Casino King

The first time I ever entered a casino was on my 18th birthday. The gambling age in Minnesota was 18 years, and it was a right of passage for everyone to go the second they turned 18… Well maybe not EVERYONE, but for my group of friends it was tradition. The night I turned 18 we went to the casino and somehow, someway I turned $100 into $1000 playing blackjack. Thus the start of my interest in blackjack and other casino games.

A few months later, though, I moved to Chicago for college where the gambling age is 21. Going to the casino was not a possibility. So I put it out of mind for about four years. During that time in Chicago I studied film making and social media development. After college I got a job working in sports media in Los Angeles, CA. When I moved to LA in 2015, one of my friends mentioned we should go to the casino. I was excited to go as it had been some time since I played blackjack or other table games. However, when I got to the casino I found out that in California, they charge you $1 per hand to play blackjack. This was terrible for me because at the time I only wanted to bet $10/hand.

Before I could walk out, one of the staff members asked if I had played Texas Hold’em. I had not. They brought me over to the poker room and I gave it a try, immediately falling in love with it. I wasn’t very good but I really enjoyed the amount of entertainment you got for the price of admission to a poker tournament. I would play as much poker as I could during the next few years, and slowly got better and better. Right when I started to hit my stride, the pandemic hit. Casinos closed down, my work had us all work from home (we moved to Minnesota), and everything stood still. Until one day when I downloaded TikTok.

That day changed my life, and I had no idea at the time. A few days after downloading it I started making skits. Random skits about anything. Then, a skit about poker took off. It was a light bulb moment for me. Over the next two months I did my best to record a skit every single day. The following on the account grew and grew until one day one of my co workers found my account. This was an issue for me because I was in a management role and all of a sudden people working for me found a TikTok account called Matt Gothard that was making funny gambling skits. I tried to find an alias that hadn’t been taken and 'The Casino King' was born.

One I changed my name the account really skyrocketed from 5K followers to 50K followers in about a month. I was invited to play high stakes poker on the Hustler Casino Live stream. Up until that point I had never bought in for over $1,000. For that event I had to buy in for $10,000. It was all the spare money that I could responsibly use for something like this, but I decided to take a chance. I packed my bags, traveled to Los Angeles and sat down at the poker table under some bright lights. A few hours later the stream ended and I had over $30,000 worth in front of me. I still couldn’t believe it. I actually missed my exit four times on the way back to the airbnb as my mind was running wild.

The hype from the episode got me featured on multiple podcasts and poker news outlets that featured my story. All of a sudden I had over 100K followers on TikTok and growing pages on IG, YouTube and Facebook.

A few weeks later I decided to quit my job and focus on YouTube full time. That was about 2 years ago and now I have 100K subscribers and followers on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. I’ve also fully embraced making content around all casino games from blackjack, baccarat, other table games and slots. Last year I created a series where I gambled $100 every day and took users' requests as the plot of each video. That series has now evolved into “betting $100 every day for the rest of my life.” I also created a long form YouTube series called “Double or Nothing” where I needed to double $5000 into $10,000 in order to play in the WSOP Main Event. It was a huge hit for me on YouTube and has inspired a lot of my new content.

I’ve been beyond blessed to do this for a living. I’m really looking forward to diving in more to live streaming and long form YouTube content in the next year.