GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 49 - April 2021

enue streams since you never know when one may suddenly stop. If an 18-year-old friend told you he or she wanted to become an iGa- ming affiliate, what would your ad- vice be? Try to work at a smaller company who is growing fast. You will have much more opportunities to progress and your job will be safer than at a larger company where you are a small fish in a big pond. How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected you both personally and professionally? Personally, it has had a huge effect as I was meant to return to the U.K. aroundMarch last year, but at that time lockdowns were beginning to kick in and the COVID virus was taking off in Europe. Thailand has remarkably kept a lid on it and (as of end of February 2021) there has only been around 80 deaths in total out of 70 million people. The U.K. did not look like a fun place to be last year (and still isn’t) so I am still here in the sunshine. I will return to the U.K. once it has all calmed down a bit. March/April 2020 was a very bad time for us professionally. The LegalBet group had some people on probation and we had to let them go. We did not know how long the lockdowns would go on for, and when there was zero sport to bet on, obviously our revenue fell similarly. Managers had to take a 33% haircut on their salaries, top manage- ment lost as much as 50%. Fortunately, when things picked up it was possible to reimburse the lost wages, and some of the probation staff were rehired, but not all of them. This was such a blow that when in January 2020 there were record figures coming in, it was a major disappointment for everyone on so many levels. But regardless, despite all we went through in 2020, we grew on most metrics, just not by as much as we hoped. Do you gamble online? I used to gam- ble online a lot and it was my main source of income for a few years. Slowly, but surely, bookmakers and casinos either limited or shut my accounts down completely. In the end, it was too much effort to get the bets I wanted to place on, so I had to stop. I do still gamble now and then, but not seriously and only really at the exchanges (Betfair or Smarkets) where I can actually get a decent sized bet on! I have been in (land-based) casinos be- fore, but only three times in my life. Once in Perth (Australia), once in Moscow (Russia) and once in Sheffield in the U.K. I left slightly up in all three of them, purely by luck. I have no intention of going to one again, although in all three the food was great and I had a lovely time, so it could happen. You list playing pool as one of your interests on your GPWA profile. Are you a pool shark? Would you take all of our money if we challenged you? I am nowhere near as good as I should be given how much I play, but I am probably above average. My team has won a few leagues before, which I was very proud of, but I was just one of five players, and, if truth be told, the other four are better than me. What are your other hobbies? I used to do a lot of cycling and would really like to get back into that. I cycled across the U.K. before. One Friday evening, I thought I would like to see if I could do it and that Sunday morning my housemate drove me and my bike to Lowestoft, the most Easterly point of the U.K. I ended up on the Welsh Coast in Aberystwyth five days later. It was great fun, probably the best week of my life. If someone from out of town were visiting you, what’s the one place you’d definitely take them to see? That is a good question. I think probably Bokey Bar, which is where the Hua Hin pool league is run and has everything you could want from a bar in Thailand. It has EVERYTHING. It is my favorite place to be when I want to relax. For someone out of town though, who is maybe in Thailand for the first time, getting up early and going for a walk on the beach to Khao Takiab is beautiful and you see so many interesting things on the way. LegalBetAndy In terms of gettingfirst-timevisitors to the site, we have found that some of the most successful articles can come from niche events . Things that notmany other sites have writtenabout , but we did, whichmeanswe get a disproportionate amount of that traffic . . . Ultimately though, it is about having a qualityproduct . After I lost a game once in the middle of a match I sat back down, my fiancé, who was there supporting me, said, “You see everyone looking at you? That’s because nobody can understand how you got onto this team!” The truth hurts sometimes. I do not play for money in heads up games, so I definitely would not take all of yours. My largest-ever tournament win was 3,000 THB, so about $100. I am not going to win the Mosconi Cup anytime soon. If you could invite any five people, living or dead, to dinner, who would they be? George Orwell, Terry Wogan, Jarvis Cocker, Grant Holt and Ricky Gervais. Name three things that people reading this magazine don’t know about you. 1. I have two guinea pigs, both are called Spartacus. 2. My favorite number is genuinely 142,857. 3. I used to collect spoons! 59 G P W A t i m e s . o r g