Poker champ James Bond to buy ex-World Series Scottish soccer team

Posted: January 10, 2025, 08:43 pm.

Last updated: January 10, 2025, 08:43 pm.

Former World Series of Poker Europe (WSOPE) champion James Bond is on the verge of acquiring Scottish Championship soccer team Dunfermline Athletic.

The Briton, who won the WSOP European Main Event in London in 2010 for $1.1 million, is leading a consortium of investors in bidding for the 75% stake currently held by German football investment group DAFC Fussball GmbH.

It is expected that the Scottish Football Association (SFA) board and its fellow investors, American nationals Wai Yin Kelly Kung and Justin Royce Harkema, will approve the sale. The parties are due to meet next week to complete the purchase of the team, which plays in Scotland's second tier. The Daily Mail Report.

The group already has minority ownership in Spanish La Liga 2 team Cordoba CF.

Who is James Board?

Bord is a former Citigroup banker who left the world of finance in his mid-20s to pursue his interest in poker and sports betting. Along with winning the WSOPE, he also ran a training and staking company for players, known as Poker Farm.

He is the founder of Short Circuit Science, a San Francisco-based company that specializes in sports-data analytics, medical-prescription technology, and climate adoption analysis.

In the mid-to-late 2000s, the board worked for Tony Bloom, whose gambling syndicate and advisory service, Star Lizard, is one of the biggest winners in football betting.

Bloom is also a famous poker player who received the nickname “The Lizard” due to his cool song On the table.

After 'Lizard'

Star Lizard made Bloom very wealthy, and in 2019, he bought his childhood club, Brighton FC, which was in the third tier of English football at the time. Applying the same cold, hard analysis to the transfer market as he does to the betting markets, Bloom took Brighton to the English Premier League, where they remain.

At some point, Byrd left Star Lizard to work for another sports betting fund run by Matthew Benham, who had also previously worked for Bloom. Benham later became an investor in the Matchbook betting exchange, and in 2012 he took the reins of his childhood club, Brentford FC.

The team was promoted to the Premier League in 2021, proving once and for all that data nerds are the future of football.