Bodog创始人Calvin Ayre的一些人生事迹

　　Bodog创始人Calvin Ayre在Fitzrovia酒吧中边喝玫瑰香槟酒边解释说：“我不久前在克拉科夫（波兰城市）被抢劫过一次。为了等一架回英国的航班，我在宾馆里足足等了两天。我再也不想回波兰了”他现在看起来似乎已经康复了。

　　Ayre回忆起在一天半夜他是如何被两个年轻姑娘骗进一家酒吧的。接下来的事你应该猜得到：那两个姑娘把他带到一群男人身边后就马上不见了，那群男人把他打倒在地。然后他们陪同Ayre去ATM取钱，最后Ayre给了他们大约220欧元后他们总算把他放了。

　　如果当时那群人知道Ayre的身份的话，他们肯定会问他要更多的钱。Ayre并不希望他的50岁生日是在去往伦敦，爱丁堡，都柏林，马德里，伊比沙堡和埃尔的路上度过。（也许不仅仅只是这些地方。）

　　一些观察家们认为Ayre在波兰发生的这件事仅仅是他在过去十年中遇到的麻烦中很小的一件。

　　Ayre的父亲曾今是个养猪的农民后来因为走私毒品而被判罪。在20世纪90年代，Ayre因为一桩公司股权分配丑闻而不被允许担任一家英国哥伦比亚全国性公司的董事长。然而，他没有因为这样的挫折而投降，反而开创了Bodog，它是世界上最大的网络赌博公司之一。蒸蒸日上的事业使得Ayre甚至可以在超级碗比赛直播中鉴赏内衣，后来《花花公子》杂志甚至为他写了6页的内容。（Ayre购买了3000本这期杂志）Ayre在温哥华购买了两处赌场，在安提瓜州购买了三处赌场，还在哥斯达黎加，泰国和菲律宾购买了多处房产，他经常会在这些地方举办豪华派对，派对上经常会有豪赌的客人，说唱歌手，全副武装的保卫人员以及热辣的比基尼美女。

　　他笑着说：“每年我都会在都柏林举办一次派对，我会邀请50个姑娘来参加派对。”“那你和其中的几个姑娘有过…？” 他回答说“两个。我那时喝醉了。”

　　他接下来说的很多事情也差不多都是这样的套路，其中的一件事他是这样说的：“亚洲是最好的地方，因为…”其实Ayre说这话暗含的信息非常明显：他希望能够在任何有国界的地方开展他的生意。

　　之前Bodog的名气还没这么响，直到这家公司冒着风险进军美国市场后它才逐渐显露头角。在2005年时这家公司的赌博资金已达73亿美元，《福布斯》杂志预估这家公司至少价值10亿美元，此时这家公司正处于其巅峰状态。Ayre说：“那时，他们都低估了我的公司。我现在没法达到身价10亿美元了，但是正是由于《福布斯》的那篇文章使得我在我之后的人生里都成为了一位亿万富翁。”

　　这家公司在《福布斯》杂志预估它市值后的一年就遭遇危机，市值大幅下挫。这件事被媒体冠以具有噱头的标题进行报道：“网络赌博大亨Calvin Ayre给美国穿了小鞋：快来抓我呀。”美国政府不再容忍这样的玩笑了，不久候便强烈反对网络赌博。在2006年10月，美国通过了新的立法，其中规定银行的钱不得进入与网络赌博有关的活动。

　　一夕之间，什么都变了。大批网络赌博公司从美国这块最大，最有利可图的市场中撤出了。暂居在安提瓜州的加拿大人Calvin Ayre将他的公司转型，然后将其转变为一个品牌，之后授权给其他赌博运行者。

　　Bodog的公司的英国合作伙伴恰好有赌博委员会的证书，因此它可以在英国市场进行运营，Bogog在美国的网站现在是由加拿大的MMGG公司运营的，它仍在与美国政府相持着。这样的做法完全是无视了美国司法部所作出的努力，因为此时美国的司法部刚刚才起诉三家仍在进行赌博活动的网站：PokerStars Full Tilt 和 Absolute Poker.

　　译文：

　　"I have just been mugged in Krakow," he explains, seemingly recovered, sipping pink champagne in a Fitzrovia bar. "I spent two days in my hotel room waiting for a flight back to England. I am never going back."

　　Ayre recalls how he was tricked into entering a bar late one night by a pair of young women. You might already be able to guess the rest: his companions disappeared and left him to a group of men, who knocked him to the ground, escorted him to a cash machine and relieved him of 1,000 zlotys （about ?220）。

　　If they had known who he was they would have surely asked for more, but it was still not the way that Ayre had planned to spend that leg of his 50th birthday celebrations – which include a tour taking in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Madrid, Ibiza, Barcelona and Ayr （more of which later）。

　　Still, for some observers, the Polish setback represents one of the few poor hands that the entrepreneur has been dealt in the past decade.

　　Ayre, whose pig-farmer father was convicted of smuggling marijuana, was barred from acting as a director of a public company in British Columbia following a share-trading scandal in the 1990s. However, he recovered from that setback to create Bodog, one of the largest online gambling brands in the world, and the business's growth led to him judging televised lingerie contests during the Super Bowl and being the subject of a six-page profile in Playboy （he bought 3,000 copies of the issue for himself）。 It has also funded two homes in Vancouver and three in Antigua, plus pads in Costa Rica, Thailand and the Philippines, where he hosts lavish parties, typically attended by big-spending gamblers, rap artists, armed bodyguards and bikini-clad Bodog Girls.

　　"I invited 50 girls to my birthday party in Dublin, one for each year," he beams. So, how many did you, er… ? "Just two," he fires back. "I was drunk."

　　There are other, more graphic, tales along similar lines, one of which begins: "Asia is the best place in the world because they…" But let's leave it there. Ayre's message is clear: here is a man who deliberately races towards whatever boundary he can find.

　　That reputation was sealed at Bodog, which began life focusing on taking bets from the legally dubious US market. The company mushroomed to take $7.3bn （？4.4bn） in wagers in 2005, and Forbes estimated Ayre's net worth to be "at least $1bn". It proved to be the peak of his earning power. "At the time, they undervalued it," he says.

　　"There's no way I'm worth a billion now, but I'll be a billionaire for the rest of my life because of that article."

　　The trigger for the slump came a year after the magazine piece, which was provocatively headlined "Cyber bookie Calvin Ayre sticks it to Uncle Sam: catch me if you can". The US government was no longer enjoying the joke and moved swiftly against companies that allowed Americans to gamble online. In October 2006, new legislation was passed that barred banks from making internet-wager-related money transfers.

　　Overnight, everything changed. An exodus of companies from their largest, most profitable market followed. Ayre, who is resident in Antigua and a Canadian citizen, remodelled his business, finessing it into a brand that he licensed to other gambling operators.

　　Bodog's British partner has just obtained a Gambling Commission licence to operate in the UK, while the US website is now run by Canada-based Morris Mohawk Gaming Group （MMGG）， which continues to take American bets. That is despite a further move by the US department of justice in April, when it indicted the top three sites still taking bets: PokerStars, Full Tilt and Absolute Poker.