“Come On In, Baby”: The Wild West of 90s sports betting
“What the f**k do you want?”, grumbled a man sitting in a rickety old building in Antigua, barely glancing up from his cluttered desk.
“Um, I’m here to see Bill Scott about a job,” a 25-year-old Paris replied awkwardly, mentally mapping her escape route from what felt like a dodgy movie scene.
His frown turned to a mischievous grin. “Well, come on in, baby, I’m Billy.”
Paris Smith, former CEO of Pinnacle, is widely regarded as one of the most influential women in the online gaming world, having steered sports betting through a transformative era spanning over three decades. In this two-part series, Paris tells SiGMA News about the raw, rebellious, and visionary days of the early iGaming industry and what it was really like to be part of a motley crew of dreamers and doers.
Pen, paper, cigarette butts and beer bottles
It was 1995. Paris Smith, fresh off a college basketball scholarship, had moved to Antigua armed with a tourism degree. But, looking very much like the rural North Dakotan she was in a country that insisted on hiring locals, finding a stable job in a seasonal industry was proving a little trickier than expected.
She was hustling, trying to figure out her next step, when fate came paddling into her life while she was out walking her dog along the beach.
“My dog was struggling in the sea, and this stranger grabbed him and brought him out of the ocean,” Paris recalls. “We got chatting, you know, the small talk after someone saves your favourite family member. He tells me he owns a sportsbook and knows an American guy in Antigua, Bill Scott, who was looking for phone clerks at his sportsbook, World Wide Tele Sports.”
The next day, 7 July 1995, she turned up for an interview.
“The office building was easy to spot, and came with an ashtray full of cigarette butts, a table full of beers, tape recorders, phones, a TV, and a bunch of clunky computers.”
Her interview with Bill Scott lasted ten minutes, and the official training, probably half that.
“Bill tells me, ‘Alright, when someone calls, say, “Sports pin?” Put the PIN number in and give them a rundown.’
And I’m like… what’s a rundown?”
“He says, ‘It’s straight parlays, parlays, sweethearts, or reverses, you know, just put it in STR for straights, SW for sweethearts, put in the amount, read it back to them, and say “Confirm?”, and that’s it.’”
Right on cue, the phone rings.
Paris answers, “Sports pin?”
Click. They hang up.
Another call: “Sports pin?”
Click.
“Turns out females answering phones to take sports bets was not a thing back then,” she says. “They just kept hanging up on me.”
Eventually, someone on the other end had the sense to ask:
“Is this WWTS?”
“Um, I think so,” Paris replies.
“This is BW…”
“So yeah,” Paris smiles, “the first phone call I ever took was from Billy Walters, one of the most renowned professional bettors in the world.”
Now, if that’s not a sign from the universe, I don’t know what is.
Could it be any more analogue?
A few weeks passed, and the job was ticking along nicely. But it was the calm before the storm.
“Billy had taken out a $750 ad in Jim Feist’s magazine, and suddenly the phones were ringing off the hook.”
WWTS wasn’t exactly equipped for scale. They signed up around 1,500 new players off the back of that ad, which may not sound too crazy now, but in those days, everything was done manually. No slick CRM, no automated onboarding systems.
“We were in a frenzy, scribbling names, addresses, and phone numbers down on scraps of paper, quickly relaying instructions on how the punters could send money for their bets.
“At that time, the only payment options were Western Union Quick Collect, cashier cheques or bank wires, nothing like today’s instant payment methods. It was utter chaos.”
But Paris didn’t panic, and she wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty either.
“And, you know, that’s just where we had to start. We had to solve problems as they arose, and those problems went from ‘how do we process these payments’ to ‘wait, how the hell are we actually going to build this business, Billy?’”
At lightning speed, WWTS grew from a handful of staff to 185 employees and still managed to maintain a reputation for having the best customer service in the industry.
All the phone clerks were women; personable, sharp, and working shifts long enough to get to know the regulars like family, almost like the barmaids down your local pub.
“Hey Johnny, been to the doctor about that dodgy knee of yours yet? Your team’s playing Saturday, by the way. Let me know if you want to send funds for the weekend.”
Paris laughs, “That was what an upsell looked like in 1995.”
The trust they built wasn’t through marketing in today’s sense of the word. It was really earned authentically. “People weren’t just voices on a phone; they were relationships. That personal connection made all the difference.”
WWTS reaches its pinnacle
Paris’s role grew organically within WWTS. She wasn’t given promotions; they just happened because she became indispensable. She stayed for 11 years, not because she had to, but because she believed in what they were building.
“I was loyal to Billy. I didn’t want to jump ship just because someone else came calling.”
And people did come calling, particularly Pinnacle. This sharp book was gaining momentum fast, and players were starting to take notice.
“Back then, there were no regulations, and banking was complicated, so we were doing book-to-book transfers. But then there was a point where 60% of WWTS’s withdrawals were going straight to Pinnacle.”
Paris started going floor to floor, asking clerks to transfer the Pinnacle-bound customers to her.
“‘Johnny, what are you doing?’ I’d ask the customers. ‘Why are you transferring your money to Pinnacle?’”
The answer was always some version of:
“Well, I don’t know, all my friends bet there, they just have an edge, better juice.”
Word of mouth was powerful, and Pinnacle’s growth was coming from bettors telling other bettors where the sharp lines were. The army on the ground that Pinnacle was growing was absolutely phenomenal.
“It wasn’t until August 2006, a couple years after Billy sold WWTS, that I was ready to take the leap over to Pinnacle,” she explains. “The timing just felt right. It made sense to start something new.”
So, Paris made the move to Curaçao and into a whole new kind of chaos.
This money-making machine needs maintenance
“Pinnacle had no structure. No titles. No org chart. It was just this stripped-back money-making machine that, looking back now, really needed to equip itself for the success it was going to have.”
Paris started hiring. She pulled from her WWTS playbook and brought in people who could thrive under pressure and still keep their heads. And just five months in, she got the call that would cause complete carnage.
“Hey Paris, you know how you’re so logistical and operational and stuff?” they said. “We want to exit the U.S. market, and we need you to do it.’”
She assumed they meant somewhere down the line, maybe after March Madness?
“No… the 11th.”
“Of what?”
“January.”
It was the 7th.
What followed was four days of pure execution. She built the plan, barely slept, and prepared to shut off 35,000 active accounts, all with money in them that would need to be refunded using a customer service team of just 12 people.
“It was clearly an impossible task, so I brought in another Bill, a genius who, in just two days, wrote and tested the scripts we would use to automate the move. At midnight on the 11th, .”
The next morning, Paris woke up to hundreds of messages, phone calls, emails, Skype calls, and Facebook pings, all asking the same thing.
“Yeah, we did it,” she confirms. “We exited the U.S. market. And a couple weeks later, unbeknownst to us, Neteller’s founders were arrested, but everyone’s money was already safely out of Pinnacle.”
Nailed it
Despite the weight of that whole project (60-65% of Pinnacle’s customers were U.S. based at the time), Paris considers it one of her most accomplished moments.
“Of all the things we did, that’s probably what I’m most proud of in terms of execution. To exit an entire market, to have those huge profits plummet to $7 million a year and then rebuild it all from scratch? It was a task and a half, but by the time I left Pinnacle 17 years later, it was just as big, if not bigger, than when I started. We really nailed it.”
In 2023, after decades of building the Pinnacle business through Europe and Asia, Paris stepped away from executive leadership, not to slow down but to start lifting up the next generation.
Because when you’ve built an empire from a beach in Antigua with nothing more than a pen, notepad, and barely-working phone line, you’ve got more than enough wisdom to pass down.
Continue the trip down memory lane in Part Two of our OGs of Online Gaming feature, where Paris Smith gives us more nostalgic 90s gold and looks to the future of the industry that she helped shape.
