Every time somebody clicked on my banner and played for real money, I would get paid a commission of what the site made from that player or a flat fee.

As the months went by, the content on the site grew immensely. Thousands of visitors would read the articles and forum posts, each week. My income was also growing. I was bringing in a few thousand dollars a month in revenue from the banners. Life was good.

Then, it wasn’t.

When I was in basic training, I couldn’t understand why it was so important to make my bed so well or align my boots perfectly. Then, one of the drill instructors explained to me that it’s all about attention to detail. He said, “Some of you will go on to be aircraft mechanics. The last thing you want to do is leave a wrench inside the engine of an F-16. Basic training is all about learning to pay attention to detail.”

I guess it didn’t take.

I woke up one morning to find Live Action Poker had been hacked. The homepage was a skull and crossbones with some Arabic writing. Tech support told me it was just a default index page that had been added to my site and all I had to do was delete that one page.

The control panel for the website was a bit confusing, but it did have a system in place where a pop-up window would appear asking if you are sure you want to do something, before it is finalized.

I stared at the window that said, “Are you sure you want to delete your entire site?” I read it twice. Then, I clicked on “Yes”.

I don’t think a millisecond went by before I said out loud, “What the fuck did I just do?”

Gone.

It was all gone. The articles, the tens of thousands of chat forum posts, the hours of writing effort put in by poker celebrities.

I called tech support.

“We’re sorry, sir. You did not opt for the backup service, so we do not have any archives of your data.”

I just put myself out of business.

After wallowing in my sorrow for about thirty minutes, I left the office and headed to the only place I knew that would make me feel better. I went to the casino to play poker.

I remember this poker game like it was yesterday. Three obnoxious tourists and four really old regulars. Whenever the games were dull or I had no desire to talk to the other players at the table, I would read a magazine and the only magazine to read in the poker room was CardPlayer Magazine. In fact, it was the only poker magazine in existence.

As I browsed through the pages, I recall thinking how poorly designed it was, how boring the articles were, and how I could do a much better job putting a magazine together.

Wait. Could I do a much better job? I didn’t know, but I immediately cashed out my chips and ran to Office Depot.

“What’s the best desktop publishing software you have?”

“We really don’t have a big selection, but you can try Microsoft Publisher.”

I bought it and rushed home to see what I could come up with.

And that’s the day I became a magazine publisher.