Interview – Henrik Sandin – Operations

The Boss Media Poker Network

The Boss Media Poker Network was also known as the International Poker Network and started operations around 1999.

It was originally written by a company called SnowCode AB which was a small game developer located in the same city, Växjö, as Boss Media. SnowCode originally wrote games for the X-Box game console. “They wrote a snowboarding game apparently and some other stuff”.

SnowCode AB was the predecessor of Play N’ Go that started around 2005 (for whom Henrick would work for later on in Manila).

“Main thing was is that they were in same city and Boss Media needed more developers to build a poker platform. So Boss Media hired SnowCode as consultants to build the International Poker Network.”

First games were 7-Card Stud and Texas Hold’em.

The Boss Media Poker Network became a significant player in the online poker industry. After Boss Media’s acquisition by GTECH in 2008, the network gradually declined and was eventually phased out as the market evolved and competition intensified.

Page List

Interview First Page

Paradise Poker

Paradise Poker was a Boss Media operator from 2007.

Paradise Poker was the original poker network and began operations using its own software around 1999. Operations were run from Costa Rica and servers housed in Kahnawake.

The original code for Paradise Poker was developed by a group of Canadian software developers. The platform was launched in 1999 and quickly became popular with players all over the world.

After Paradise Poker was acquired by Sportingbet in 2004, the platform transitioned to using Boss Media software as part of Sportingbet’s integration strategy. Sportingbet was ultimately acquired by GVC Holdings in 2013 which became Entain in 2020.

In 2014 the decision to shut down Paradise Poker was taken. After a long demise and loss of relevancy in the online poker world, Paradise Poker was no more.

Open

Casino.com – Organic Traffic Defined

Earlier on, Joel had fortuitously purchased the domain Casino.com.

So, Casino.com was their own site. This could not get better! Joel was smart enough to buy this domain early on and the website proved to be a big driver to the success of Boss Media.

Affiliates aren’t really needed in this case as Casino.com would prove to be a great landing site. But Henrik built an affiliate system anyway. It was sorely needed by the white-label operators, who were not is such a fortuitous position.

Boss Media became a white-label provider and GoldClubCasino.com became a sort of test ground, with new products being tested there first.

Early Payments

Payments were originally cleared by the Wells Fargo bank in Las Vegas. Authorizations were obtained by using an X.25 connection which was not nippy or particularly reliable. The casino overloaded the Wells and Fargo system on its first day.

In theory, with X.25, as more than one concurrent communications session was possible, more than one payment transaction could be sent for authorization at the same time. But there was a limit to how many transactions could be processed by the Wells Fargo system and their limit was soon exceeded. The popularity of the new casino flooded Wells Fargo and brought their systems to a grinding halt.

To solve the issue, Henrik implemented some improvements . He created a payment queuing system to buffer the payment transactions at busy times. But, eventually they had to implement other payment clearance methods instead.

X.25 Description -Short Bit O’ Tech..

As did many banks at that time, Wells Fargo provided a payments authorization service to clients via the X.25 network. To access the service, the client needed to have a deal with the local telecoms company to provide the necessary networking equipment. Then the client’s programmers could create the code needed to call the authorization service and clear payments.

We’ve always referred to the internet as our only method of interconnecting computers. However, there were other networking possibilities available to businesses during the late 1960’s and onwards. X.25 was one of those.
X.25 specified a set of protocols for connectivity over a packet switched network. and in the 1970’s and 80’s, cooperation between telecommunications companies created a worldwide network which became popular with corporate users, including major banks, and is still in use by the airline industry today.

Packet Switching in terms of data communication refers to a method of forming data into short messages of a fixed format – a data packet. Packets also have a header as well as the actual data. The header contains the info needed to route the packet through the network to the correct destination.
The internet is also a packet switching network and uses the same principals, However, the differences are in how one connected.

Within the internet, each packet is routed individually. A sequence of packets may take different routes and so the internet is considered to be connectionless.

An X.25 is considered to be connection-oriented. Within an X.25 network, before data transmission, a virtual circuit must set up between the sender and receiver and communication commences only between the two devices.

It’s a sort of dial-up system and like the telephone system, each device would have a subscriber number including a country code.

Also, X.25 is slow in comparison to the Internet. X.25 was designed for low-speed, reliable communication, typical of early telecommunications networks. It supports error correction but at the cost of bandwidth and latency. Whereas, the internet is designed to handle high-speed communication, with scalability in mind. While it sacrifices some reliability at the network layer, it provides mechanisms at higher layers (like TCP) to ensure data integrity.

Aside…

Henrik recalled the time that his help was once required in locating a break in the data cable between Antigua and London.

As the main user of the services that used the cable, the submarine captain called and asked to send Pings over the network. so that he could measure the time the reflected signal took to be received.

With some clever math, they could then work out the distance the ping had traveled and -therefore – get a good location of where the break in the cable was. Neat.

Previous Page -Boss Media

Next Page – Hurricane Georges