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Eugene Katchalov: From Poker Champion to Esports Entrepreneur


Eugene Katchalov: TIL - From Poker Champion to Esports Entrepreneur

Eugene Katchalov is founder of QLASH. In this feature interview, Eugene Katchalov shares the secrets behind their success to date and tells The Industry Leaders how they're continuing to grow and improve as a business leader.


For those who don't know about you and your work, can you tell us who you are, and where your business is based?

I was a professional poker player for 14 years and became one of the best in the world earning almost $10mil. I started to invest my winnings into different business ventures and decided to invest in one particular one where I took a more active role in the beginning stages of the company. This was into QLASH Esports together with my partner Luca Pagano. The company is based in Switzerland and is currently the largest Esports org in Italy.


What was the main inspiration behind starting your business?

My partner and I were both global brand ambassadors for Pokerstars and learned a lot through our time with them. We were both fans of Esports and wanted to apply some of the lessons learned from how Pokerstars built their platform and build our own for Esports, albeit with a different monetization model. Just as pokerstars signed us to be ambassadors to promote the brand, we signed multiple teams in different Esports. This allowed our brand to quickly grow to become one of the most recognized in the space. Shortly thereafter we began to organize our own events and started to develop our online events platform, which is our core focus now.

Who does your business help?

Our business today helps both our community and our customers. Our community is the players who compete, have fun, win prizes and get to meet their heroes through our community. Our customers are the different brands that sponsor our events and want access to this young audience that they normally have trouble reaching through other marketing methods.


Can you share with us a time when you failed, and what you learned from that experience to make yourself a better entrepreneur?

Poker is like a microcosm of business investing as you're constantly takings risks and investing some portion of your bankroll into different tournaments all with not particularly high chances of immediate success. It taught me a lot about bankroll management and allowed me to achieve great levels of success including #1 player in the world in 2011. However, that success also got to my head somewhat and I became overconfident in my abilities and stopped trying as hard as I did in the past. This lead to a long cold streak for me starting in 2012 which took me a few painful years to realize and shake off. The main takeaway lesson for me was to be careful and not get overconfident no matter what's going on. There are always competitors working just as hard to achieve what you've already achieved and if you start slacking, you will lose it.


How do you define success, and how do you measure it in your business?

Having been an investor in many loss-making startups, success for me is when a business proves that it can become self-sustaining without any additional investments while retaining a level of growth that will grow profit.


How do you stay motivated and focused on your goals, especially during the tough times?

Most people are likely not built for entrepreneurship as it's extraordinarily grueling and hard. So if you're not able to stay motivated and focused on your own a large enough % of the time, you're probably better off doing something else. I'm a natural optimist, so even during tough times I've confidence that there will come a turning point and I just need to keep working and wait things out.


What do you think are the key qualities that every successful entrepreneur should possess?

Persistance, Optimism, learning from your mistakes and knowing how to listen to others while sticking to your vision

What role do you think technology and digital innovation play in the success of businesses in your industry, and how do you stay up-to-date with the latest trends?

They play a big role in the Esports industry. As the general age group of people in this industry is kids and young adults, they are all quite used to using their phones and computers to interact. What we're seeing now is that a lot of companies are trying to build event organizing platforms and capture all the masses. All this competition certainly confirms for us that we're not the only ones who see an opportunity here and also gives us a chance to see what's working or not in other solutions.

What do you think sets your company apart from others in your industry, and how do you plan to continue to differentiate yourself in the future?

Our strong and long lasting relationships with game publishers. This is something we worked on for years and is one of the most important things in our industry as the game publishers hold IP rights to their games and therefore decide everything when it comes to events around those games. In the future, we'd like to be seen as a partner that drives attention to upcoming and existing games through our massive, engaged community of players.


TIL - QLASH

Are you working on any specific products, deals or promotions that people should know about?

You can download the QLASH Community app in the app store and see all our ongoing promotions inside.



What does the next 12 months have in store for you and your business?

We are looking to take what we've learned in the Italian market and expand into other regions.



Eugene Katchalov: TIL - From Poker Champion to Esports Entrepreneur

How should people connect with you to find out more?

On LinkedIn & X (Twitter)


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