The Rise & Epic Fall Fall of Goalpoker — Chapter 2 / Vancouver or Bust

When You Realise You Aren’t The Only Sucker At The Table (Just The Poorest)

No matter how inept the Goalpoker CEO was, I was trying my best to challenge for the title. I had literally no experience in running a marketing department, let alone the intricacies of running one in an online poker startup. I didn’t know what Affiliate Marketing was, let alone how to engage with affiliates. As such, in one of his rare moments of clarity, the boss sent me to meet the Absolute Poker founders in Vancouver for a few days to learn from ‘the best’.

Our games were hosted on the Cereus Poker Network, home of both Absolute and Ultimate Bet. The guys at Absolute had already made it, so in theory I had everything to learn from my three-day trip to the west coast of Canada.

I left the team in Redhill to untangle the mess of A/ a Sevilla FC shirt sponsorship deal and B/ a completely nonsensical sponsorship of Dream Team on Sky One that the CEO had signed and then forgotten about and ran away to the other side of the world.

Excited to be meeting this bunch of (by now, extremely successful and wealthy) young Americans, I flew over the pond with a keenness to learn and anticipation about what they’d be like.