Gerard Daffy: The man who helped pioneer online bookmakers in Australia

He is the voice every punter knows, a pioneer and visionary who helped kick-start the corporate bookmaker phenomenon in this country back in 1993.

Gerard Daffy and his great mate, the late Terry Lillis, a bookmaker, and developer, joined forces 30 years ago almost to the day to create a betting brand known as Centrebet.

Once described as the “heartbeat” of bookmaking in the Northern Territory, Lillis fielded on his 50th Darwin Cup in 2019, before passing away in November 2021.

He was renowned for fearlessly taking on big punters, a reputation he carved out after arriving with his bag at Alice Springs as a young gun in 1969.

When he and Daffy embarked on their venture in 1993 there were only two corporate bookmakers operating in the country – Centrebet and Sportsbet.

Nowadays, there are more than 100 dotting the Australian betting sites landscape.

It was a real struggle early for Lillis – who bankrolled the venture – and Daffy, the architect whose knowledge and ideas eventually turned to gold, as they relied on a handful of loyal clients for their turnover.

Today, betting companies generate hundreds of millions of dollars annually within Australia.

Before the more familiar names of Ladbrokes, Pointsbet, Playup, and Sportingbet, were taking wagers on horse racing and sport, Centrebet was paving a path for their arrival, with Daffy and his small but dedicated team working against the odds to survive initially.

When they were setting up their base in the ‘Red Centre’ in 1993, they barely generated enough income to draw a wage.

Some weeks they battled to make a living.

But by the time the business was sold firstly to Jupiters and then to SportsOdds Group for $46 million in 2003, they were bigger than Uluru.

Daffy’s knowledge of racing and sport was unsurpassed.

He was always ready to fire off a colourful quote when contacted for a comment on anything from boxing, darts, fly-fishing, and politics when journalists called him.

And they called him often once they realised the value in getting his thoughts on big issues in racing, sport, and especially politics which created history.

Unlike today, you can wait a day or more for someone to return your call, Daffy never missed an opportunity to self-promote his growing company.

It was more important to him personally than just the CentreBet brand.

He made sure he returned every call because that was the right thing to do as a person.

Daffy’s story is a fascinating one.

The oldest of nine children, his father, Jack, who only recently turned 90, was a bookmaker’s clerk at the local Warrnambool races in country Victoria.

He was president of the local Warrnambool Greyhound club and on Saturdays, he worked as a clerk for the local bookmakers to get more money to feed his tribe.

Daffy used to go to the greyhounds with his Dad on Thursday nights and to the races on Saturday and developed a love for numbers.

He trained greyhounds when he was 12 years old (without a licence) and at 16 years became one of the youngest people to ever be granted a clerk’s licence to write bets at the races.

He always had a fascination with numbers and admits he was never cut out for a 9-5 office job.

Daffy took the biggest punt of his life when uprooted his wife, Linda, who says has supported him unconditionally, and his young family to move to Alice Springs and launch Centrebet with a handful of clients and a lot of hope his ideas would eventually take off.

“We got the first corporate bookmaker license to operate out of Pioneer Park in 1993,” Daffy told BettingSite.com.au on what would have been CentreBet’s 30-year anniversary this week.

When we first started out, clients lodged money, were given a customer number and they placed bets over the telephone.

Winnings were paid later into their bank accounts on request.

“We’d write the bets down on a slip of paper, it was transferred onto a card with the client’s number and we manually changed the balance.

“It was all handwritten.”

As Daffy pointed out there was no internet or online betting available in those formative years.

But he found a way to make it work, introducing more and more events and novelty markets, watching the client base grow and grow as he cleverly marketed Centrebet through the media and to the world.

Internet betting came into play in August 1996.

By the year 2000, with the aid of technological advancements, Centrebet’s client base worldwide was in the hundreds of thousands.

Ironically, the 1993 Federal election played a huge role in Centrebet eventually becoming a household name.

“That gave us a kick start because we got national coverage with A Current Affair who came out to Alice to do a story on us.

“Betting on elections in Australia had never been done before. There was a charter of events at the time we were allowed to bet on, it wasn’t a very big list, but fortunately for us, politics was on it.

“We couldn’t advertise by law, but we could, with the NT Government’s approval, bet on special events, like the Logies, and we bet on some odd events like the world wife-carrying champions, world sauna sitting championships, and mobile phone throwing championships which gleaned us publicity here and overseas.

“We bet on a lot of odd events, one of the weirdest was the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog race in Alaska which went for days.”

Daffy believes Centrebet paved the way for many advances in the way people bet today.

“We did so much for the industry,” he says.

“We introduced multi-lingual and multi-currency websites for overseas our clients and designed a call centre in their own language.

“We were the first to offer 24/7 betting.

“We were second in the world to onto the internet and the first in the world to offer live betting, which was on cricket.

“When we started out we were scribbling down bets on a piece of paper on rugby league and AFL games and we decided to extrapolate a lot of bet formats from oversea soccer which we applied to Australian sport.

“We started markets like first try scorer in league, the first goal scorer in AFL, half-time-full-time markets, total points, and margin betting, all these kinds of things.

“Now you can go into any sporting contest or game with any bookmaker and there will be three or four hundred bets type on just one game.

“They would have happened anyway, but all those betting innovations we have today all started at Centrebet in Alice Springs.”

Daffy admits when he set out to revolutionise betting in Australia some 30 years ago, he could not have envisaged what is happening today with bookmakers giving punters money back on bets and betting promotions paying out on losing protests.

His long-range tip though is that many of the new online bookmakers will fall by the wayside because they can’t be sustained.

“Go back 10 years ago and most punters had one bookie and limited options but now you bet on hundreds of races and any sporting event around the world and they are all offering different incentives.”

“Punters though all have multiple accounts because of the deals being offered.

“So now punters jump from bookie to bookie chasing the best deals they can get.

“I have a feeling some, or a lot of that will eventually be outlawed and it’s not really cost effective.

“It’s bottom line stuff and there’s not a business in the world that can sustain it.

“They will eventually drop off.”

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