Like many great stories, the first ever online sportsbook started with a pint and a fight in Pimlico.
Before Ian Sherrington became the man who created the tech that would receive the worlds first ever online sports bet, he was a bicycle shop assistant, a computer operator for an insurance company, and eventually a broke twenty-something student sharing a cramped flat in London with a few friends.
But technically, it all started earlier than that. Much earlier.
Ian Sherrington is the engineer behind the launch of the worlds first online sportsbook. As Technical Director at Intertops in the mid-1990s, he built and deployed the system that accepted the first ever online sports bet back in 1996. He’s not one for the spotlight, but his fingerprints are all over the foundations of modern iGaming. From postal coupons and fax lines to debugging code in Antigua, Ian was there from the beginning, and still .
I think the first time I got into gambling, if you like, was when I built this Wheel of Fortune thing for the Boy Scouts, Ian says. I was around seven or eight years old, I used relays and lots of bits of wire and soldering. It had lights, colours, a big spinning wheel, and youd press one of those doorbell buttons; whichever light came on, that was your bet.
This wasnt just a novelty. It was Ians first experiment in odds, electrics, logic, and user engagement, all things that would define a big chunk of his career.
We set it up at the vicars church fte, he adds. Total hit.
The German tourist and the cigarette
Fast forward a couple of decades and Ian is living in London, flat-sharing with three friends in a small apartment in Pimlico. We all generally got on, he says, but the rule was if anyone had an argument, wed go to the pub, buy a beer, and remember that we loved each other.
One night, the rule was triggered; they argued, they hit the pub, they made up, and then a random German tourist offered Ian a cigarette.
I spoke a bit of German, so we got talking, Ian says. He told me he had just arrived off the train from Germany and wanted to start a bookmakers in London. He said he was looking for a place to stay, a license, a way in.
As luck would have it, the flat above theirs had just become available. I told him he could move in upstairs, Ian laughs. And thats essentially where Intertops started.
Messy, manual, and magnificently successful
The German tourist was a man named Detlef Train, an affable, driven guy who had a vision: bring German football betting to a wider audience. The initial plan wasnt groundbreaking; hed advertise in Kicker, a German football magazine, and punters would mail in their name and address.
In return, theyd receive a coupon with that weeks fixtures, fill in their predictions and post them back.
It was a two-week cycle, Ian says. One batch of coupons going out, one coming in. It was all processed by hand. And you never called Detlef on a Sunday, hed be furiously bashing away at a calculator, sorting the winners and losers. It was messy, manual, and magnificently successful, with the business taking off faster than anyone expected.
Masking tape and manual labour
Ian eventually left London for a contract in the Netherlands. By then, Detlef had a growing customer base, but the process was held together with masking tape and manual labour. To scale it, he needed a proper system, and he had hired a friend to build one.
But it was just absolutely awful, says Ian. It was going to fall apart. There were just a few weeks left before the whole thing would collapse.
So Ian, now working full-time for Shell, stepped in.
I rewrote the entire thing. Created a new system from scratch, he says. That became the Intertops system.
From that point on, things moved quickly. Detlef relocated the the business to Austria. The company began processing bets from all over Europe: Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the UK. Telephone clerks were hired.
We had an optical mark reading system, Ian says. People would fill in the forms and mark their bets, and we had a machine that could read those marks no more manual entry.
It was still old-school, but it was scaling.
Mackerel, machines, and momentum
Detlef and Ian remained close over the years, bonded by the chaos of those early days, and one summer he came to visit Ian and his wife in the Netherlands. Detlef wanted to go fishing. Ian assumed he meant in the North Sea.
He meant sitting on an idyllic riverbank. I booked us on an ocean-going trawler at 6am, Ian says. We were hungover and stuck on this boat mackerel fishing for eight hours.
But that morning, somewhere off the Dutch coast, a little bit of magic happened.
Detlef said, You know? Weve done it all. The phone lines work. The optical mark system works. Everythings automated. So what next?
Ian thought for a moment, then said:
Well…there is this new thing called the internet.
Come back on Friday for Part Two of our OGs of Online Gaming feature, where Ian talks about receiving the first ever online sports bet and how they were nearly defeated by a plug.
