Straight Flush: The True Story of Six College Friends Who Dealt Their Way to a Billion-Dollar Online Poker Empire--and How It All Came Crashing Down . . .

by Ben Mezrich

  Another part of the shift had to do with girls. Hilt had recently coupled off with an old girlfriend—a spectacular five-foot-seven blonde who had graduated college in three years with honors, a scouted model who was now in school to be a teacher. She had come to Costa Rica so they could be together, and they were moving rapidly toward marriage. In contrast, Scott had fallen into a relationship of his own with a hot-blooded, exceedingly jealous Colombian he’d met at a club in San José. For whatever reason, Scott’s girlfriend had taken an immediate dislike to the girl Garin was dating, a pretty Costa Rican, and instead had been pushing him to spend as much couple time as possible with Hilt and his likely future wife. Maybe Scott’s girlfriend was hoping that Hilt’s relationship stability would rub off on them; whatever the case, the fact that Scott’s and Garin’s women didn’t get along meant less time spent together.

  “And the landscape has changed,” Hilt added. “So many more competitors now. Another poker site popping up every day. And they’re passing us by.”

  That was an understatement; not only were there now hundreds, if not thousands, of online poker sites, but a handful of them were dwarfing AbsolutePoker.com. Specifically, PokerStars.com and PartyPoker.com were monsters in the industry. To be fair, they had both been well capitalized from the beginning; neither had started in some frat house in Montana. Party Poker’s founders had their 1-900 sex line fortune and had rolled that cash into building what was now probably one of the biggest online companies, in terms of straight revenue, in existence. And PokerStars was following right behind.

  Absolute Poker had certainly grown dramatically from its humble beginnings. Now valued at more than thirty million dollars, it was bringing in about eight thousand dollars a day in revenue. But with the competition, and the price they were paying to sign up new players, they needed to figure out how to leverage what they had, and expand exponentially.

  Which was why they were in the elevator in Portland.

  “Hopefully Greg can tell us what we’re doing wrong,” Scott responded as the elevator slowed at the fourteenth floor. “Because God knows, he’s done everything right.”

  Scott had met Greg Pierson, CEO and founder of UltimateBet.com, one of their competitors—which was now valued in the hundreds of millions, one step away from the PokerStars and Party Pokers of the industry—when Greg had tried to sell him on a software partnership. Greg was a computer guy, a programming whiz who fell into online poker sideways; at the time Scott had first spoken to him, Greg’s company, ieLogic, was creating skin sites for the gaming industry—basically, software that allowed instant, pop-up gaming on the Internet without downloads. Scott had remained in contact with the man and had always thought he was one of the smartest guys in the business. So when Greg had invited him to come by their offices in Portland, Scott figured it would be worthwhile to pick the man’s brain. Ultimate Bet had streaked right past Absolute Poker, and Scott needed to know why.

  The elevator doors opened, spilling them out into a brightly lit modern lobby, staffed by a woman in an impeccable suit seated behind a smoked-glass desk. After a brief wait they were led to a corner office with large picture windows overlooking downtown Portland. Pierson rose from his leather chair to greet them, and it was instantly obvious that things were going very well for the former software geek. He was a compact man in an off-brown suit, and his face was glowing beneath his crown of reddish hair, eyes beaming from behind his wire-rimmed glasses. He looked like he’d just won the lottery.

  He ushered them to a pair of leather chairs behind a glass table. As Scott took his seat, he saw the Ultimate Bet logo embedded in the table, beneath a scrawl of carved writing: WORLD POKER TOUR CHARTER MEMBER.

  Pierson noticed him reading the table and pointed with a thumb.

  “Cost us a hundred thousand, and worth every penny.”

  “The table?” Hilt asked, incredulous. Pierson laughed.

  “Fuck you. No, sponsoring the tour. Got us unlimited access to advertise on the TV show. Wednesday nights on Travel Channel.”

  Scott and Hilt nodded, but Pierson just looked at them, then shook his head.

  “You guys don’t get it, do you? Wednesday nights on the Travel Channel. That’s national TV.”

  Scott smiled politely. He knew the show. It was one of a number of poker shows that had launched on television, including World Series of Poker on ESPN, which was probably the industry’s best-known show. The idea of poker on TV had been a long time in coming, but it hadn’t been until very recently that the game had finally made inroads into the medium, specifically because of a pretty interesting invention—the hole cam.

  The problem with poker, as a visual sport, was that you couldn’t normally see the players’ cards—so it was hard to play along with them, because you were only seeing the results of the game after all the cards were laid down, rather than taking part in the action along the way. But the hole cam changed all that, by showing the players’ cards as they were dealt, so that the viewer could witness the drama of the game as it unfolded. First instituted on a show in the United Kingdom, it had come to U.S. TV via both the ESPN World Series of Poker and Travel Channel’s World Poker Tour. Scott hadn’t realized that Pierson’s Ultimate Bet had been a sponsor of the show—but at first, he didn’t get the significance. Besides, they’d all sponsored all sorts of shit, from cruises to golf outings to charity tournaments.

  “It’s a fun show,” Scott agreed. “We catch it now and then on the TVs in the sports book upstairs from our office.”

  Pierson pulled his desk chair around so he was sitting across from them at the table. He leaned toward them, looking like some sort of intense, bespectacled turtle.

  “You’re not getting what I’m saying. Scott, you know how much revenue we did last week? One hundred thousand a day. Every day.”

  Scott looked at Hilt. He could see the shock in his friend’s eyes. Absolute Poker was doing eight thousand a day—and that was during a good week. A hundred thousand dollars a day? That seemed impossible.

  “How?” was all Scott could manage.

  Pierson grinned, obviously happy he had gotten through. “The game has changed, man.”

  “We know,” Hilt started. “So many more online sites—”

  “No. That’s not what I mean. The game has changed. Poker. It’s gone mainstream, in a major way. Because of shows like ours, and the World Series. It started with Moneymaker winning a bracelet, but it’s gone so much farther now, it’s straight-up mainstream. And that’s what we’ve done. We’ve gone mainstream too.”

  Of course, Scott knew all about Chris Moneymaker, who’d won the World Series of Poker’s main event in 2003. Moneymaker had been a regular Joe, an accountant who won his spot in the event by playing a thirty-eight-dollar online tournament at PokerStars. When he won the World Series—going head to head against some of the greatest professional poker players of the era—his $2.5 million prize had inspired a whole new generation. Moneymaker hadn’t trained in dark poker rooms or smoky casinos. He’d learned how to play at home, online. If a guy as average seeming as Chris Moneymaker could win the World Series of Poker, then anyone could.

  “One in five Americans played poker last year,” Pierson continued. “And those numbers are only growing. More people play poker than play baseball—it’s our goddamn national sport. And now it’s nationally televised. Travel Channel, ESPN, ABC, NBC.”

  Scott was starting to catch on. For the first time in history, the two-hundred-year-old game of poker was being beamed into living rooms across America. All over the world too.

  Back in 1999, when Scott had discovered the game, poker had been relegated to the back rooms of bars like Stockman’s and the frat houses and dorm rooms of college kids. Now it was on TV, right after the Yankees–Red Sox game or the Super Bowl.

  “TV changed everything. TV is the key.”

  Pierson railed on, explaining that Ultimate Bet was advertising on as many shows as it could—and everyone else was doing the sam
e thing. PokerStars had the World Series of Poker and the North American Poker Tour on ESPN, National Heads-Up Poker Championship and Poker After Dark on NBC. Party Poker was advertising everywhere, including sports events and shows that had nothing to do with cards.

  And through television, these sites were working with the poker shows to publicize a whole roster of poker celebrities who were becoming as well known as professional athletes: Phil Hellmuth, Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, Doyle Brunson, Phil Ivey, Annie Duke. By sponsoring players, sites like Pierson’s could further advertise themselves—through T-shirts, hats, whatever they could get the players to wear. They were after exposure, as much as they could buy—and from what Pierson was saying, because of TV, they could suddenly buy a whole hell of a lot more than Scott had ever thought possible.

  As Pierson talked on, Scott was already trying to figure out a way to cut the meeting short and get the hell back on the road. He tried to signal Hilt with his eyes. He didn’t want to waste another minute in that office.

  Pierson was right. Television was a window into every American home. The faster Absolute Poker could get on TV, the faster it would end up in every American living room.

  Go, go, go!” Scott shouted, pushing Garin, Hilt, Shane, and Brent up the cement stairwell in front of him. “It’s on in two minutes!”

  Scott had just gotten the phone call from their Philadelphia-based advertising company a few minutes earlier: AbsolutePoker.com’s first commercial was going to air during the last few seconds of World Poker Tour—in the same block as one of Pierson’s own ads. Although Scott and his team had gone over the ad a dozen times since the Philly guys handed it in, there was something different about the idea of watching it live. They wanted to see it on the screen just like their customers would.

  Scott and Hilt had come up with the concept of the ad during the drive back from Portland to Seattle. Just a thirty-second bump, a simple story that Scott felt captured the essence of what Absolute Poker was supposed to be. A guy at a computer in a well-appointed apartment, his friends in the next room getting ready to hit ladies’ night at a local bar. The friends tell him it’s time to go downtown—that the party is about to start. The guy declines; he says no, he’s going to pass, he’s playing online poker. Then the AbsolutePoker.com logo—and something like “Play it anytime, anywhere.”

  To Scott, it felt perfect. There was nothing seedy about it, nothing dark. Choosing to play online poker over going to a bar—it was just another form of entertainment, and hell, if you looked at the average credit card deposits of most players, it was an even cheaper, more responsible decision than heading off to ladies’ night.

  Scott made it to the top of the stairs and burst into the back room of the sports book office, right behind Garin, Shane, and Brent. The room was set up like a lounge, with couches, a refrigerator, and a handful of televisions hanging from three walls. The TVs were usually turned to sporting events, but Scott had called their upstairs neighbor right after he’d gotten off the phone with Philly; all the screens were now showing the World Poker Tour, which had just ended. The credits were rolling as Scott took his position a few feet from one of the televisions, his hand resting on Hilt’s shoulder. Garin, Shane, and Brent were near a second TV, breathing hard.

  And then, suddenly, there it was. The ad went by fast—thirty seconds felt like four heartbeats, maybe five—and then the show was over. Scott blinked, still seeing the Absolute Poker diamond emblazoned on his retinas. Then Hilt turned and raced back toward the stairwell.

  “Back down,” he said. “Let’s see what that did.”

  The rest followed, nearly knocking him over as he pushed his way back onto the stairs.

  A moment later they were in front of Scott’s computer, looking at the back-end numbers that told them how many people were registering for the site in real time. Hilt was hitting the Refresh button with his index finger.

  At first the numbers were the same as before—a few new registrations, followed by a few more. And then—Christ.

  Twenty registrations to the website. All new players, all signing up to AbsolutePoker.com for the first time.

  Then forty registrations.

  Then eighty.

  “How is this possible?” Garin whispered.

  A hundred registrations. Then a hundred fifty. And it was still increasing, more and more registrations, every time Hilt hit Refresh.

  “From one commercial?” Brent said. “Holy shit.”

  “If this holds up,” Hilt commented quietly, “we’re going to do twenty thousand in revenue in the next day.”

  Scott exhaled. From around eight thousand in revenue before the television ad to twenty thousand after. And what would happen when those television ads were everywhere? How many people would be coming to AbsolutePoker.com to play poker? How much money would they be able to generate?

  “Is the software going to hold?” Garin asked. There was a tinge of panic in his voice.

  Scott ignored him. He caught eyes with Hilt, and could see that Hilt felt it too. Something had changed, something huge.

  Scott glanced behind them, and saw that most of their other employees—maybe forty, fifty people—were now standing around watching the company officers. Scott reached out and pulled an office chair from in front of the nearest desk, then climbed up so that he was standing high above the room. He waited until the place had gone silent.

  “Poker is everywhere,” he said, hitting each word. “And from now on, we will be everywhere too. Television ads. And not just on poker shows. I’m talking sporting events, college basketball, college football. Wrestling—everywhere. We’re not just an online poker company anymore—we’re a marketing company. And the thing we’re selling is the most popular game in the world.”

  The game of poker had changed, and Absolute Poker was going to change with it—hurtling into the mainstream.

  Maybe Garin had his concerns, but Scott knew it wasn’t the time to slow down.

  It was their moment to step on the goddamn gas.

  CHAPTER 19

  The speedometer had to be wrong.

  There was no way the BMW could be going that fast down a road this narrow, or one that was mostly dirt and gravel, with enough blind twists and jagged turns that it was way beyond serpentine. And yet there it was, those bright red digital numbers screaming out of the dashboard, telling Brent that he should be screaming as well. But instead he was laughing, so damn hard that the half bottle of tequila he’d drunk over the past three hours was threatening to tango back up his esophagus and drench the backseat of Scott’s car.

  That would serve his brother right. It was Scott who was behind the wheel, grinning back at Brent in the rearview mirror every time they took another hairpin turn and somehow stayed on the road, a wild, adrenaline-infused grin that was almost as terrifying as the numbers on the dashboard. When his brother got like this, anything could happen.

  “Creo que está loco!” the girl seated on Brent’s lap squealed—alerting Brent to the fact that there was a girl seated on his lap. In the same moment, he noticed that she wasn’t wearing any pants, just bikini briefs and a T-shirt. Her ample breasts were fighting against the thin material of shirt, dime-size nipples jutting out as she took another swig from the bottle of tequila, which Brent now saw she’d brought with her from the bar. She was either terrified or excited, or both. Brent tried not to stare—because he could see now that his younger brother, Trent, jammed into the cramped backseat of the speeding BMW next to him and the girl, had gone bright red with the effort to do the same. Every now and then, however, the poor kid lost to the urge and snapped a quick glance at that heaving, perfect set.

  Brent couldn’t blame him. Because Trent really was still just a kid, even though he’d turned nineteen a few months earlier. A devout Mormon who’d just gotten back from missionary work in Chile, he wasn’t used to Scott and his antics, and he’d certainly never been in a situation like this before.

  Trent had arrived in Costa Rica only
that afternoon, about six hours earlier. Just a three-day visit, on his way back to Salt Lake City. When he’d gotten to Scott’s house, Brent had suggested they take him hiking in the jungle, or maybe to the beach. Scott had vetoed those ideas immediately: He’s just spent the past year preaching about Jesus. We need to take him downtown.

  And so they’d brought him to the worst place on earth, the same spot Scott and Hilt had taken Brent when he’d first arrived in San José. That pink hellhole full of girls.

  To Trent’s credit, he’d kept himself under control the whole time, refusing alcohol, turning away when the girls tried to throw themselves at him. At one point in the evening a Nicaraguan beauty had sat right on his lap in the bar, pulling up her tube top to reveal her naked brown chest. Trent had looked away until finally she shrugged and moved on to the next guy at the bar.

  Brent wasn’t sure, but it appeared the same Nicaraguan girl was actually now up in the front passenger seat, next to Scott, her long arms extended as she gripped the dashboard, brown fingers now turning white. At least it looked like her from the side, the same green tank. She was shouting something in Spanish too, probably about Scott’s mental state, but Brent could hardly hear her over the sound of the gravel spitting up behind the tires. Girls like her, and the one on his lap—they’d been cycling through Scott’s house at a pretty frantic pace, ever since the company had discovered TV and exploded. There was so much money coming in, it felt like there was a reason to celebrate every single night. Even though most of the twenty thousand dollars in revenue they were bringing in each day was going back into marketing, there was still enough left over to put them all in a different tax bracket—if Costa Rica had tax brackets. Brent wasn’t sure what Scott, Hilt, Shane, or Garin were bringing in, but his salary had grown from his original two thousand dollars a month to closer to ten. It was more than enough to have imported his own BMW, which would have saved him from the terrifying roller coaster he now found himself on.