QuinnBet: Tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door

Declan Lynch

QUINNBET, the new online gambling operation headed by the former billionaire Sean Quinn, has a Q logo which looks very similar to the one which served the old Quinn Insurance so well. And why not? While financial commentators have been expressing some wry amusement at Quinn’s loyalty to the old lettering, given all that happened under that sign, there are other perfectly good reasons to maintain this sense of continuity.

If you are trying to offer value to punters, you don’t want to be wasting too much money in the area of artistic impression — after all, no punter has ever emerged from a betting office to report that he was pleased at the profit he had made that day, but that he had found the experience somewhat tarnished by what he perceived as design flaws in the layout of the premises and other such superficial matters.

And if the bettor loses on the day, there is no logo — however spruced up and original — which will console him.

No doubt the Quinns are well aware of this, making their entry into the online gambling trade with the old familiar branding and a colour scheme of green, white and gold against a black backdrop.

Which is almost some sort of artistic statement in itself, but we are not here for the art, we are here for the money.

And in this we see the most obvious continuity of all, in the journey of Sean Quinn from insurance to bookmaking, via his adventures in banking and the stock market.

We see so much continuity in fact, that at times it looks like he is not really starting in the betting business — he has been there all the time.

For what is insurance anyway, but a vast gambling operation? Life insurance is a punt that we take on our own very existence, with the slight complication that if we ‘win’, somebody else will collect.

As for banking and the stock market, such are our memories of ‘casino capitalism’ that we might even be seeing Quinn’s move into online gambling as a kind of a late conversion to the path of dreary conservatism. With the further consolation that if QuinnBet somehow goes down, punters for years to come will hardly be expected to make up the shortfall with a levy on their accumulators.

Personally, in these pages I have always written the story of Sean Quinn essentially as a gambling narrative, a game of highstakes risk management in a variety of genres — and low-stakes risk management too. His legend was formed around stories of his levelheaded and unaffected nature, such as the weekly game of poker with friends with no more than a fiver in the pot.

When he was being sent to jail for nine weeks for contempt of court, there was a poignant echo of this in the last thing he was reported as saying: “Get my pack of cards.”

And there is an ancient desire in the hearts of all punters — particularly those who have punted away something in the region of €2.4bn — to go over to the other side and be the bookie.

“Sean Quinn is an eejit and Sean Quinn has done stupid things. I accept that. But did he run a great company for 35 years? One of the best ever,” was another quote from Sean Quinn on that day in court.

So if you were Sean Quinn, how could you not be attracted by this online gambling phenomenon? You’re still in the gambling game, only you’re not the eejit any more, you are whatever is the opposite of the eejit. In theory at least. But then the Quinns are not the only ones who have noticed that we are living through the Wild West era of online gambling, in which a largely unregulated business is making astronomical profits as fast as it possibly can. You might say it’s a bit like the financial services sector before various ‘corrections’ were made.

So naturally when we see words like “largely unregulated business making astronomical profits”, we can expect a fair few interested parties to the proceedings. If we look at the shirt sponsors of Premier League clubs alone, we see the names of 10 different gambling corporations, all of whom have obviously got in there some time before QuinnBet — some of whom, like Bet365, have become a kind of global monstrosity.

Moreover, there is a growing awareness that online gambling can quickly turn into an intractable addiction that can ruin your life, and there is talk of increases in taxation and regulation from the risible levels at which they stand at present.

Not that these things will happen with any great urgency, not before another generation of ‘players’ has been recruited by the ubiquitous advertising, but still… there is talk of these things, of something needing to be done, by someone, somewhere, sometime in the not too distant future.

Here and there, the odd voice is speaking truth to power, or at least to Paddy Power. Here and there, the awareness is growing that the concept of Responsible Gambling — which the bookies have been putting forward in their defence — can be as empty as any of the lines the Anglo guys would lay on the regulator back in the glory days.

There is a sense that change is coming to the Old West, as it were; that if you were going to stake your claim to a piece of it, ideally you wouldn’t start from here. So QuinnBet is reminding me here of that Bob Dylan line: “trying to get to heaven before they close the door”.

But certainly there is some kind of heaven to be found there for any online operator, given the scale of the gambling epidemic which is upon us. And QuinnBet, run by Sean Junior but with Sean Senior in command, is promising to go in and “ruffle it up a bit”. Whatever that means.

They are sincerely committed to the Responsible Gambling, and they are uniquely placed in this regard, needing only to post a video of the boss explaining how you can go from games of poker for a fiver, to dropping €2.4bn on ‘derivatives’.

But they seem to be adopting a subtler approach, and I note that on the website they are promoting Quinn’s Quarterback, which goes like this: “Having a bad week? Hey, it can happen to anyone. Get back on track with QuinnBet Quarterback! All QuinnBet customers can receive up to 25pc of their weekly losses as a Free Bet.”

I need hardly add that there are rigorous and extensive terms and conditions attached to this — but still, I am charmed by the payoff line: “Now that’s a safer bet!”

In that arena, getting back 25pc of some of your losses to use as a betting chip is about as safe as it gets.

And now I remember another line in that great Bob Dylan song, Tryin’ To Get To Heaven, which in this case has a strange resonance on both sides of the transaction: “When you think that you lost everything, you find out you can always lose a little more...”

‘QuinnBet is promising to go in and “ruffle it up a bit”. Whatever that means’