GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 25 - June 2013

monthly visitors – a play-for-fun site offer- ing the full suite of casino games. The sys- tem will be set up so that when Foxwoods is licensed to offer real-money gaming, the Connecticut casino can easily “flip the switch” and begin real-money operations. And on the B2B side, Foxwoods and GameAccount will work together to sell the GameAccount platform to other casi- nos. Their initial focus? New Jersey – the most lucrative market (so far) in the U.S. for online gaming. New Jersey has autho- rized casinos to offer a full suite of games to people gambling in New Jersey, and suppliers are scrambling to get a piece of the action. Both Foxwoods and GameAccount trav- eled circuitous routes to this partner- ship. GameAccount started as a skill gaming provider. And the Foxwoods Development Company (FDC), which set up the deal for the MPTN, saw a deal with another provider fall through. But in the end both sides found exactly whom they were looking for. The day FDC and GameAccount an- nounced their partnership, GPWA Editor- in-chief Vin Narayanan sat down in a suite in the Mandarin Oriental overlooking San Francisco Bay and Alcatraz for an exclusive interview with GameAccount CEO Dermot Smurfit, FDC Chairman Joseph Colebut, FDC Director of Administration Frank Pracukowski, Tim Walker from FDC’s board of managers and Mashantucket Pequot Gaming Commission Director of Compliance Al Baldoz. Their conversation covered a variety of topics, including the paths each company took into the online gambling realm, the development of their North American business plan, what they were looking for in terms of partners, why they chose each other and what the future of their partnership holds. It also illustrates the many dynamics at work for suppliers and operators as they look to chart a path for- ward in the newly regulated American on- line gaming market. The interview, which clocked in at just over an hour, has been edited for length and clarity. Q: GameAccount didn’t start off as a supplier of online casino games. How did you get into the business? SMURFIT: We set up the company in 2002. And we decided to build a technol- ogy platform – an Internet gaming system – which was specifically dedicated to mul- tiplayer games of skill. Multiplayer games of skill were not regulated in the same way Internet gaming was. So competitions of physical skill or mental skill between peo- ple were not regulated gaming, per se. Skipping forward a few years, we figured out that the customer economics for skill games tournaments were so low that it be- came very difficult to support a business- to-consumer business on top of that. In 2005, we spent some time doing due diligence on WorldWinner.com in Boston, and we realized that the customer econom- ics weren’t any different for an American organization that had about 20 times the number of customers we had in the U.K., and we should probably do a bit of a U-turn and decide what else we were going to do. Foxwoods Resort Casino & MGM Grand at Foxwoods COVER STORY The anatomy of a deal