My GGPoker Experience

Today marks a whole year since I started my little career cameo at GGPoker, so it seems like a good time to talk about the experience.

In the three months since I’ve left, I’ve come to think of it as an unplanned job pregnancy. I wasn’t really prepared for it, it took nine months from beginning to end and I was pretty uncomfortable throughout.

But a whole season has elapsed since I gave back my laptop and forgot to hand in my pass, so I’m feeling pretty clear-headed about things. Hence, this will neither be an ill-judged, bridge-burning assassination, nor a wretchworthy I-left-my-job-where-everyone-and-everything-was-amazing LinkedIn epitaph.

Firstly though, I feel like I should address why I took the job in the first place. Partly to mitigate screams of hypocrisy, but mostly because it’s relevant to why I left.

The role was a great fit on paper. Getting me in to run CRM for a poker brand is like getting in a grizzled English manager to keep you in the Premier League after a slow start with a ramshackle, yet capable squad. That is to say, 70% of the time, it will work all of the time.

It was billed as a pure poker role. GG doesn’t have a sportsbook and they aren’t that fussed about casino, so I could focus on a gambling format with scope for education, innovation and entertainment, with a relatively low risk of harm. That’s kind of a big deal to me.

The stated mission was to get GG to #1 in market share for the UK. There would be money to spend, and apparently the only thing that mattered was the vanity goal of getting bigger than PokerStars in every region. That suited me just fine, because I believe most of the gambling industry’s awfulness is a result of being profit driven. Plus it’s fun to beat PokerStars at stuff.

Finally, the job required me to be in London. I have no love for the UK’s smuggest and most expensive city, but I’d reached a natural crossroads for my stay in Liverpool and the timing was good to be closer to family and home.

Now to the juice – where did it go wrong?

Well, sorry to tease for a bit longer, but it wasn’t my colleagues. They were mostly a good and capable bunch – some of them were exceptionally hard-working and knowledgeable. I couldn’t have survived or nearly thrived without the support of folks in Dublin and Malta. I found it harder to gel with Toronto and Seoul, but that might have been a case of distance and timezones.

The role was mostly as billed. Although in true start-up fashion, I had to take on some web and content duties so that we could move fast. That was just as well though because I wasn’t fully empowered to carry out CRM duties. That was mostly because the ownership had no real concept of CRM’s purpose and had implemented strange and restrictive rules regarding company communications.

Nonetheless, I reckon I did some B+ work with a moderate budget, some patchy data and a limited set of tools. I look back on my output and I’m pretty happy with the contribution – although it fell short of what we could have achieved given the freedom to operate.

I’ll admit I was initially perturbed by the company’s disregard for intellectual property rights. The brazen “borrowing” of PokerStars’ game brands (e.g. MicroMillions) didn’t sit well with me, mostly because they were taking things that I personally helped to build more than a decade before. They were also fast and loose with in-client imagery, with both South Park and Game of Thrones being gleefully ripped off during my stay. It demonstrated a lack of ideas and a branding team that didn’t really understand their purpose.

Before I started, I had heard rumours of dodgy practices at GG, and that did concern me. It turns out there was some truth to those rumours, as in October we were slapped with a UKGC fine of £672K relating to an audit from two years prior. It seems during the lockdown poker boom, they were not as dilligent as they should have been about accepting deposits.

However, during my short tenure the UK&I Operations team went well above and beyond when it came to KYC and overall compliance. If there was a hint of suspicion that your account was not legitimate, or that you could not afford to play, then you were simply shut out. It was a tough stance that cost the company millions more than the value of the fine.

To this day, GGPoker has a poor reputation on the UK poker scene because of how hard it is to get money on the site. While that was holding back our market share progress, I’ll admit it was a slight frutration. As an ex-employee with strong leanings towards safer gambling, I think it’s great. If you’re anywhere near your overdraft, then you shouldn’t be buying into poker tournaments.

The main issue, as you might be starting to discern from my micro-gripes (or subtle choice of blog image), was the company management. They deserve full credit for somehow cracking and growing a market that everyone in the wider gambling industry had written off. For me though, they were a poor fit.

I actually almost took the job three months earlier, but withdrew my interest when I heard about a new high-level recruitment. I had concerns that they would be heading in an unscrupulous direction, but subsequently changed my mind when the job role and location changed. That was probably naïve.

After a promising few months in the role, the mantra that “only market share matters” was dropped in favour of a deranged, almost maniacal, desire for revenue. This coincided with a slowdown as the cost of living crisis took hold. Clearly the management were expecting a seasonal uptick, and so shat their proverbial pants. Some of the resulting behaviour towards staff and business partners was, in my mind, unacceptable.

The number one lesson you should learn from poker, is to make good decisions and trust that results will come. You can’t get caught up in inevitable short term variability. By panicking at the first potential sign of trouble, the company management demonstrated they didn’t understand that critical life concept. They showed their true colours, and they were not pretty.

From that point onwards, the only sound you could hear was the crack of the revenue whip. There was incessant pressure to hit meaningless targets, and that meant constantly bugging players to deposit more. I didn’t sign up for that, but I gamely stuck it out. Until…

On a Friday afternoon just before Christmas, with annual targets plainly out of reach, I was asked to put together a free spins slot offer for new players. I was working during a day off at the time, in a vain effort to make up some of the shortfall. In the moment, the request felt like an extra firm punch in the stomach, but it was actually a blessing. With my laptop already open I was able to have my resignation typed out and sent within 15 minutes.

I worked diligently over the following three months of my notice period. During that time though, the pressure never let up and I was asked (and refused) to do the slots offer a further two occasions. They just didn’t seem to understand my ethical objection, or that it was completely contrary to why I had been hired.

Overall, I don’t regret giving it a go. It was fun to be back in a problem-solving environment, I met some great people and now I know what Slack and Discord are. Plus it was a nice surprise to discover that I could slot back into a regimented routine without any serious chafing. Importantly, GGPoker were 50% bigger in the UK than they were when I started, so it wasn’t a total waste of my time or their money.

It would have been nice to do better though. Perhaps I’ll get a proper chance to shine next time around.