Masayuki Mochizuki

That again is Mark Olson.

In addition to being a top-ranked player, he co-founded and runs Backgammon Galaxy, an online platform for playing and studying the game.

Backgammon Galaxy was an idea that came up between me, Sandra Liloff, and Mochi back in 2018.

Mochi and Sandra are basically the two biggest backgammon legends in the world.

The idea was simply just to have a unified, grand backgammon site because it was kind of lacking.

We just set out to do it.

A bit of naivety there.

Me and Sander came from the world of sports betting.

Basically, I was a quant in sports betting for the last 10 years prior to that.

In 2019 or so, I went full time on Pagamma Galaxy trying to get this project up and running.

We thought that we were going to be a money gaming site because that was kind of like the world we came from, but it wasn't really a good business plan.

It's a very regulated market.

We had trouble really getting off the ground.

In the meantime, we had a YouTube channel.

It became the biggest Backgammon YouTube channel quite fast.

We realized that the opportunities in mobile gaming and social gaming were actually gigantic.

The market is really, really big.

So we pivoted and we started creating a product and we raised some money and we had the first real version, I would say, of Backgammon Galaxy launched in 2022.

How many players are on the site and how do you make money?

We have about 220,000 users.