The 10 most influential online gambling people this decade: Part 1, the near misses

The last decade of online gambling has seen the industry transform through a mix of product innovation, consolidation and regulation, as well as riding on the back of some major technology trends in the wider consumer sector. It’s a business that’s now driven by mobile, the public markets and sits comfortably in the mainstream leisure sector both in terms of products and valuations. But for all of these leaps forward there were people making the first jump in the dark.

There is never one person who effects change, and it’s always down to a varied and shifting group of contributors and collaborators, but this list looks to highlight those who stand for and represent the biggest changes and influences on a business in the last ten years. For an industry that’s not even in its thirties it’s perhaps more surprising how much actually remains the same. But as we enter a new decade there is a new model emerging and it’s interesting to take a look back at the big shifts that led to it via the people who helped shape it.

We should note this list is entirely focused on the European online gambling space. That is not to diminish the importance of the Asian or emerging US sector, but to provide a bit of focus. There are also some big names that crossover the two, notably AsianLogic’s Tom Hall for his contribution to bridging the gap between Europe and Asia and helping to establish the top-tier supplier sector in Asia that exists now, or Senator Lesniak in New Jersey, or even Thomas Winter for helping turn up the dial on the online casino market there.

But this is the list we have, and we start with the ones who didn’t quite make it…

15. Nigel Eccles

Company: FanDuel

Reason: DFS (sale)

Daily fantasy sports was the defining online gambling product of the second half of the decade in many ways even if its direct impact on Europe was fairly minimal. While its founders would doubtless argue it wasn’t gambling at all, the ability to tap into a sports betting-style mindset with a legal product was transformative to the US market. Here was a product that could be advertised on mainstream TV, that appealed to a massively broad and young audience, and that sold sports-based gaming to a very wide audience. Don’t tell me the regulators and legislators weren’t influenced.

You could argue it was Jason Robins and DraftKings that refined the product and the approach, and certainly the ability to raise capital, but it was Eccles and FanDuel that came first and for much of the time were the larger of the two. And it was FanDuel that found a, slightly ungainly, exit into the welcoming arms of Flutter (nee Paddy Power Betfair) which has helped push that brand to the leading sports betting operator in the nascent US market. And it is FanDuel and DraftKings that continues to drive the European invasion into the US market today.

14. Robots

Company: Poker, exchange betting

Reason: Creating and ruining the modern game

The world of peer-to-peer gambling was one of the bolder promises from the previous decade of a brave new future that began to resemble something of a dystopia towards the middle of the 2010s. Fair and transparent contracts between players that cut out the middle man and led to better functioning and accessible markets for all as what we were promised, but it was not quite what was delivered. And a large part of this? Bots.

Far from the huge clunking lumps of steel from the 1950s visions of the future, what actually wreaked havoc across the sector were little bits of software code running algorithms on your favourite betting exchange or poker site of choice. The two verticals it should be noted treated them rather differently, with them greeted with open arms at the exchanges, who built APIs to allow faster and easier access. While over the street there remains a fierce battle to stop them taking over the poker world.

The net result, however, is much the same. Value is often gobbled up quickly, recreational players get squeezed, occasionally crazy things happen when they go rogue and they enable often sophisticated strategies to be run at scale by large organisations. The bots are also taking over on the operator side, with automation of trading increasingly commonplace and becoming more so in CRM. Eventually we may get bots talking to bots and we can all just quit and go home. Perhaps that’s the utopia we were all seeking all along.

13. Norbert Teufelberger

Company: bwin.party

Reason: The Firestarter

It may seem a lifetime ago, but it was back in 2011 the first mega-merger was created in online gambling with the giant that was bwin.party. What was originally known as Project Jumbo by some of the bankers that worked on the deal created the first super-sized online gambling operator and set the bar for what was to follow at the corporate level. And ahead of his bwin founder partner Manfred Bodner and PartyGaming’s Jim Ryan, bwin CEO Norbert Teufelberger was arguably the figurehead of the deal.

Norbert Teufelberger

That bwin.party is now the blueprint of how not to do M&A is perhaps to undersell what Teufelberger achieved back in the early part of the decade. This was thinking bigger than anyone had dared at the time and creating a business that had a truly global truly multi-vertical reach that owned its own technology and had a scale other firms could only dream of. That remains the model others look to today, and there is no doubting his influence on the sector even if most people remember him as not one of its greatest achievers.

12. Shay Segev

Company: Playtech/Gala Coral/GVC

Reason: Driving omni-channel and making mergers work

Shay Segev, currently COO at GVC, has been instrumental in driving some of the biggest initiatives in the industry throughout the decade. During his time at Playtech as COO he helped build out their retail division and was a key figure in some of the most important acquisitions that expanded their footprint beyond casino. And in turn this led to both his role at Coral and in part to their strategy of building out omni-channel as a real point of differentiation for that business.

Segev has been at the intersection of some of the bigger trends of the decade, from supplier consolidation to the B2B/B2C crossover to omni-channel to M&A and remains at the heart of one of the most important firms in the sector. He served as chief strategy officer at Gala Coral during a period of huge change and huge growth at that business and created a model others have looked to follow both in the UK and abroad. He has also been a key figure in the merger with Ladbrokes and in turn the takeover by GVC.

If you don’t like Playtech’s influence, the use of omni-channel or the goliaths of the modern egaming corporate world then he may not be your favourite entry on this list. But he has no shortage of people that speak highly of him, and it’s hard to argue against his contribution.

11. David Baazov

Company: Amaya

Reason: M&NIA

Undoubtedly one of the more controversial names on the list, he was responsible for one of the most audacious deals in the history of the space when Amaya acquired PokerStars owners the Rational Group. And he demonstrated to the rest of the sector what was possible with a dream, some well-connected backers and a shit load of debt. While it’s easy to look back on the troubled history of Amaya, to dismiss what they achieved would be folly and it is without question they changed the industry for good, or maybe a little for bad also.

David Baazov

Baazov’s role in it will always be disputed, and his fall from grace was as rapid as it was total, but he was the larger than life frontman making sometimes absurd promises of success but always thinking very big and the industry always felt different after he played his role in it. Whether that is a good thing or not is for others to judge. But few people made more of an impact on the sector, fewer still are remembered quite as keenly.