Don Best Joins The Gambling911.com Family: Partners With Mike Tyson
As many of you already know, the oldest established sports line service (feed), Don Best, has joined the Gambling911.com family. As part of this new relationship, Gambling911.com has entered into an exclusive content creation and a sharing agreement. Myself and others from the Gambling911.com team will be appearing regularly on Don Best TV. One of the biggest announcements coming from the Don Best camp is their deal with boxing great Mike Tyson. I had an opportunity recently to sit down with Benjie Cherniak of DonBest.com to discuss the company and its aggressive future marketing plan.
JENNY: Tell our readers a bit about Donbest.com and what they can get from the site.
BENJIE: Donbest.com is a sports information website in which individuals who have an interest in sports from a bettors perspective can gain insights to not just the actual odds on the games but also insights into analysis of the games. Also, not just from an information perspective but from the bettors’ perspective.
JENNY: What are some of the recent happenings going on the site and some things you guys are going to introduce in near future?
BENJIE: There’s a few differentiators on our website that have sort of made a bit of an impact of late in the market place. One of them would be the introduction about seven months ago or so of DonbestTV or DBTV as we like to call it founded the URL tv.donbest.com. So you can see it right from the front page of our website or go straight to that URL, which is a subdomain and see all of the videos found on DonbestTV. Basically, what we’ve done is we have an in-house studio here at our Donbest offices in Las Vegas and on a daily basis we’ll do three, four, or five videos primarily hosted by our host Pat Williams along with a number of different types of guests who would be both sports analysts, sports handicappers, individuals from our Donbest sports information department, folks who have insight to the game not just from an information perspective but from a odds and a bettors perspective. They’ll do a number of different game previews for really all of the various sports and each clip is usually two to three or four minutes and it’ll provide some insight. In some cases it may be a handicapper offering their take on who will actually cover the spread or if it’ll be an Over or Under but more often than not it’s just sort of providing insight that will allow the individual to make their own betting decisions.
JENNY: You guys have a new product Donbest’s Free Live Odds. Can you tell me a little bit about that new product?
Every sharp sports bettor subscribes to Don Best. There probably are few exceptions to that rule.
BENJIE: Yes, the Donbest’s Free Live Odds is the first product sports information odds product that offers free odds that are actually live odds. Our Donbest subscription service is a pay for subscription service in which you can get all of the odds from all the sportsbooks in real time. We felt that it was time to release to the market place an odds service in which they can get live odds in real time at no cost to the consumer.
JENNY: I’m on the site right now and I noticed you cover a lot including sports news. But I also noticed here that you have a “hot handicapper” here Jim Feist. Do you guys usually put a handicapper on the site to promote?
BENJIE: If you look at the website right up top where it says Handicappers.donbest.com – if you click on that it’ll take you to actually a website within our website, which promotes all of our handicappers. So Jim is a handicapper who had a good weekend, which is why he’s promoted as the “hot handicapper” but on that page you can see all of the Donbest handicappers that are featured on the website. On a daily basis they all offer a combination of free plays as well as plays that you can pay for but all of their plays that you pay for are guaranteed plays such as you only pay if they’ve picked a winner.
JENNY: There was recent announcement in Vegas at your studio of Mike Tyson becoming an ambassador for pro boxing in China. Can you tell our readers a little bit more of that announcement?
BENJIE: Yeah. Absolutely. As I eluted to, we built out the studio here in Las Vegas and Mike Tyson’s team had approached us in regards to hosting a press conference out of our offices. That was held on Thursday October 14th. The press conference was to announce that Mike Tyson was invited by the Chinese government to attend the upcoming December boxing expedition games, which are being held in Tianjin, China. Mike Tyson is attending as a boxing ambassador and a celebrity promoter and I believe he’s even refereeing one of the main events. Basically, his presence is to show the Chinese boxing fans that he’s an ambassador for the sport, he’s supporting the government’s effort to create the first international boxing center in China and for the launch of professional boxing in China. My understanding is while that amateur boxing has been prevalent, there’s never been professional boxing in China. So this is their first launch of that and at such there was a press conference here at our offices hosted by Donbest’s Pat Williams who host our DonbestTV and the participants included Mike Tyson himself, two Chinese government officials from Tianjin who flew in, as well as Sterling McPherson who’s a U.S. boxing promoter, there was a number of both Las Vegas, U.S., and international media in attendance. It was a fun event and Mike Tyson himself was very engaging.
JENNY: Do you know if this was something that he (Mike Tyson) planned out or was it something that just happened where China came in and said “Hey, we want you come out and be our ambassador?
BENJIE: To my understanding based on what I saw in press conference, is that they had approached Mike about what their intentions of growing the sport in China and my understanding is the Chinese government is investing somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 million into this project. They approached Mike Tyson. He was the guy they wanted as a partner and help launch this in China.
JENNY: As far as the press conference itself, was there a big turnout? Also, Mike Tyson has been known to be a little bit arrogant. Did he seem to be that at the time during the press conference?
BENJIE: Very fair question. I would say there were somewhere in the neighborhood of forty media in attendance all sort of crammed into our TV studio for the press conference. Mike himself I had heard – I’ve never met Mike Tyson before and I had heard a lot of what you had heard in regards to him potentially being “arrogant or not friendly”. While I didn’t personally have a lot of direct interaction with him, from the Donbest side it was really our host Pat Williams who was interviewing him and spending a lot of time with him but from everything I saw he really was anything but what I had heard. He was very friendly. He was very pleasant. He seemed at peace with himself. He was making jokes and sort of making fun of himself. One of our employees came by with his two babies and he held them in his lap and played with them. This is the same guy who once said in a press conference “I’m going to eat your children” and now here he is playing with young kids and seeming very at peace with it. So maybe it’s a question of having matured. Maybe it’s a question of having been around the block a time or two or ten. But whatever it is he really seemed to be enjoying himself and very approachable and pleasant to be around.
JENNY: What else would you like to tell our readers about Donbest.com?
BENJIE: Well I think in terms of Donbest.com – if we’re talking about the actual website – we feel it’s rapidly becoming a destination site for those that want to come in for the games or read content or watch videos that will give them insights into games from the bettors perspective. Of course, in regards to our company Donbest, we have our line service, which is subscription line service that people pay for and if you’re a very astute bettor in addition to coming to our website for a plethora of free information it would serve you well to take a very close look at our product. We do offer free trials and is something that the astute bettor can’t do without.
- Jenny Woo, Gambling911.com Senior International Correspondent
