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Interview with Russ “Dutch” Boyd
by Eric Rosenberg
Editors Note: This interview was conducted via email. All questions were submitted at one time, so there were no “redirects” based on Boyd’s answers.
Read the History Article Here FIRST
LAP: You received a law Degree at the age of 18. Tell me about your childhood. You obviously skipped grades. When did you or your parents realize that you were gifted?
Boyd: I grew up mostly in Missouri, although I spent some time in California and Utah when I was really young. Growing up, it was just me, my mom, and my little brother Bobby (who's 14 months younger than I am). My dad walked out on us when I was 2, and wasn't ever in the picture. My mom was always struggling... she worked mostly as a cake decorator, which always paid minimum wage. We moved a lot... pretty much every time our lease would run out, we'd pick and move to a different city... I guess because my mom was always looking for something better for us. But everywhere we went was pretty much the same.
We were both pretty intelligent... probably more my brother, than me. We started reading really early, me at 3 and Bobby at 2. My mom always put us first, and would read to us and teach us new things. Every time we'd start a new elementary school, we'd both go through the same process of making new friends and adjusting to the school. And each time, they'd give us all sorts of placement tests and IQ tests to make sure we were ready to be with their other students. We always did well, and were in the gifted programs at every elementary school we went to. They put our IQs at around 150.
A lot of people ask where we got our intelligence... from our mom or from our dad. But I don't really think intelligence is inherited. I think it has more to do with the early years of development, before a kid ever gets into Kindergarten. With my brother and I, we were close enough that we'd always be pushing each other to excel... and we'd always learn to do things at the same time.
When I was 11 or so, I skipped two grades to 7th. I was still in the gifted program. They had all of the kids in the program take the ACT as part of a talent search that Duke University sponsored. I ended up scoring a 23 on the test, which wasn't outstanding... there were four 13 year olds that year who scored a perfect 36. But 23 was higher than the senior class averaged at the high school I was going to, so my mom asked me if I wanted to try taking a few classes at the junior college near where we lived. I did... I started half-time, did fine... moved to full-time. Before I knew it, i was 13 and graduating with my AA. Then it was on to a state university, CMSU. I finished up my BA. I took the LSAT when I was 14 and scored a 165, which is pretty high... so then I decided I might as well go to law school.
LAP: What kind of social impact did being the youngest person in your classes have on you?
Boyd: I don't think I'll ever really know how it impacted me, always being the youngest in the school. There were lots of high-school experiences that I'm sure I missed out on... things like sports and dating and such. I didn’t have my first girlfriend until I was 18… all of the girls I knew were 7 years old than me.
It was a little weird, because I think most of the friends I had in undergrad were more there because of the novelty of hanging out with Doogie Howswer. That kind of changed in law school, since by the time I was 15 I wasn't looking all that young any more. I still looked younger, but I was growing facial hair and had grown a few inches. I remember the first day I heard a couple of people talking behind me about a 15 year old in the class, and wondering who it was. I was right in front of them, and they didn't have a clue I was the kid.
LAP: Why didn't you pursue a career in law after graduating from law school?
Boyd: I suppose I stopped wanting to be a lawyer after I interned for a couple law firms during the summer after my first year. All of the lawyers I worked for didn't seem too happy with their jobs. They worked long hours, had very little time for anything outside of their work, and at the end of the week they didn't even get paid all that much. It was mostly thankless work, and you really saw people at their worst. I still toy with the idea of pursuing something in law, though.
LAP: When did you first start playing poker?
Boyd: I really started getting into poker after I saw Rounders. Here I was in law school, not really sure what I wanted to do... then I see Matt Damon on the big screen dropping law and going to Vegas to kick some ass. It got me interested in the game. I went to the library and checked out the only poker book they had... Thursday Night Poker by Peter Steiner. I read the book and started playing online.
This was back in about '97 or '98 I guess. There was this online site called 2am.com where you could play poker for free... they'd start you out with 1000 in play money chips and if you turned it into $1m, they'd give you $100 in real money. I played there for a long time trying to figure out the game. It took me about a month and half before I turned that 1000 into a million in chips. Then I did it again. Before long, I was pulling out $100 every three or four days... they had dealer's choice games there, so you could make all sorts of crazy wild games where people wouldn't know their relative hand value and games which really favor the dealer. And all their games were played no-limit. There were about three or four regulars there who just cleaned up. After a few months of this, the site changed their rules to allow only 1 $100 score per player.
That's when I started playing on Planet Poker. I had a bankroll of about $1000 built up from the play-money site. I spent about $300 on all the poker books (Caro, Sklansky, Jones, Super System, etc...) and the rest I deposited into my Planet Poker account. I did pretty well. One thing I will say, though, is that the age-limit requirements from these online cardrooms are pretty much a joke. I was playing online before I was 18, and I'm sure there are lots of underage players today.
LAP: At what age did you realize that playing poker was what you wanted to do for a living?
Boyd: Well, I'm still not sure it's what I want to do for a living. After school I moved out to California and played a lot at a smaller casino called the Wagon Wheel. I was still under 21, so I couldn't really draw a lot of attention to myself... but nobody cared at the Wagon Wheel. I had a job at Macy's during the evenings, and during the day I'd play at the club. Sometimes I'd go over to Garden City, which is also pretty lax in their carding. Poker is where I got most of my money that summer. I wouldn't call it making a living, though, until a couple years later when I started propping at Garden City. A lot of poker players say they play poker for a living, when what they mean is that they don't have a job, and don't plan on getting one unless their bankroll runs out. One guy wrote an anthropology piece a few years ago on professional poker players... I think the guy's name was David Hayano. He talks a lot in that piece about how most "pros" don't rely on poker as their only source of income... and of those that do, a high percentage go back to real jobs when their bankroll disappears.
LAP: Tell me about how you got into the online poker industry.
Boyd: I was 18 and playing on Planet Poker. That was the only site up then, besides some smaller ones that used the same software... like Delta Poker and Dragon Poker Inn. They only had Holdem back then, and the limits only went up to 10/20. The software was slow and clumsy. I was living with my little brother, who had gotten recruited out of college to work in the Silicon Valley as a developer.
I was on his bed playing on my laptop... while he was watching TV. I remember saying, "bro... someone really ought to come up with a better poker site." About five minutes later, I decided I could be that guy. It would be easy as cake. We'd offer all of the other games besides Holdem... Stud, Omaha, the hi-lows. We'd offer spread-limit betting and higher limits. And we'd offer tournaments.
I started running the numbers and realizing how sick the profit potential was. We could potentially make $50 million a year. Maybe a lot more. And we'd have the best poker site around. I was pretty excited about it.
LAP: How did you fund your first online poker room venture?
Boyd: In a word, badly. We were very naïve in our understanding of what it would take to compete in the industry. We figured we could build the software in a couple of months, put a site up, and then just expect people to come. We managed to raise $50k from friends and family, and thought that would be enough.
Looking back on it, I think it’s amazing that we were able to even get the site live. We only had three developers working on the software, and all of them had other jobs that they were working to support themselves. It took us 9 months to develop the software, which was a minor miracle… and I think says a lot for how brilliant my little brother is, who did most of the software design. There are a lot of well-funded projects that I know of that have never even been able to get to the point where the software could go live.
LAP: There were some troubles with that first room you operated. What happened?
Boyd: There were lots of troubles with Pokerspot. First off, the market had changed dramatically in the 9 months it took us to get up and running. Paradise Poker released their software two months after we started the Pokerspot project, and they were worlds ahead of Planet Poker. They still had a lot left to be desired in their software, though, such as the hi-low games, spread-limit betting, and tournaments. We released our software in May 2000 and it was pretty much empty. We didn’t yet have tournaments, which would come a few months later. We didn’t save any money to market the thing, and we had a lot of difficulties running it. And we didn’t build any type of back-office management tools to help us run the thing… so we pretty much had none of the competitive advantages that we set out to have. We were running this little cardroom with hardly any players, and we were having trouble managing it. We pretty much were winging things like customer support and the financial side of things. Things like cashouts were all done manually, and we had no Customer Relations Management solutions… the first four months we were up, we were using Outlook Express to manage all of our customer support emails. We were very much over our head.
Things started looking up in September 2000, when we released our tournaments. We were the first online cardroom to offer online poker tournaments, and none of the other sites would catch up for a good 9 months (when Pokerstars released their software). This started drawing a lot of traffic to the site. We developed our back-office tools and things were going a lot smoother. By December, we were in third place behind Paradise and Planet and looking pretty good. We raked $100k that month and we were growing at an astonishing rate. People loved those poker tournaments. In January, we raked $160k. Things didn’t look like they were going to slow down. And we were finally starting to get to the point where we had a marketing budget.
That January, though, things fell apart. We were pushing all of the credit card deposits through a company called Net Pro Ltd. I met them a few times at the various gaming conferences. Back then, there weren’t too many ways to get money into an online gaming account (and this is still a major problem facing online operators). We couldn’t process credit card transactions like a retail business.
In the middle of January, Net Pro told us that they hadn’t gotten the funds that they processed for us (all of the credit card transactions from the middle of December until then) from their bank. They said it was a temporary problem, and that we’d just have to sit tight for a week while they work it out. At the time, it didn’t seem like it was going to be as big of a deal as it turned out to be. They assured us we’d be getting all of those deposits, and that it wouldn’t take more than a week or so.
Two weeks later, it became clear that it wasn’t a temporary problem at all. They stopped answering their phones and we were left holding the bag for 6 weeks of credit card deposits. We had several hundred cashout requests with no way of paying them out. And without new chips entering the system, all of the action on the site died very quickly.
There were about 1000 players who had money on deposit with us. Many of them were able to charge back their credit cards and at least not be on the hook for the money that they deposited. But there was no way to make good on any of the money that they had won. It was a big disaster.
LAP: Many people don't believe your story about the PokerSpot funds being kept from you. What do you have to say to the folks that believe you "took the money and ran"?
Boyd: I understand how people can blame me for losing their money, and think that the whole site was a scam to run off with a few hundred thousand in player deposits. And it’s pretty hard to explain to a customer that they aren’t getting their cashout because your site had problems with a business partner. Players don’t understand how complicated it is to run these online sites… when they make a deposit and it shows up in their account, it would make sense that the online site has their money in a bank account somewhere, when in reality that online site is depending on another company to make good on that purchase.
A lot of people naturally assume that I took all of that money and partied, buying a big house in the Carribean and breast implants for a blonde girlfriend. But that isn’t true. When Pokerspot failed, it ruined me. I didn’t have a way to pay my rent, I didn’t have a job anymore, and I had no idea how I was going to turn it all around.
LAP: What steps did you take to try and recover the money?
Boyd: The first thing we did was try and get our money from Net Pro. We filed a lawsuit, and did everything we could to pressure them into giving us the deposits. But it became pretty clear that they didn’t have the money. In law school, one of the first sayings that you learn is “you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip”. It means that if some 19 year old kid gets drunk and crashes his car into your house, sure… you can sue him. You can probably even with a few hundred thousand. But you’re not going to see any of it, since he doesn’t have any money. He’s judgment proof. With Net Pro, it was the same thing. They didn’t have any money to collect.
So after that, it became clear that we’d have to figure out another way to pay the players back. The only way I could see doing that was by selling the business. We had a few assets… a userlist of about 8500 players, some pretty decent software, and a pending patent for the online poker tournaments we developed. We shopped around a bit and had some offers. We finally agreed on an offer from a large Montreal-based online casino. They agreed to give us all jobs and $1 million for the software… $500k would be ear-marked to pay back the players. We moved up to Montreal and started working with them. About four months into the deal, they called us into their office and told us that they were no longer interested in paying back the player debt… they’d give us $300k for the software (which wasn’t nearly enough to pay back the players) and we could still have our jobs with them. We turned it down and decided we’d be better off trying to salvage some of the deals that we had turned down which would include paying back the Pokerspot players. By then, though, none of the old offers still stood. The original developers had to take other jobs, and without them being able to support the software, I was unable to find a buyer.
LAP: After Pokerspot's demise what did you do? (i.e. for work, play, etc.)
Boyd: I wasn’t feeling too high on life after the Pokerspot project failed. It is a very discouraging thing having a failed business. You put your heart into something for a few years, and watch it grow. I went through a pretty bad depression after the site went down. I drank a lot and didn’t have a lot of interest in things. I picked up a few consulting gigs for online casinos and cardrooms, which gave me enough money to pay my rent and eat. I played a lot of pool.
This was also the time when I propped in San Jose. I did pretty well for the few months I was out there. I went out to San Jose in 2002 with about $2k and turned it into $25k the first month I was out there. I won a half dozen of the tournaments at Garden City that month, and took second in one of the bigger San Pablo events. So I made a little money out in California… then I moved back to Missouri to figure out what I was going to do.
I picked up another consulting gig earlier this year and moved to Antigua for a few months. It was a pretty relaxing time for me… pretty much just advising a sportsbook out there who was trying to make the next big cardroom. That’s when I came up with the idea of having a rakefree cardroom. I tried to get the sportsbook behind it, but they didn’t see the business sense in giving up a potential $50 million a year in rakes. But I thought it had a lot of potential, so I came back to the states to work on it in May.
LAP: You finished 12th in this year's WSOP. Take us to the beginning. How did you get your seat in the World Series?
Boyd: I had set up an investor meeting for the rakefree project in Vegas around the time the WSOP was going to be going on. The meeting didn’t end up happening. I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and thought maybe I’d stay in Vegas. I didn’t have a lot of money. I had about $3,500 and I was going to set up shop somewhere… so I got a crappy week-to-week room downtown a few blocks away from the Horseshoe. I figured I’d see if I was happy in Vegas, and if it fit me, I’d get an apartment somewhere and try sustaining myself on poker while I worked on the rakefree project on the side.
The week before the WSOP happened, I played in some of the super satellites. I won my seat three days before the tournament started.
LAP: The WSOP was nationally televised on ESPN and they covered you pretty extensively. How did that exposure effect your life?
Boyd: It was a very surreal few days playing that tournament. By the third day I was doing very, very well. I had been thinking about the best strategy the whole time I was in Antigua, and came up with some strategy ideas that I think really helped me in the tournament. On the third day, I ended up third in chips… that’s when the guy from ESPN came over and asked for an interview.
The World Series is a complete media circus. There are cameras everywhere, and so much excitement surrounding the event. I’ve never experienced anything like it. What was so incredible is that I rolled into Vegas a complete nobody. I had a pitiful bankroll. Then a week later, everybody I ran into knew who I was. Now, every time I walk into a poker room, somebody comments on the show.
What is really weird is when people recognize me outside of poker. I was bowling with my girlfriend and a couple of buddies a couple weeks ago, when the guy who sat down in the lane next to us just kept staring at me. Finally, he said “you look like Dutch Boyd!” Another time I was in a college bar in Baton Rouge and four different people came up to me and said they recognized me… and these are college-aged kids. There was this one gorgeous blonde girl who came up and lit my cigarette. I saw her again when she was leaving with her boyfriend, and he boyfriend said something like, “hey Julie… doesn’t that guy look like the poker player from ESPN who you thought was cute?” I couldn’t believe it… I was like, “hey… it’s me!” She came over and took off my hat… kind of ruffled my hair a bit. Then she said, “oh my god! Ooh… you should come with us!” That’s when her boyfriend grabbed her by the hand and got her out of there really quick. It was pretty funny.
Besides just getting recognized in bars and bowling alleys, I’d say the biggest way it’s impacted me has been that it’s opened up a few doors for things like the rakefree site. Those episodes showed to a million and a half people, so now a lot of people know who I am.
LAP: You have a new poker venture that you are working on. Tell me about that.
Boyd: The new site I’m working on is called Rakefree.com. It will basically be an online cardroom that doesn’t take a lot in rakes. I’ve been in poker from both sides… the operation side and the player side. And the simple fact is that operators do not have an interest in having their players win. I remember a conversation I had with Randy Blumer, who is the founder of the Planet Poker cardroom. He was talking about how, if they weren’t forced to by the competition, the wouldn’t offer any game over 10/20. It’s in the cardrooms’ best interest to have all of their players lose a little bit over a long period of time… throwing the chips back and forth until it all ends up getting eaten by the rake.
Poker would be a much better game if it wasn’t so costly to play. The way the rake is structured makes the games practically unbeatable. There are very few players who can make any substantial money playing poker for a living. As a full-time player online, I started adding up the numbers and it was sick how much money I was paying to the online cardroom. I averaged about 5000 hands a week. I’d win about 8% of them. So I was paying about $1200/week to play online. Each time I had a less then stellar week, I’d just think about that $1,200 that the casino took.
There isn’t any reason for online cardrooms to charge a rake. All of the processes are automated. Having been on the other side, I understand very well the costs that go into operating an online cardroom… and they are nowhere near the costs of operating a brick and mortar cardroom. The only reason players accept the rake is because it is a hidden cost. You only pay a rake when you win a pot, so it doesn’t seem like you’re losing anything. But you are.
I think poker is changing a lot… but it can never get to the same level of “legitimate” sports like golf, tennis, bowling, pool, etc. The reason is because the players aren’t winning. And the reason for that is because the house is raping the players. This doesn’t just apply to ring players… it applies to tournaments to. There isn’t any reason why a site like Paradise Poker should be making $50 million a year off of a userbase of 50,000 players, or a site like Pokerstars should be making $45,000 off of a single tournament.
With Rakefree.com, I’m hoping to change poker in a dramatic way. By removing the rake, I believe that the majority of poker players can be break-even or winning players. The closer poker gets to an even-sum game, the more likely it is to become accepted as a worthwhile activity. I would even like to see poker become a positive sum game. Imagine if every time you played a pot, the casino actually added money into it instead of taking it away. And imagine what that would do to the public perception of poker. It’s possible. There are other ways to make money from poker players besides charging them thousands a month to play.
LAP: How are you going about raising the capital for this new card room?
Boyd: I haven’t really gotten too serious about raising money for the new cardroom. I’m finishing up a business plan right now. After I have something that I can actually show to investors, and show how you can make millions a year without charging a rake, I’ll be doing a lot more to raise funds. I’ll be putting together some press packages and trying to get some exposure in business magazines and such.
LAP: How has the history of PokerSpot played in with your trying to get funded?
Boyd: Fortunately, most of the people I’ve talked with who have expressed interest in investing have understood the Pokerspot issue. I can’t say that it hasn’t damaged my credibility. It has. But at the same time, most businessmen realize that the majority of small businesses fail and a lot of times you can learn more from a failure than you can from a success. We did a lot of impressive things with the Pokerspot cardroom, and it gave me a lot of experience in the online gaming industry.
There aren’t too many people who really understand online poker. I understand it from almost all perspectives… the player’s perspective and the operator’s perspective. I understand the issues surrounding an online cardroom… marketing, technology, customer relations management, fraud control. There are very few people who would be able to successfully introduce an online cardroom at this point. The industry is saturated and there aren’t too many competitive edges left to tap. It’s basically becoming a marketing war between cardrooms which are all pretty much the same.
If Pokerspot hadn’t run into cash problems, we would very likely be one of the market leaders today. We had great software which was improving all the time, and we had a 50%/mo growth rate for the four months we were in operation. We did all of that with four people and a budget of $50k.
LAP: What will you do differently this time to ensure that history doesn't repeat itself? (in regards to your online card room)
Boyd: I’d do a number of things differently. First off, the way players get money into the cardrooms is different now then it was two years ago. There aren’t many credit cards which allow gaming transactions anymore, so the ecommerce side of the business has shifted more to services like Firepay and Neteller. These sites no longer hold the deposits for weeks before releasing them to the merchants, like the ecommerce companies did a few years ago. Now, casinos get their deposits a few days after they are made, rather than having to wait several weeks. So the problem that sunk Pokerspot would be an issue now.
But there are still a lot of potential trapdoors that can sink an online cardroom. The most important thing I’d do this time around is make sure that the cardroom was adequately funded, and could absorb unforeseen problems. I’d make the cardroom a lot more transparent, as well, so that players could see exactly how much money was going into the system, where it was going, etc. I’d like to have a bond setup which would guarantee all player money in the system.
Trust is the most important thing with online poker sites. Right now, the only reason that I trust my money in a place like Pokerstars or Party Poker is because they have a lot of traffic and they haven’t had any problems paying customers out. But I don’t really know that these sites are trustworthy, and won’t disappear in the next six months. I don’t know that Pokerstars is financially sound, or that Party Poker isn’t using a bunch of bots which can all see my cards to inflate their numbers. The only way you can be sure that a site is trustworthy is if the site is transparent. That means being able to see who is involved, where the money is going, where everything is located, where the accounts are, what the software looks like, etc. It means being able to drop into the site’s offices, meet the developers and the people who run the site. I don’t know of any site right now which operates anything like, say, Amazon.com or Ebay.com.
LAP: What type of assurances would you offer those that would be skeptical in giving you a second chance?
Boyd: I can’t promise that Rakefree.com is going to be successful. I have a lot of critics who have made it clear that they would never play a site I was involved in. Maybe they’ll change their mind when the site is actually live and they realize they could be making $50k/yr more at rakefree.com.
Actions speak louder than words. So far, I haven’t been able to actually DO anything to make people think I care about the old Pokerspot issues. If I was on the outside looking in, I’d be skeptical too. And I wouldn’t be rushing to deposit money at Rakefree.com.
I will say this, though. A lot of other cardrooms and casinos have gone down and left their players high and dry. And where are those operators? Who are they, even? People throw a lot of mud, but I’m still here. I’m still trying to improve poker, and I’m still trying to improve my reputation. I could have done a lot of things after Pokerspot, including changing my name and trying to forget it ever happened. But I didn’t.
I hope that if I am able to create a rakefree cardroom and pay back all of those old Pokerspot players, that my reputation won’t be as soiled. That instead of being remembered as a con artist who “took the money and ran,” I’ll be remembered as the kid who failed miserably at his first business, but worked for years to try and turn it around into something positive.
LAP: Do you have a plan in place that would eventually pay back those that lost their funds at PokerSpot?
Boyd: There are basically two ways that I see the Pokerspot players getting paid back. The first way is through Rakefree.com. The business plan will call for purchasing the old Pokerspot assets in return for assuming the player debt. Like I mentioned before, there are several assets which are still in the old company. Proprietary poker software is not cheap, and it can definitely make business sense for Rakefree.com to purchase the software, the patents, and the old userlist for the amount it would take to pay off the Pokerspot debt. Ideally, this debt would be paid before Rakefree.com begins its operations.
The second way is by pursuing a breach of contract claim against the Montreal-based casino which pulled out of the deal we made to sell the software and pay the players back. Up until now, I haven’t had the money to go forward with that lawsuit.
I suppose a third way is if, by some miracle, I win a few million at poker. This year at the WSOP I pledged that if I won, I would personally pay back the Pokerspot debt. A lot of people got pissed at that, because they said it wasn’t enough… that I should be giving up every penny I make (in or outside of poker) until the debt is paid off. I think that’s a very unrealistic expectation. I don’t feel like that debt is my debt. Pokerspot was not Dutch Boyd. It was a corporation, not a shell of a corporation. I didn’t even own a controlling amount in it. And I’m not going to be carrying the debt as mine. But if I was able to make enough money so that the player debt wasn’t a majority of my net worth, I would pay it back to restore my reputation.
LAP: When you first came into the public eye, you referred to yourself as “Russ”. Now you go by the nickname of “Dutch”. Where did you get that nickname?
Boyd: I got the nickname Dutch from my first friend in Vegas. I told him my name was Russ, and he misheard me… he sayd, “Dutch, huh? That’s a cool name.” I didn’t correct him. So then he started introducing me as Dutch, and I took the name as my own. It’s nice to have a nickname in poker… it allows you to keep your worlds separate.
LAP: And last, but not least... Do you consider yourself to be a genius?
Boyd: I sometimes get real moments of clarity that even surprise myself. It was happening all this year at the WSOP. I guess players call it the “zone”. But it’s something that happens outside of the poker table as well, where my thoughts are clear, where I seem to fully understand everything that’s going on around me, and I can come up with great ideas and ways to implement those ideas. I suppose that’s all that genius really is… and that everybody shows many, many moments of genius in their lives.
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