Professional poker player and domain investor Dutch Boyd publishes Poker Tilt.
A key reason I like the domain name industry is that I get to meet people from very different backgrounds.
One of these people is Dutch Boyd, a three-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner who also dabbles in domain names.
I met Boyd in person during a TRAFFIC conference in Vegas many years ago. He was a fan of the blog and we started chatting. We ended up heading to the poker tables where he taught me a trick or two. (I lost money, so it didn’t work.)
Boyd has an interesting past with many ups and downs. After his latest “down”, he decided to raise money on Kickstarter and publish a book called Poker Tilt.
Poker Tilt tells his interesting story, from his early days growing up with a single mom, to his (ultimately) failed online poker site and battles with mental illness.
Dutch is a smart guy. He graduated law school at 18, when most people are just graduating high school.
He then started online poker site PokerSpot, which busted and created a number of enemies for him. In the book, Boyd blames the downfall primarily on credit card processors withholding funds. But for players who had deposits with the site, all they probably care about (understandably) is that they didn’t get their money back.
Boyd later started to suffer from depression. He was diagnosed as bipolar and went through multiple manic episodes, which left Boyd with even more failed relationships and enemies.
It was perhaps during one of these manic episodes that he initiated some failed domain name acquisitions, leading to complaints on domain name forums. In his book, he explains that he wasted money on domains during one of his episodes:
I started sleeping less, wouldn’t stop talking about random nonsense, and slowly sunk deeper into full-blown mania. I went through a buying splurge where I wasted thousands of dollars on worthless domain names…
Aside from his personal struggles, I found the book interesting as Boyd explains the declining state of the poker industry right now. I tried swapping out “domain” for “poker” in his descriptions of the industry, and found lots of similarities.
Certain aspects of the domain name business aren’t what they once were. Yet many domain investors ignore this reality. They press forward, assuming everything is the way it was and will remain this way forever. They pat each other on the back for big scores they made a decade ago, ignoring what’s happening in the past few years.
The same goes for the poker industry, as Boyd tells it, although the reasons for the retreat in poker are different.
Fortunately for domain name investors, there are plenty of ways to reinvent themselves and shift their business models to take advantage of the new landscape. The same might not be true for poker players.
If I have any complaint about Boyd’s book, it’s that he uses a lot of poker terminology that non-poker readers won’t understand. That said, the book flows even if you don’t understand the references.
Boyd’s book is worth a read. It’s available on Amazon.com in both Kindle and paperback versions.
Joseph Peterson says
Sounds like a unique story.