September’s schedule: travel, travel, travel

Thursday 24^th Sept. 7.30pm

It’s the end of my working day, which began with a flood in our offices.  Quick, I have to write a ‘post’ on my blog before I lose the motivation I had when I was setting it up.  What an idea to set up a blog?!  It really is my wish to inform people about the gambling industry, because I believe that very few participants really know this subject.  The problem is that I’m a company director (I’m in charge of all the money), which consumes a lot of my time.

I have an exciting career, a passionate team and a business project which has no limits for the next 5 years, so I can’t complain.  But I travel a lot.  Take September for example:  I went to Cannes (PPT), to Paris (twice), Budapest, Copenhagen, Barcelona, London (twice), and Marakech (for the WPT). I took 17 flights between the 1^st and 30^th September.

That’s what online gaming is all about: conferences, events and meetings all over the world.

In Budapest: (3 days), Chilipoker had a stand at the affiliation event.  We have been present 4 times a year (Amsterdam, London, Barcelona and Budapest) for the past 3 years.  We had a team of 3 staff (Hungarian, English and French) who represented our affiliation programme: ShareTheChilli.com. It was an opportunity to meet our affiliates and discover new ones.  Today we work with almost 1,600 affiliates across the world, who promote Chilipoker and will soon be promoting our new products.

Copenhagen (4 days); this was the online gaming (B2B) annual mass with two events:

– EiGexpo.com which brings together all industry suppliers (games platforms, payment solutions, etc…) / It’s an opportunity to get an update on the progress made during the year (the other mass is in London, at the end of January) by our partners and to discover new ones.  For example, we spent (Severin (Head of Poker) and myself) an entire afternoon with our supplier and our friends from Playtech, finding out about new technologies that Chilipoker can offer to its clients in the next 6 months.  Some nice surprises are in store

– World Poker Congress 2009: is a round of online poker conferences, Chilipoker has been the official sponsor since 2007 (Malta, Budapest and now Copenhagen).  Different subjects were broached by participants, in particular about the future of online poker, its strengths, the danger of rakeback, etc …  I had the opportunity to take part in a ‘CEO Panel’ with Jim Ryan (CEO of Partygaming), Steve Lipscomb (CEO of WPT, our partner) and Malcolm Graham (CEO of PKR).  My English isn’t good enough to allow me to get into any long debates, so I answered the questions that I was asked and explained that our partnership with Iliad-Free was the first of its kind in Europe, and that there was much more to come from us.

London (2 days): a quick visit to WSOPE to help out my MadeInPoker.com teams, who produce a daily video newspaper, as well as 2 other meetings that I can’t go into

Marrakech: after having missed my connecting flight (storms in Barcelona) – I had a 6 hour meeting to organise our WPT Marrakech.  This poker party, as I choose to describe it, started off rather well.  Organisation is well underway, we have already sold almost 250 paid places (out of a maximum of 350) and we are preparing interesting evenings, buggy excursions, etc… Poker players who come to Marrakech should be delighted, because it’s not just a poker tournament, but a whole event.

Paris: a half-day to meet journalists (NouvelObs who are doing a story on online gaming), etc….

Hallelujah, I‘ll be staying for one week in Malta to work alongside my teams, before returning to Paris for a conference on sport and Parisian sports people (at the National Assembly, 30 September), where I will be a speaker.  Then I will fly off to London again, accompanied by a French TV crew (news team), to support Liz Lieu who will be playing the EPT.

That’s all, for now.  My next post, which will be next weekend, I hope – will be an important topic: the end of the golden age of online gaming….Watch this space.