The US government was no longer enjoying the joke and moved swiftly against companies that allowed Americans to gamble online. The trigger for the slump came a year after the magazine piece, which was provocatively headlined 'Cyber bookie Calvin Ayre sticks it to Uncle Sam: catch me if you can'. 'There's no way I'm worth a billion now, but I'll be a billionaire for the rest of my life because of that article.' 'At the time, they undervalued it,' he says. It proved to be the peak of his earning power. The company mushroomed to take $7.3bn (£4.4bn) in wagers in 2005, and Forbes estimated Ayre's net worth to be 'at least $1bn'.

That reputation was sealed at Bodog, which began life focusing on taking bets from the legally dubious US market. Ayre's message is clear: here is a man who deliberately races towards whatever boundary he can find. There are other, more graphic, tales along similar lines, one of which begins: 'Asia is the best place in the world because they.' But let's leave it there. 'I invited 50 girls to my birthday party in Dublin, one for each year,' he beams. It has also funded two homes in Vancouver and three in Antigua, plus pads in Costa Rica, Thailand and the Philippines, where he hosts lavish parties, typically attended by big-spending gamblers, rap artists, armed bodyguards and bikini-clad Bodog Girls. However, he recovered from that setback to create Bodog, one of the largest online gambling brands in the world, and the business's growth led to him judging televised lingerie contests during the Super Bowl and being the subject of a six-page profile in Playboy (he bought 3,000 copies of the issue for himself). Still, for some observers, the Polish setback represents one of the few poor hands that the entrepreneur has been dealt in the past decade.Īyre, whose pig-farmer father was convicted of smuggling marijuana, was barred from acting as a director of a public company in British Columbia following a share-trading scandal in the 1990s. If they had known who he was they would have surely asked for more, but it was still not the way that Ayre had planned to spend that leg of his 50th birthday celebrations – which include a tour taking in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Madrid, Ibiza, Barcelona and Ayr (more of which later). You might already be able to guess the rest: his companions disappeared and left him to a group of men, who knocked him to the ground, escorted him to a cash machine and relieved him of 1,000 zlotys (about £220). Ayre recalls how he was tricked into entering a bar late one night by a pair of young women.

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