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

  “Sorry?”

  “You own it,” Brent said. “Twenty-eight hundred dollars to go, and I can’t pay it—so it’s yours. It’s out front.”

  “Sir—”

  “Call it a voluntary repossession. Be careful, the ignition sticks a little bit. I’d love to stay and chat, but I don’t have the time. I’m moving to Costa Rica.”

  Before the woman could respond, he turned and headed back toward the glass exit, smiling as he went.

  My God my God my God this is awesome, Brent thought as he spilled out of Santamaría International and into the overwhelming chaos, noise, and heat. He felt himself pulled in every direction at once, with people jostling him as they looked for their rides, taxi drivers yanking at his sleeves, kids trying to sell him handmade trinkets, people whispering offers to him for everything from booze to drugs to girls—and then he broke free from the crowd for a moment and saw Scott and Hilt over on the other side of the curb, leaning against a guardrail and just watching him. Both had big grins on their faces.

  Brent composed himself as best he could and strolled toward them, flattening his tie against the buttons of his shirt. His backpack—all he had brought with him, filled with the few items of clothing that he hadn’t sold—was sticking to his back because of the heat and humidity, but he didn’t care. Seeing Scott there, waiting for him, took all the worry away. He’d have followed his older brother to the ends of the earth—which, looking around, seemed to be exactly where he was.

  “Welcome to Costa Rica,” Scott said, leaping off the guardrail to shake his hand. “And I see you came dressed to impress.”

  “I figured you’d want me to hit the ground running,” Brent responded, greeting Hilt as well. Then they led him to a taxi that was waiting a few yards down the curb. It was obvious Scott knew the driver, who greeted him with a smile and a few words of Spanish. Brent couldn’t tell whether Scott understood the guy, but either way, a moment later the three of them crowded into the back, and the cab took off like a rocket, zero to warp speed in less than three seconds.

  “I mean, I’ve almost been fired once already, and I haven’t even started working.”

  Hilt laughed, glancing at Scott. “You almost fired your own brother?”

  “Hell,” Scott said as the taxi narrowly avoided a truck carrying what looked to be bushels of bananas, then took a curve so fast it felt like they were up on two wheels, “we were all almost out of a job a week ago. Half our money, gone in the blink of an eye. Only managed to save the other half by pulling most of it out of the bank in St. Lucia, before it went bust like the one in Dominica.”

  Brent had heard about that from Phil. He’d told Brent how Scott had narrowly avoided full ruin by getting about three hundred thousand dollars out of the St. Lucia bank—only to hear that the St. Lucia bank then went under as well, just a couple of hours after he’d succeeded with the transfer.

  “Even so,” Scott continued, “that was nearly the end. We almost packed everything up and went home.”

  “But you didn’t,” Brent said, pressing his face against the window to get a better glimpse of the low buildings flashing by.

  “Nope,” his brother said, his eyes narrow. “We did the fucking opposite. We went all in. Decided to launch the site anyway, and then hit the investors up again, as hard as we could. Put a whole new valuation on the company, brought in as many new shareholders as we could find.”

  Brent was impressed, though he knew his brother well enough to understand: Scott didn’t give up—no matter how bad things might be, well, he’d been through worse.

  “We’ve revalued the company at four million,” Hilt explained. “And the investors pitched in another seven hundred fifty thousand, so we’ve got over a million to spend on advertising and development. So we’re kicking things up.”

  “And the site?” Brent asked. He’d logged on to it every night, waiting for Scott to finally hire him. He loved the way it looked, and although he wasn’t really a poker player like his brother, he enjoyed the game play. He mostly lost, but never much, maybe thirty or forty bucks in total.

  “Starting small, but still, the money has started to trickle in. We’ve been registering about fifty players a day. Most of those are playing for fun, but about one in ten puts down a credit card to play with real money. It’s adding up to about a hundred bucks a day in our rake, but it’s a start. As long as it keeps the board of directors happy, it’s all good.”

  Brent looked at his brother. “We have a board of directors?”

  Scott pointed to himself and Hilt. “And Garin, Shane, Phil, and a bunch of Hilt’s people back in Florida. We’re doing everything as by-the-book as we can, even though there isn’t much regulation from anyone outside the company. Hell, we’d love some regulation, but the industry seems to work this way, so we need to do these things ourselves.”

  Brent had just graduated college—he didn’t know much about business or how a company like this was supposed to be structured. But he could tell Hilt and his brother took these things very seriously. Then again, they weren’t much older than he, and they were building their company on what felt like the edge of the world.

  Outside the window, the scene was becoming increasingly urban, with storefronts and boxy apartment buildings, traffic jams and blinking streetlights. This didn’t look like the upscale residential suburb his brother had described on the phone.

  “Are we heading to the house?” he asked. He really was eager to get started working. As Absolute Poker’s new director of customer service, he had a whole department to run.

  Scott winked at him, then pointed out the front windshield of the cab. “Not exactly.”

  Brent squinted against the sun and saw a huge pink hotel rising behind a crowded sidewalk. His gaze slid up the seven stories to the marquee at the top of the building.

  “The Hotel Del Rey,” he read cautiously. “Are you checking me into a hotel?”

  Again Scott winked.

  “Not exactly,” he repeated.

  Six hours later Brent opened his eyes just in time to see the sidewalk hurtling toward his face. He managed to get one hand out, catching himself inches before he hit, and rolled onto his shoulder, then over onto his back, his feet straight up in the air. Above his leather loafers, he could see that the sky had somehow gone black. He had no idea how it had switched from day to night in what felt like a few seconds; the last thing he remembered clearly was stepping into that damn pink hotel, his brother and Hilt urging him on from behind. He’d lost sight of them when the first girl grabbed him by the hand, right inside the Del Rey’s entrance, and he hadn’t seen either of them since. Twelve hours ago he was handing his car keys over to a bank teller in Missoula, Montana. Now he was on a Costa Rican sidewalk, the sky between his feet. All in all, it had been a pretty good day.

  Then he heard laughter, and female voices speaking Spanish. He followed the sound and realized why he was lying on the sidewalk. He’d obviously fallen out of the taxi when one of the girls had opened the door. There were two of them, the girls: one tall with dark skin and incredibly long legs, made even longer by her six-inch see-through heels; the other only about five feet tall, with short blond hair and enormous breasts. The girl in the heels was paying the taxi driver—out of Brent’s wallet, he realized—while the other one leaned over Brent, poking at his chest.

  “You fall down,” she said in heavily accented English.

  “I fall down,” Brent responded. He let her pull him to his feet. He was wobbly, but to his surprise, he found that he could, in fact, stand. As the taxi pulled away from the curb, he took the shorter girl in one arm and the tall, dark-skinned girl in the other. He had no recollection of where or how he had met them, but he could see that they were beautiful, and that they liked to share. Maybe this sort of thing had happened to guys like Scott in college, but Brent had never been in this situation before. And he liked it.

  “Is your house?” the shorter girl asked.

  With some difficulty
, Brent peered out through the darkness, making out what appeared to be a two-story home directly in front of them. It looked just like the house Scott and Hilt had described when they’d given him the directions he was to use with the taxi drivers, but still he was amazed that he had gotten there on his own. Well, he’d had a little help. He had no idea how much he was going to have to pay the girls, but the fact that the taller girl was still holding his wallet was a pretty bad sign.

  “I have no idea,” Brent said honestly. “I hope so.”

  He pulled the two girls tight to his sides and started up the hill to the house’s front door.

  The porch light came on as he got close, and before he could even knock, or find a doorbell, or just kick the damn thing in, the door swung inward. Garin was standing in the doorway, all ten feet of him, with a goofy smile on his face.

  “Brent, man. You made it. Welcome to the house. Scott was about to send out the Costa Rican air force to find you.”

  Brent smiled back at him and started forward, but Garin held out a hand, blocking his way. “Sorry, man. You can come in, but the girls can’t.”

  Brent stared at the hand. It looked ten times as large as it was supposed to. “What do you mean?”

  “No girls allowed in the house. It’s an official rule.”

  “But . . .” Brent started. He gestured at the tall girl, then the other. “Two of them, Garin. There are two of them.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. You’ll have to call them a cab.”

  Brent couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but Garin only shrugged. “Sorry, man. House rules.”

  It took another fifteen minutes for the taxi to return to collect the girls. By the time Brent finally made it inside the house, he was halfway to sober. Still a little angry, but clearheaded enough not to make a big deal out of it. If Scott could acquiesce to the no-girls rule, then he certainly could. He was Mormon, after all.

  He took in the cubicles that sectioned up the living room, counting the wires and computers. It was an impressive sight. He spotted Shane at one of the cubicles, plugging away, his ear to a phone. Maybe he was on with Korea, or perhaps he was dealing with the server. A couple of the other computers were on and running, the screens filled with numbers. One of them, Brent knew, was keeping live track of people signing on to the site and especially new registrations. Every morning, Scott had told him, they looked at that number, and if it was high enough, they had a mini celebration. It was a sort of ritual—no matter how drunk they got the night before, the team checked the registration numbers together.

  “This place looks great,” Brent said. “So where’s my department?”

  Garin’s smile got even wider. With a flourish, he pointed to a short side table right inside the door. There was a computer on it, and a phone right next to the monitor. Someone had placed a low stool in front of the keyboard, set almost all the way down to the floor.

  Brent stared at the table, then back at Garin. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Welcome to the Customer Service Department.”

  Brent closed his eyes. The whole department was him. He didn’t even have a desk. His chair was a stool.

  “That computer has about two hundred e-mails on it, most of them complaints,” Garin continued. “There will be a hundred more tomorrow, guaranteed.”

  Brent opened his eyes, sighing. Scott was probably getting a big laugh out of the situation, but Brent decided then and there he wasn’t going to say a word; he was just going to take it in stride.

  “So what do I do with those e-mails, exactly?”

  “You answer them.”

  Garin patted him on the back, then headed for the kitchen. Drunk as he still was, Brent lowered himself onto the stool. He was determined to look on the bright side. He still was the director of customer service. Even if it was a department of one. He was the director of himself.

  He couldn’t help laughing as he powered up the computer and started answering those damn e-mails.

  CHAPTER 15

  Six months flashed by in a blur of eighteen-hour days: Brent chained to that coffee table; Scott, Garin, Shane, and Hilt camped out in their cubicles. Every morning they rolled out of bed, then gathered around Scott’s screen to see how many new players had registered, how many new real-money accounts had been deposited. Then phone calls with potential investors, shareholders, board members. Reading through e-mails from the Koreans. Impromptu meetings about new promotional ideas—free roll tournaments, where players could join for no charge and play for cash prizes, advertising opportunities on various poker blogs, in online poker magazines, via e-mail blasts . . .

  Every now and then, when someone realized the refrigerator was empty, straws were drawn to see who would make the five-mile walk to the nearest supermarket, lugging home energy drinks, rice, beans, pasta, and beer in oversize plastic bags.

  And when there was something to celebrate—the thousandth account, the first day with three hundred dollars in rakes, a good review in a poker blog—late nights at the Del Rey, and then, when that started to get old, scouting trips to a half dozen other clubs, bars, and casinos that pockmarked downtown San José. Sometimes the party went all night long, ending in some hotel room with a half dozen naked ticas—Costa Rican girls, some of whom became girlfriends, others who were just there for the alcohol—and a buffet of other vices.

  Even so, the focus was always on their work. No matter how late the party ran, there was an unwritten rule in the house—you were at your post the next morning, or you weren’t getting paid. At first, the salaries were paltry—a couple thousand a month, barely enough to cover their lifestyle. As the site grew, and its valuation doubled again, those salaries began to change. Three thousand a month, then five thousand. Back in the States those numbers still wouldn’t raise many eyebrows, but in Costa Rica the guys were fast on their way to becoming what all the ticas assumed they were—rich expat Americans, living the expat way.

  Brent knew that something had changed, that the bootstrap feel of the company was being left behind, when Scott had a BMW 3 Series convertible imported—delivered directly to the house by a driver who actually asked if they were the legendary gringos who had founded Paradise Poker, telling him the same story Scott and the group had heard when they first toured the country about the shadowy foreigners who supposedly lived somewhere in the hills above San José and were shuttled around by bodyguards, though in this retelling it was Range Rovers with tinted windows instead of Escalades. When the BMW was followed by the purchase of two souped-up motorcycles, a Kawasaki Ninja for Shane and a bright red racing Ducati for Scott, it was just more evidence that things were building faster than any of them had expected.

  Still, though the money was changing and the site was growing in popularity—getting more good reviews all over the Web for being clean, fast, and trustworthy, always paying its accounts quickly and honestly, even in an industry that was completely unregulated—Brent’s life revolved around those e-mails. He got complaints about everything from Internet outages to slow deals, from nitpicky objections to the visual layout of a game table to reports of perceived abuse from other players. And, of course, numerous accusations of cheating by other players, by imagined robot players—artificially intelligent software that some magazine or another had suggested might be trolling the fledgling Internet sites—and sometimes even by the site itself. It was an early lesson for Brent, one that he assumed every casino operator in Vegas had learned the minute they offered their first game: when people lost money, their first instinct was always to suspect foul play. Game of chance, game of skill—it didn’t matter; it was rare when players took losing gracefully. But Brent always did his best to address the complaints, no matter how arbitrary they seemed.

  Even so, it was a mind-numbing, soul-crushing job. As more money came in, as Absolute Poker went from a fledgling little company with a handful of players to a viable business with enough investment to support a valuation nearing six million dollars, Brent decide
d it was time for a change.

  Thankfully for him, he wasn’t the only one to feel that way.

  And we are up and running!”

  The applause was near deafening, accentuated by the low ceilings and the freshly painted, newly plastered walls. Someone popped a bottle of champagne, the cork flying in a low arc that narrowly sailed over the bank of cubicles and threaded between Scott and Hilt, who were standing at the head of the long, rectangular room. Behind them, a pair of windows looked out over a poorly lit parking lot. From where Brent was sitting, behind a computer screen at one of the cubicles, he could count at least twelve cars in the lot, including Scott’s BMW, as well as two motorcycles—Shane’s Ninja and a Honda owned by one of the directors of the sports book that took up the top two floors above them.

  The building wasn’t grand—it was really just a concrete, glass, and plaster box in a strip mall near downtown San José—but it was a hell of an improvement on the home office. Instead of seeming like a fraternity, the company now felt like a corporate business. Other than the dress code, that is; the Costa Rican employees, who made up two-thirds of the room, were mostly in short-sleeved shirts, shorts, and even flip-flops. Scott was dressed similarly; he’d taken to wearing flip-flops almost everywhere, even when they went out to fancy restaurants—which they did almost every Friday, now that things were going so well.

  But even with the flip-flops, nobody would have mistaken the place for the SAE house anymore. There were at least thirty people moving about, engaged in some sort of job or another. Thirty people who were getting paychecks, having their health and dental paid for, setting up company trips to the beach, even taking part in the homeless charity—centered in a soup kitchen in one of the more depressing San José slums—that Brent had talked the other guys into helping him set up. They were a part of the community now, and Brent felt it was important to make sure their lives revolved around something other than printing money.