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

  At the time, CrazyMarco had e-mailed customer service at Absolute Poker, asking for a play history for Potripper and the tournament. It turned out that, for whatever reason—either by mistake or on purpose—someone at Absolute Poker had e-mailed back an Excel file including the entire play history—everyone’s cards, the history and information on everyone in the tournament’s e-mail accounts. This was a staggering breach of protocol; even worse, when CrazyMarco eventually looked through the file—spurred on by the Absolute Poker press release, which he felt had brushed aside a legitimate suspicion of cheating—he discovered that Potripper had indeed been cheating somehow. Playing the way he was playing simply by chance or skill would have been like winning the lottery ten times in a row. The only thing that explained his play was that somehow he could see everyone’s cards, as they were dealt.

  That was bad enough, but then things got really ugly.

  Because upon analyzing the IP addresses and user details that had been provided by the anonymous Absolute Poker employee along with the hand history, it appeared that there was an observer account—number 363, to be exact—associated with Potripper’s winning play—and that both 363 and Potripper’s IPs could be traced back to Costa Rica. Once the blogger sleuths got hold of that information, it was just a few more steps, a little more research—and they’d uncovered the e-mail associated with account 363.

  That e-mail was scott@rivieraltd.com. And according to the bloggers, that e-mail linked directly to the founder of Absolute Poker.

  Scott Tom.

  CHAPTER 29

  Eight hundred thousand dollars. He really screwed us. He really screwed me.”

  Pete felt like he was in the presence of a volcano that was seconds from erupting. A moment of tense silence swept through the room as everyone at the dining room table watched Scott struggling to regain control of his features. Pete had seen Scott mad before—even in college the guy could be volatile—but this was different. This was terrifying.

  The moment had been building all through dinner. Even though the conversation had remained light, avoiding the obvious topic—the reason for the get-together in Scott’s house—Pete could see the emotion roiling behind Scott’s green eyes. By the time dessert was served, it was obvious he was using every ounce of willpower to keep that emotion from bursting forth until the dishes had been cleared and the wives and girlfriends had retired to the living room, the better to avoid getting hit in the crossfire.

  Scott had been upset when Pete and Brent first told him about the discovery of the cheating scandal and where the players’ intricate sleuthing had led them. Now that he’d had a chance to piece together what had happened himself—and had discovered how his name and reputation had been dragged into the depths of the scandal, without his knowledge—he was absolutely livid.

  The e-mail had indeed been linked to his profile, though it was an e-mail he hadn’t used for a long time. And the 363 account, it turned out, was in fact an old account also linked to him that had been deactivated years ago; it had been one of the employee accounts the Koreans had initially given them to keep tabs on the beta test, way back when they had first launched AbsolutePoker.com. Furthermore, when they traced the IPs of where number 363 and Potripper were being employed, it appeared that both accounts were being run through ports in computer networks linked through Absolute Poker’s home servers: the cheating was coming from inside the house, so to speak.

  Eventually Scott had been able to piece together what had happened. Sometime, perhaps as early as summer of 2007, a database programmer in Korea attempting to speed up back-end communication routines had inadvertently disabled the time delay in the software used to monitor game play. At some point after that an employee in Costa Rica had discovered this mistake—and had realized that with no time delay built in, it would be possible to see the cards as they were dealt, in real time. This employee had further realized that by using one of the old employee player accounts—number 363, to be specific—he could escape notice, because the old accounts often had large money balances. And since the account was linked to management, it wouldn’t catch the attention of anyone in the Fraud Department, no matter how often it was being played.

  From there, it hadn’t taken long for Scott to discover the cheater himself. Scott hadn’t been to the Absolute Poker offices for some time, and neither Pete nor Brent had made use of his computers since he’d stepped back from his official leadership role—but that didn’t mean the computers had lain dormant. It turned out that one of the operation managers who’d worked part-time under Angelo had engaged account number 363. When he’d realized how easily he could beat the game, seeing all the cards as they were dealt, he’d gone to work with an unknown number of accomplices and had managed to swindle almost eight hundred thousand dollars from tournament players, observing the cards with account 363, then parroting that information to other handles—Potripper among them.

  Worst of all, he’d done all this while inadvertently implicating Scott and the Absolute Poker headquarters.

  It was appalling, and personally devastating to Scott, whose reputation was now being trashed on the poker blogs. The perception that he would somehow knowingly be involved in betraying the company he’d built—a company that was now bringing in two million dollars a day—by cheating his players was difficult to bear.

  They’d immediately fired the person responsible, who besides being an operation manager was a close friend of Scott’s—and had finally admitted to the public that they’d discovered the source of the scandal and had done their best to fix the software security issues. They had also responded by paying back anyone who had played against the cheating player accounts. But it wasn’t enough, and they all knew it. Online poker was an unregulated industry; trust was something companies earned, and once players stopped trusting a company, they found somewhere else to play.

  It was Pete who finally broke the silence at the table—surprising himself, because he couldn’t even match Scott’s angry glare.

  “Let’s look at this rationally. This is out now. It’s been picked up by news organizations. The blogs, newspapers, it’s gonna be on goddamn 60 Minutes. We’ve already had a run on the bank. A week ago we were averaging two million dollars in revenue a day. Now that’s been cut by more than fifteen percent. We’re seeing withdrawals of around eight hundred thousand—a day.”

  The numbers were sobering. Pete had been monitoring the press and the blogs, and the issue felt like it was only growing, not going away. Absolute Poker was being linked in everybody’s mind with cheating. This scandal was ruining the brand they had worked so hard to build.

  “People are scared,” Pete continued. He wasn’t sugarcoating it, that was for sure. “The press is getting worse. At the end of the day, this is the largest online scandal in the history of gaming. It’s a big deal.”

  “I know it’s a big deal,” Scott shot back. “And we’re paying everyone back who lost. Hell, we’re paying people back who would have lost anyway, even if this shithead hadn’t cheated.”

  “That’s not the point. It isn’t really about how much was stolen. These guys sitting around playing poker twenty hours a day have nothing better to do than write and talk about this shit. This has become a soap opera. Ninety-nine percent of what everyone is saying is false—but we can’t ignore the one percent that was true.”

  “We’re getting goddamn death threats, Scott,” Brent said, his voice so low it was almost a whisper.

  Everyone looked at Scott, who finally laced his fingers together against the table, getting his anger in check. He spoke carefully, picking his words as if with tongs.

  “I’m not even running things anymore. I’ve been gone awhile.”

  He seemed to resolve something internally; it was as if a shade was drawing shut behind his bright green eyes.

  “Maybe it’s time I made it official.”

  Scott understood that if they didn’t get this scandal under control and behind them, it would cost the compan
y much more than the money the cheater had stolen. But more important to Scott than the money was the company he had built, with his sweat and his blood and his passion—and he didn’t want to watch it disintegrate.

  He cared too much to ever let that happen.

  The North American Sabreliner twin turbojet sputtered to life, then began rolling slowly toward the private strip of runway on the back lot of Santamaría International Airport. Up in the cockpit, the two pilots were finishing up their flight check, speaking in Spanish with each other and the tower, their voices carrying back through the open cabin of the midsize private business jet to where Scott, Hilt, Hilt’s gorgeous blond wife, and Scott’s girlfriend were opening a three-hundred-dollar bottle of champagne.

  It was taking all four of them to attend to the bottle, because they were already a little buzzed, even though it was half past noon on a Monday. It had been a long weekend already, but they were now officially on vacation, taxiing toward the first hop on a weeklong Caribbean tour. The trip would begin with a refueling stop in Colombia, then extend through a handful of islands that promised white-sand beaches, palm trees, infinity pools, five-star hotels—and limited access to wireless networks.

  It was a bittersweet moment for Scott, seated by the window in the back of the small plane, one hand on his girlfriend’s arm, the other gripping a crystal champagne flute. Officially stepping down from his role at Absolute Poker had been more difficult than he’d ever let on to any of his friends; only his father knew the torment he had gone through as he’d made his leaving known to the shareholders and packed away whatever remained of his life at the company into cardboard boxes to be stored in the basement of his rented home. He’d never dreamed of his company growing so big—but he’d also never imagined that one day he would have to step aside, especially under such dark circumstances. Not just the cheating scandal caused by one of his employees, but what the UIGEA had wrought. Only his dad fully knew how painful it had been for Scott to watch himself go from being an Internet wunderkind, days away from being a billionaire, to having to separate himself from the company, forced to explain away his association with an entire industry that had overnight been tarnished by what he saw as an unfair and hypocritical act of Congress.

  But here he was, in the back of a private jet with his closest confidant, who was struggling with the champagne cork as the plane bumped and jerked over the poorly paved runway.

  The private plane had been Hilt’s idea; none of them had ever been in a private plane before, and it just seemed fitting. They were going out in style. At the moment, Scott didn’t want to think about anything other than the trip to those white-sand beaches, those five-star hotels.

  “Here we go!” Hilt shouted over the rumble of the twin turbojets churning to full power. They’d turned down the runway and were now gaining speed. There was a loud pop, startling Scott, but then he saw the cork pinging off the cabin ceiling and laughed. He tried to hold his glass steady as Hilt poured the champagne.

  Then he turned forward, toasting himself as he watched the front of the plane lift upward, inch by inch, the front wheels coming off the runway, the nose tilting toward the sky.

  And suddenly, a violent shudder reverberated down the right side of the cabin. Before any of them could react, the nose of the plane plunged back down to the runway—and there was an incredible noise, like a gun going off, as the tires blew. The pilots were screaming in Spanish, and Scott dropped his champagne glass, gripping the seat in front of him. He could see the pavement still flashing by through the front windshield. They had to be going 150 miles per hour, skidding on those trashed tires, the entire plane shaking and jagging like it was about to tear itself apart—and even worse, Scott could now see the end of that runway, a grassy field extending toward a fence and a grouping of what appeared to be steel pylons . . .

  And then the plane hurtled off the pavement and into the field. A second later, they slammed into the first pylon; the windshield shattered inward, an entire section of the plane’s nose shearing off. The cabin dipped down, and then they were spinning. One of the wings was caught in the grass, and jet fuel sprayed in through the cockpit, drenching the interior of the cabin. Part of the wing snapped off—and then everything went still. The plane was tilted halfway over, and there was a gaping hole where the cabin door used to be.

  Scott’s mind went blank as his reflexes took over. He grabbed his girlfriend in one hand, yanking her out of her seat belt. Then he was diving forward over the seats. Hilt and his wife were right behind him as he leaped through the opening and landed feetfirst in a ditch, two feet deep in noxious jet fuel.

  All four of them lost their footing as they struggled to crawl out of the ditch, but they didn’t stop moving until they were a good three hundred yards from the wrecked plane. When Scott looked back, he saw the first fire truck pulling up. He dropped to his knees on the grass, watching with Hilt and the girls as the fire truck sprayed the crash site with foam from a giant, high-powered hose. They were all bleeding from scratches on their hands and faces, and they reeked of jet fuel—but somehow, they were alive.

  By the time they were released from the hospital—more a precautionary stay than due to the severity of their cuts and bruises—word of the accident had already made it onto a variety of online local and international news sites and was rapidly spreading through the blogs. Scott’s phone was gone, lost somewhere in the wreckage, which was now entirely presided over by agents from the FAA, since it had been an American-built airplane. They had to use Hilt’s phone to check in with everyone to tell them that they were okay. By the second person they’d called, they’d realized that the story, spreading electronically at first, but eventually into newspapers as well, was turning into something out of a Hollywood thriller.

  “This is ridiculous,” Hilt said as he hung up the phone. “Now they’re reporting that there was three million dollars and a bunch of coke in a suitcase in the back of the plane, and that you’re on the run to Colombia. I’ve never gone near cocaine—and where the hell did they get the three million dollars?”

  Scott shook his head, bewildered. He was watching an urban legend generating right in front of him, and there was nothing he could do about it. What the hell—it was just too perfect to fight. A high-flying American cowboy from Montana, founder of an online poker empire, fleeing Costa Rica to Colombia with a suitcase filled with millions of dollars and mountains of coke.

  “If you’ve got to go out,” he said finally, laughing, pulling at one of the bandages on his hands, “may as well go out with a bang.”

  CHAPTER 30

  If Pete had thought things would return to normal after Scott exited in his faux blaze of glory, he couldn’t have been more wrong. The Absolute Poker cheating scandal that the bloggers had uncovered, as bad as it was, was only the tip of a much, much larger iceberg. This time, however, they were facing a problem they hadn’t created, but had inherited—or, more accurately, had bought.

  The whispers had started right after Barcelona, but everyone had been too busy dealing with the massive jump in their business and the payment-processing fallout of UIGEA to take any real notice. Just as with the Absolute Poker scandal, the whispers were coming from players, via poker blogs; but this time, as soon as the rumors reached Pete in his cubicle in San José, he took them extremely seriously and reacted as quickly as he could. He’d learned his lesson—covering up suspicions of scandal only made the scandal worse—and this time the scandal appeared to be so much bigger from the outset that no number of press releases would make it go away. It would take months to get to the core of what had happened, but once Pete had his proof, he intended to act, and to put everything out in the open, as clearly as he could.

  When the time finally came, he turned the office that Scott no longer used in their San José headquarters into a sort of war room. The walls were covered in charts and graphs, most culled from the blog sites, a few developed by his own in-house software guys. He’d set up a small round table
in the center of the room, which he, Brent, and Angelo were now seated around. Computer printouts, faxes, and studies sent from Korea were piled high around them; many of the detailed reports that went along with the studies were actually in Korean, but Pete had gone through enough of it over the phone with C.J. that he knew the gist of what they had found.

  It had taken thirty people, and more than a million dollars in investigative fees, to build the evidence on the table in front of them. And Pete was now certain; just as many bloggers and players had been posting over the previous six months, there was a continuing and severe cheating scandal taking place at the tables of UltimateBet.com. The Absolute Poker cheating scandal had been relatively short-lived and had cost players between six and eight hundred thousand dollars. The Ultimate Bet scandal, according to Pete’s research, had possibly gone on for years, dating all the way back to at least 2005, and had probably resulted in many millions of dollars stolen from players—perhaps between ten and twenty million, if not more.

  Even worse, Pete and his investigators believed that the cheating went all the way up to the top levels of the Ultimate Bet corporate brass. Pulling IP addresses had given them names and profiles way up in the hierarchy of their former competitor. Once he’d compiled the evidence, Pete had confronted UB’s leadership directly; he’d shown them his evidence of back-door programs, irregular play, chip dumping—all of it. And they’d just dug in their heels. But there was no way Pete could let this go.

  It was too staggering a find. It was only a matter of time before it became public, because the players analyzing the suspicious play of many Ultimate Bet accounts were uncovering more evidence of cheating every day. Pete also intended to put out a press release about what he’d found, and to get the Kahnawake Gaming Commission involved. The news was going to seriously impact the business—and the value of the entire company.