My CalvinAyre.com interview on the acquisition of The Hendon Mob

I had the opportunity today to be interviewed by Lee Davy for CalvinAyre.com about our recent acquisition of TheHendonMob.com .

You can listen to the audio interview in this post: http://calvinayre.com/2013/07/31/poker/alexandre-dreyfus-hendon-mob-acquisition-ld-audio-interview/

Amongst other things, I explained how and when the idea of buying TheHendonMob.com (THM) came to mind. And it was actually before even buying the GPI. The guys at Epic and GPI already had a great relationship with THM and also an option to acquire the company. So I always kept this somewhere in my mind for when I would eventually be able to do it. We now have a great product with a combined total of 500,000 visitors a month and a total of 2,000,000 unique visitors (poker players) a year. A great tool for advertising! We will now be able to be in touch with over 1,000 casinos around the world already in touch with THM, and find advertisers all over the world to sell our audience of poker players.

TheHendonMob.com is a great website for live poker players, but it is also the biggest poker community in the UK. So I want to ensure you that both www.thehendonmob.com and www.globalpokerindex.com will keep their identities, and that we will keep the forum going and even try to make it bigger! THM will remain a data collector (and will be developed in order to grow and collect even more data like weekly or daily events for instance), and GPI will stay a rankings/news website, with new services to be developed in the future.

An example of something will try to develop, is the GPId. The idea is to have a unique ID for every single poker player in the world, that they would use to register to any tourney in the world. This way, no more duplicates, clean data, and a better system to follow what’s happening in the poker world.
An example of what we won’t do is collect data regarding buy ins and players no cashing into an event, in order to figure out a return on investment (ROI). I think this is dangerous for the industry, and would not help promoting poker as a sport or a “show business”.

With our brands, I now want the GPI to become a real hub for live poker players, where they will be able to find all the poker results, schedule, casinos, rankings, news… anything related to poker, in order to try and improve the live poker industry.

Listen to the audio interview and let me know in the comments what are your thoughts about all this!