Dutch Boyd, Poker Player, Domainer

Dutch Boyd is a professional poker player and a “part-time” domainer as he describes on his blog, DutchBoyd.com.  He has won 2 WSOP bracelets and has some other interesting facts on his resume.  Dutch has a bit of a roller coaster of a past with some highs and lows.  Coming off his latest WSOP and focusing on domain development for some items in his portfolio, I’d say he’s on a high at the moment.  He took a few minutes to share some information about himself.

Mike:  Looking at your bio on DutchBoyd.com, there are a few interesting facts.  First, you are the 2nd youngest law school graduate ever, starting college at age 12.  Tell me more about your early years that led you to college at such a young age.  What attracted you to Law School?

Dutch:  I pretty much just fell into it.  I was going to middle school in a really small town in Missouri.  Less than a thousand people.  When I was 11 and going to middle school I took the ACT as part of an enrichment class I was in.  I ended up scoring a 23 on it out of 36, which isn’t exactly stellar, but it beat out the average score of the high school seniors.  There was an open admissions policy at the local community college.  They’d let anyone in who scored higher than an 18.  My mom asked if I wanted to start taking classes there instead of going to middle school.  When she explained that going full-time and taking 12 hours meant sitting in class for two hours a day instead of eight, I jumped at it.  I dropped out of middle school and started going to college part-time in January 2003 a few weeks after I turned 12.

I only took 6 hours that first semester because we didn’t really know how I’d manage college… but I did fine.  Went half-time that summer and then started full-time in the fall.  After I got my associates degree at the community college, I transferred to Central Missouri State and started working on my Bachelor’s in Computer Science.  In my junior year, I took the LSAT, which is the test you take to get into Law School.  I kicked ass on it and got a 165 out of 180.  Which is a pretty decent score for anybody… and I was 14. So I was going to be able to get into most any state law school.  I applied and got accepted to Missouri University in Columbia and started law school at 15 after finishing up my BA.  I can’t say I was superpassionate about law… it was just going to be a job for me.  I was a teenager and didn’t really know what I wanted to do.  I didn’t really find anything I was super passionate about until I discovered poker.

Dutch:  I’m sitting on about a thousand domains right now.  My best one is hands down Cured.com.  I picked it up for a grand last year from the original owner when it expired and was in the redemption period.  Sold it on sedo about a month ago for $25k.

I’ve got a lot of good poker ones… HeadsupPoker.com, PocketJacks.com, Checkraiser.com.  Some better non-poker ones are Player.tv and PrisonLife.com.

My favorite domain in my port right now is probably Nineball.com.

My biggest sale so far (that went through 🙂 was PokerHost.net for $10k.  There was a company who started a site at PokerHost.com and I had registered PokerHost.net when I tried registering the .com and it was already taken.  They actually tried to take it through a UDRP, but they had started their site well after I had registered my .net so they lost their case after I pointed that out in my response.  I sold UniversityPokerTour.com for $5k, CruisePoker.com for $2k, PokerMax.com for $3k, ReviewPoker.com for $2k… a lot of $1k domains.  I’ve got about five on the top 100 list of poker domains that have sold.

Honestly, though, I can’t really say that I’ve sold a lot of domains. Probably less than hundred in my domaining career and the bulk of those for less than a hundred to other domainers on the forums.

Dutch:  I definitely see more of a future in domaining.  Even though an hour grinding online pays better than an hour spent domaining, I love the whole passive income aspect of setting up a mini-site and watching it turn a profit.  I don’t think a lot of people, even domainers, really get how much of a future there is in what we are doing.  The kids growing up right now that are natives to the Internet… in ten years they’re going to be dropping out of Harvard and coming up with the next killer app and they’re going to need a domain name for it.  The old guard who balks at spending seven or eight figures on category killer domains… they’re going to be replaced by these kids who aren’t going to argue that a domain like Candy.com or Sex.com is worth eight figures.

Domaining is also much more of a socially positive endeavor than poker. Every dollar I take at the poker tables comes out of the pocket of someone else.  It’s an even sum game until you factor in the rake and then it’s a negative sum game.  Domaining is different than poker in that respect… it’s a positive sum game and something I can feel better about doing.  There are no losers with what we do.