Member-only story

The Rise — And Epic Fall — Of Goalpoker

Harry Lang
25 min readSep 2, 2024

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Chapter 1

​Prologue

This is a story that has been filed away in my head, for various reasons, for nearly twenty years. This is the story of the rise and calamitous fall of ‘Goalpoker’.

Strap in, folks.

In 2005, I was in the death throes of an agency job overseeing the Budweiser account in London’s Soho. Long hours, a paltry (by today’s standards, at least) salary and a disgruntled team meant I was running out of gas. I was relieved of my duties before I could quit and spent the summer taking freelance roles between trips to Ibiza, planning an eventual move to another job — and another life — in Sydney.

One of my contracts was for an online poker startup, Goalpoker.com. A skin of the high-flying US brand Absolute Poker, Goal was led by an erratic, deranged CEO and funded by an equally imbalanced (but significantly wealthy) backer. I was offered double my then salary to jump on board and, having spent a week checking out my potential life in Sydney via NYC, joined the business as a young, naïve and hopelessly underprepared Marketing Director.

What followed was a year of some of the most batshit insanity I — or anyone else adjacent to this horror show — could ever wish to see in a thousand careers.

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Harry Lang
Harry Lang

Written by Harry Lang

I'm a UK based CMO and author of 'Brands, Bandwagons & Bullshit' - a guidebook for young people about how marketing, advertising, media and PR work.

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