WHY DIDN'T SPORTS MARKET SELL?

[STEVE TURNER]

Several Sports Books tried to buy Sports Market when they knew it was going to fail. I am not privileged as to why Charlie didn't sell, but I have some opinions.

SPORTS MARKET, did a large volume of credit business including some of the larger Sports Books. I am sure most of the Sports Books that wanted to buy Sports Market weren't interested in the Credit Players. Being a credit player myself, I can understand why a Book would only want to buy the post-up players.

I wish Sports Market would have sold there post up business. Even though the players post up money was gone, most books would have eaten that loss to get the customer base.

Why did Sports Market go broke? Again I don't have the answer but, they paid real liberal bonus and had a lot of promtions offering juice free wagering at different times.

When big major American compaines, Enron, etc, go belly up, can't be surprised when Major off-shore books go belly up.

In conclusion, I still hope someone comes to the rescue of Sports Market post-up players.

[JC]

What was there to sell? They were in solvent. They owed more than they had cash in the bank. The only realistic deal to hope for would have been another book taking over all of the accounts. And to be legit that book should have enough money to back up all of those new accounts.

My guess is the owner of Aces probably wanted money in his pocket on top of that and that could have been holdong up the deal. Just my guess. If there was an offer on the table for someone who had the money to take over the accounts he should have taken it.

ANd as for credit vs. post up, when a credit player is up he is then a post up player.

[chestrockwells]

Who knows. But the one thing that people all talk about is "player list" but in actuality apart from the horse players.......(which in actuality are the ones being targeted by Royals' offer) there's probably a lot of redundancy among client or player lists. I own a small mailorder company (2500 customers) and about a year ago I looked into buying out another company of similar size and similar product content. I was interested mostly in their customer list. I found that 1 of 3 of their "customers" were either my customers already, or someone whose address we already had access to.

[Jeff]

My guess is that the chance of a sale is 50/50........

Chestrockwells makes a good point about duplicate players. No doubt there's plenty of that.

In a perfect world, with no dupes, it should be no problem for a major book, or several major books to take on the post up players.

This has happened many times in the past and as a matter of fact, books like CRIS have openly looked for books in trouble in the past.

They take on the clients and the owner of the old book essentially now has a sheet with CRIS.

CRIS works the client list and eventually the previous owner is squared away.

This is very common. So again, with the client list, whether it be one book or more than one, it's certainly do-able.

The credit players, well, that may be a different ball game.

[STEVE TURNER]

JC, thanks for the reply. A coupe of replies to your comments, Just because a company has less money in the bank than they owe, dosen't make them inslovent.

In Sports Markets case, I am sure all the post up customer money was not there. So if a different book takes them over, they are in the hole to start with. Some books still buy hoping to gain new customers. I was once told, each customer cost about $1,000 to acquire through adv, etc.

In my humble opinion a Credit Player is not a post up player just because he is ahead. Also a lot of sports books only deal with post-up players, so they wouldn't agree to purschase a Sports Books credit players.

I am a credit player off-shore and think post up players have first right to receive there money.

[Jeff]

Don't want these recent posts to be lost as a result of the posting frenzy which occured last night.

[Unregistered]

I have to say I'm impressed with the attitude of some the posters concerning post up players vs. credit players and receiving monies.

I happen to be one of those post up players who deposited once (in October) built it up a bit and then kapoof! What really irks me is that I did not avail myself of any bonus money and my plays on vig free Friday and Sunday were about 50/50. I thought I had picked a reputable book, based on my due diligence, where I could place my bets and have some fun.

Obviously I'm anything but pleased with the situation ($3000 of my own money down the tube) and my future attitude will be no more "native carib" outfits ever again. I know I know the're not all unscrupulous but I'm just not inclined anymore to put in all the effort in advance to get burned again.

I'll stick with the large UK outfits where no payment is a non issue and wait for the large Nevada corporations to establish an online presence. I'll take boring sterile corporations over high bonus, high blood pressure junk shops anyday.

It's nice to see that there are still good people out there not always looking out for only themselves all the time.

Cheers