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Business as usual at the New Bodog Nation |
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Written by Thomas Jensen
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Thursday, 06 September 2007
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 I was fortunate enough to be a guest of Bodog Entertainment Founder Calvin Ayre’s for the filming of the next installment of the popular MMA fight series Bodog Fight in Vancouver. I got to spend the entire weekend before the Bodog.com domain name was hijacked with Ayre, Extra TV Host John Kelly and Gambling911 Publisher Christopher Costigan as we watched fight after fight and drank several beers in the process.
After an action packed weekend which found one member of our entourage deported for “not having the character suitable to enter Canada”, several MMA fighters with black eyes and me nursing two major hangovers in one weekend, I jetted off to Las Vegas to attend the 2007 VegasInsider.com Football Handicapping Seminar. Upon arrival at the Red Rock Casino, Resort & Spa after a 2 hour flight delay, I fired off an email to Calvin thanking him for a great weekend and proceeded to go to bed exhausted from the weekend.
As I woke up on Monday morning and checked my emails, I noticed my email message to Calvin bounced so I instantly went to the Bodog.com domain name and then over to CalvinAyre.com and could not access either. At first, I thought that the Red Rock was somehow blocking the domain name, but found out later that 1st Technology had received a $48 million dollar judgment against the Bodog.com and was able to successfully get the Washington based registrar to transfer the ownership away from the Bodog Nation. As the week progressed, all of the other domain names in the Bodog portfolio were seized.
Impressively, Bodog Entertainment was able to quickly mobilize their core team of strategists and technology experts together to get up a mirrored website at NewBodog.com to satisfy all of their clients betting needs in under 12 hours. Since then, the new website has already had a successful first weekend of College Football under its belt and is heading into week 1 of the NFL without missing a beat. Well, almost without missing a beat, the company lost all of its valuable search engine rankings but these will eventually get restored with some hard SEO work down the road.
Point-Spreads.com had an exclusive chat with Calvin Ayre today to discuss the status of the Bodog.com domain name. One of the first questions I asked was about the rumor circulating that Bodog Entertainment was interested in acquiring another operation or URL from an existing internet gambling company.
"We are not looking to acquire anyone," stated Ayre. "It's just a rumor and there seems to be a lot of those flying around these days."
"We are for sure business as usual. After day one there was nothing different except I hear that the Costa Rican company that we were paying to hold those domains for us has got a busy legal agenda in front of them. The company that is in that lawsuit is not part of the Bodog Group of operating gaming companies so whatever happens to it will have no affect on us now."
Time is on Bodog’s side in this dispute, which Point-Spreads.com believes will be settled very soon. Ayre’s holding company owns the trademark for the word Bodog so no one else can use the vast portfolio of Bodog domain names without violating US trademark laws rendering the asset worthless to anyone but Ayre.
I am sworn to secrecy about the future plans of the Bodog Nation throughout North America, but if Calvin pulls off what he told me he is working on, everyone within the internet gambling industry will be impressed. For now, the company is charging full steam ahead in Europe and getting ready to stage an expansion into Asia. Meanwhile, its business as usual for the New Bodog Nation.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 06 September 2007 )
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