ON Tuesday morning, in a narrow office in Harold’s Cross, Dublin, Anthony Kaminskas sits back in his chair and reflects back on the first 11 months of his online betting site AKbets.bet.
What this writer presumed might have been a bumpy road of progress through the world of online betting actually sounds closer to a smooth sail.
That is thanks to a solid base of groundwork which started when the 36-year-old Rochdale native left a high ranking position in Paddy Power to go out and punt professionally in 2018. A big win gave him the base to make his biggest bet on this project, which began with establishing his name in the betting rings of racecourses around the country and on various social media platforms and podcasts.
The core strategy has always been to “offer sustainable pricing to good limits”, essentially tapping into the customers who are badly served by the bigger firms with regards to getting their reasonably sized bets on (€100 to €1,000). That offering has been well received; so well, that after working any amount of 14-hour days, seven days a week to get everything in place, the website was able to land running just before Cheltenham last March.
“When we first went live, I didn’t know how it was going to go,” Kaminskas reflects, sporting the increasingly familiar AK Bets branding on a hoodie. “I had an idea, I had my projections, but the big concern for me was when I switched the website on, would people actually bet with me or was I going to be left with a lot of fixed costs for 12 to 18 months.
“We were looking at our bet ticker (message prompter for bets coming in through the website) and it was moving very slow. From working at Powers, I’d have been used to seeing that constantly moving, but it eventually started to pick up. We broke even on the first day of Cheltenham and the big turning point for me was the second day - the results just went our way and we won €40,000. That was when I thought there is real upside here, real potential for growth.
“From the get go, I think the trust we’ve built up on course has parlayed to the website. The plan has come to fruition in some respects and it’s actually gone a lot better than I expected. My projection was that we’d have to turn over a million quid a month to break even from all the costs and we’re doing a lot more than that.
“It’s washing its face anyway and things have changed. We’ve 14,000 customers now which is really good - we’re actually getting customers from a lot more places now. At the start it was me in here on my own doing mad hours, now there are eight of us and we’re growing. We want to grow further, hire more people, more smart people basically, in different areas.”
Not bad for a guy who started off in the industry by working in a Coral shop and only ended up in Dublin to work with Paddy Power because it was the only job offer he had after university. Now he is one of the leading independent bookmakers in Ireland and Britain.
The fast progress has been startling, however the larger scale threats to the industry looks sure to test the early resolve of the business and Kaminskas has had to learn fast.
At Paddy Power he was a “risk guy” mostly, now he has to be the guy that knows every area of the business. But that gives him a fresh perspective and he is more than willing to fight the corner of an industry seemingly always under fire.
Where do you start? It seems like the word betting has never been dirtier, be it from political, societal or media attitudes. The incoming Gambling Regulation Bill, concocted by the Minister of State at the Department of Justice, James Browne, has potential seismic consequences for both the gambling and racing industry in this country.
Politicians, other industries and even high ranking figures within racing have called for an increase in betting tax from 2% to 3% while in Britain, affordability checks (bookmakers requiring punters to supply proof of income and other private finance to satisfy compliance standards) have caused chronic concern, so much so over 100,000 signatures on a petition has prompted a debate to take place in Parliament.
“In my opinion the gambling industry has never been more regulated than it is now, never been more taxed yet its reputation has never been worse,” Kaminskas asserts. “The amount of problem gamblers is minuscule and it’s not to say certain situations are not very serious but they have to be held against the sheer size of gamblers who bet responsibly.
“It’s a bizarre situation really but perception is everything. Whereas 10 to 15 years ago, it was like the Wild West in the UK and Ireland. The irony now is people like Stuart Kenny, who got rich during this period, are on TV regularly getting a free ride bashing the industry after experiencing some sort of Damascene moment. The fact of the matter is the regulated industry has never been so active and successful in preventing potential harm.
“Our compliance team is over zealous if anything - no chances can be taken with any customer (showing signs of irresponsible gambling), even if it is not even close to borderline - we just don’t take chances any more. But these customers just get lost from the eco-system and when that happens, they do not stop betting.
“We are regulated by the UK Gambling Commission, so all of our British-based customers have to go through affordability checks. We don’t mind doing that to stop potential problem gamblers, but there are a lot of customers that aren’t problem gamblers and just will not send a bookmaker their income and the amount of money in their account.
“The last time I’d looked, 77% of the people that we had requested documents off just won’t provide them. So that cohort of customers will just bounce around from bookmaker to bookmaker and eventually run out but where do they go then? They don’t stop betting.
“The black market is huge globally and it’s only getting bigger. More and more people are just going to start betting on WhatsApp and betting abroad - you wouldn’t believe how big it is already; people are betting on non-GamStop regulated sites, with no checks and no limits.
“My opinion is that regulators are going to make responsible gambling worse, I think they’re going to knock it so far underground that a decent chunk of betting is just going to be outside the regulated industry.”
Louder
So tainted has the gambling industry become, the calls for more tax are getting louder. Last August, the Tax Strategy Group, which is chaired by the Department of Finance called for a 0.5% increase in the betting tax, which is based on bookmaker turnover. Then in November, Sports Minister Catherine Martin asked for a 1% rise in the betting tax for the second year in a row, which was knocked back.
Outside of political circles, other industries, most notably Irish football, have called for an increase in betting tax while questioning the link between betting duty and the finances allocated to horse racing and greyhound racing.
Even people inside racing, like Jim Bolger, have called for an increase of the betting tax. The common theme to Kaminskas’s denouncement of the gambling industry’s regulators and criticisers is a misunderstanding of the gambling industry. He says he never felt it more while raising the issue while sitting in the live studio audience for the RTÉ show Up Front with Katie Hannon.
“I was the fish in the barrel being shot at there because honestly, you’re just dealing with people that have researched the subject for 20 minutes,” Kaminskas says. “They’ve been briefed on it, they’ll use a couple of lines and they have no inclination or incentive to understand the history and how it works because they have to bounce on to the next topic.
“The betting tax is totally misunderstood. Moving the tax from 1% to 2% was apparently no big deal but it wiped out the whole independent bookmaker sector in Ireland.
“The main point of this is gambling is a global market and you’re basically setting up Irish customers with a disadvantage. All the tax gets passed on to the customer via the pricing, because the bookmaker simply can’t afford to absorb that tax because of the tight margins and all extra costs like streaming, compliance, customer services et cetera.
“I think you will end up seeing firms differentiating prices by territory. If you’re betting in England, without a turnover tax, you’ll get 4/5, if you’re in Ireland with the turnover tax, you’ll get 8/11.
“Then you’re putting that tax against problem gambling because you’re actually exacerbating that problem because people will lose at a higher rate in Ireland because they’re getting worse prices, essentially losing quicker.
“And again, people will move away from the legal market because your WhatsApp bookie will still give you 4/5 but the regulated guy will have to give you 8/11 because he has all this tax to absorb. There is no recognition of this but it is happening already and it’s only going to increase.
“If the betting tax continued to go up, I wouldn’t rule out moving abroad. I’m British, but I have lived in Ireland for 15 years now. My wife is Irish and my kids are Irish, I want to pay taxes in Ireland, but nobody will tax my business out of existence, who doesn’t understand the business.
With regard to the Gambling Regulation Bill, namely the restriction on gambling advertising between 5.30am and 9.00pm, the horse has probably bolted already according to Kaminskas.
“James Browne is more than welcome to come down here, I will open the books and show him how the business runs but to be honest, it’s probably passed the stage of anyone in the industry convincing him to change his mind,” he says.
“If and when the bill comes in, we’d have to see the knock-on effects of how the television companies respond and how the streaming companies respond. Will it drive more people towards my website because you can watch racing there, and improve turnover that way, I don’t know. We will react, I have some ideas but we will have to see how the pieces of the jigsaw fall.”
On-course
Kaminskas continues to have a presence in the on-course betting ring and will be standing at Leopardstown this weekend in front of a likely big crowd. The business only accounts for 2.5% of his turnover but he still sees the benefit of getting his brand out there and establishing relationships. With so many short priced favourites this weekend, you’d wonder if that was good, bad or indifferent for a bookmaker.
“There aren’t many guys that come into the ring and want 5,000 on a 2/5 shot,” he says. “They are there but they barely exist. What happens is some bookmakers will fight to the death to get them in because they’re not really laying anything else.
“So they’ll be 2/5 about a 1.38 shot, they will literally cut their own throats to get that bet in. We don’t operate that way. We’re market based, we react to signal in the market basically.
“If you want to lay 2/5 shots that are 1.38, my opinion would be that I wouldn’t want to see your numbers at the end of the year whether you win or lose on the day, whereas my numbers are strong. We basically bet to win in and around 10% every year and that’s the way we operate.”
Kaminskas is no different to the on-course bookmakers in admitting that the big days and festivals, particularly jumps, is where it is at.
“I don’t really see tracks being incentivised to get people through the door,” Kaminskas says. “The media rights payments are so high, they don’t need to.
“We don’t go to Dundalk on Wednesdays anymore, it’s a waste of time, they don’t even open the bar inside. Midweek flat racing is exceptionally poorly attended - you could have a listed or Group 3 race at Gowran Park on a piping hot day during the summer, and there will be no one there.
“The jumps holds up well - the likes of Killarney and Listowel - but we can’t go to poorly attended meetings as a loss leader. It’s disappointing. If these courses are not going to try and build the sport because they are getting fat and lazy on media rights money, maybe the industry would be better off without them.”
Although there is a level of uncertainty in the gambling industry, Kaminskas is confident that his business can continue to make ground in a fiercely competitive sector. The desire to back horse racing is there - AK Bets sponsored a race series at the Curragh last season - but it needs to make business sense.
“There is lots of stuff going on but I don’t see huge stumbling blocks,” he says, on a general scale. “We’re small enough that we could pivot and react. My fear for the next 12 months from a regulation point of view is what they’ll do to problem gamblers, they’re going to kick them further and further underground and the people that think they’re making altruistic decisions, I just don’t think they’ve any idea what they’re doing and what the consequences of their actions are going to be.
“From a more positive point of view, our business is growing. We are going to continue to hire, continue to do stuff around pricing and developing our product. We are looking forward to seeing how far we can go.”