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

  He knew the number of guards was overkill, but he’d discovered that it was a real thrill going around town with a crew that large and imposing. In fact, after a week surrounded by an armed security contingent, Scott found he felt naked and vulnerable without them. Someone was always there, taking orders, making sure the road was clear; the door was held open; there was never a line for a bathroom. He, Hilt, and Pete would go to a restaurant or a club, and they’d show up in a caravan of armored cars, walk in surrounded by armed men—hell, by that point, they had more bodyguards than the president of Costa Rica.

  The head of Scott’s security company was ex-military, a guy named Santos, with a scar down the left side of his face and a very dark sense of humor. He talked about killing people as easily as he talked about the weather. Garin had taken a dislike to Santos from the start, telling Scott these weren’t the sorts of people they were supposed to hang out with, that they weren’t killers or mobsters, they were Internet entrepreneurs. But Scott reminded him that they were also expats in a country where life was held extremely cheap.

  At some moments, though, Scott had to agree—Santos could be a little terrifying. When a laptop had gone missing from the office, Pete had tasked Santos with finding it. Not a day later Santos had brought the missing computer back. When Pete asked him how he’d found it, Santos had shrugged. He’d gone to a known neighborhood thief’s house, kicked down the door, waved a gun, and asked where the computer was. Then he’d gone to another suspect’s house and done the same thing. By the third door, someone had returned the missing computer.

  Garin didn’t want a guy like that hanging around, but to Scott, there was something undeniably thrilling about having a private army. And besides, with the amount of money they were generating, they were targets, whether Garin wanted to admit it or not.

  “And things got really crazy when we got to Frankfurt,” Brent continued, still going through his trip report. “Got a call just as we walked into the office, found out we needed to go to Munich to deal with another shit processor. The guy who runs Frankfurt says, ‘Don’t fly, take our cars.’ He sends us down to the basement—and there were two black Porsches parked next to each other. Holy shit, man, these were nice cars. So we take the cars and we’re doing Mach five all the way to fucking Munich.”

  Scott turned the .38 over in his lap, feeling the weight of the thing, the meaty heft of the grip. Porsches going Mach 5, armed bodyguards like his own private army to fix any problem, a couple million in revenue a day.

  Maybe everyone was right—what did he have to be paranoid about?

  You sure this is a good idea?” Shay said from the front seat as Pete stepped out of the back of the taxi, followed by the Costa Rican girl in the tight jeans and white lace top. “We probably should have called first.”

  Pete shrugged, looking up at Scott’s beautiful rented mansion on the hill. Most of the lights were still on, and there were two sedans parked out front, with matching tinted windows and armor-thickened doors and sidewalls.

  “He never answers anyway,” Pete said. “And besides, she says he’s looking forward to seeing her. Who are we to argue with that?”

  Shay laughed, getting out of the cab after him. The girl said something in Spanish, but Shay didn’t translate, so Pete just smiled at her and nodded. He looked at the girl again as she bent to fix one of the straps of her bright yellow high heels. She was a pretty girl; her nails were a little too red and long, and her lipstick was almost blindingly bright, but she carried herself well for her height, which was all of five foot four. When they’d met her at the bar at Friday’s and she’d asked if they could take her to visit Scott, they’d resisted at first. But she’d grown on them; she’d explained that she and Scott had dated a bit a few months earlier, and they still talked on the phone now and again—and she really wanted to see him. It was kind of funny—despite everything that had happened, some elements of Scott’s personality hadn’t changed at all from his SAE days. He was still the charming rogue, but now his playland seemed to have shifted from the University of Montana to the entire country of Costa Rica.

  Pete headed up the steps to the front door, followed by Shay and the girl. It dawned on him as he reached the entrance that there was a good chance Scott already had a girl in the house; he wasn’t in a serious relationship at that point, and there was hardly a week when there wasn’t some gorgeous thing in his bed. But still, this one had been very insistent, and she seemed nice; maybe she had long-term potential. Since Pete, Garin, Brent, and Hilt all were in serious relationships now, it would have been nice to see Scott locked down as well. Maybe a good girl would calm some of his growing anxieties. They would all benefit from a less excitable Scott Tom.

  Pete knocked on the door, and a meaty bodyguard by the name of Juan opened it. He smiled at Pete and Shay, then smiled wider when he saw the girl, and ushered them inside.

  Scott was in the living room, sitting on the couch watching TV. There was a six-hundred-dollar bottle of wine in his left hand. He looked up, waved at Pete and Shay, and then he too saw the girl, and smiled as wide as the bodyguard. The girl ran over to him and gave him a big, wet kiss on the lips. Scott laughed, put an arm around her waist, and without another word led her out the side door to the back lawn, still clutching the wine bottle.

  Pete looked at Shay, pleased with himself.

  “I think we might have assisted in a love connection—” he started.

  But before he’d even finished the sentence, there was a noise from the spiral stairway to his right, and he looked up to see another girl coming down the steps. She was tall, curvaceous, with long blond hair in tight braids hanging all the way down her back. She was dressed in a pink Juicy Couture sweatsuit, the front zipper down a few inches, revealing the soft curves of her ample chest.

  Crap, Pete thought. He glanced at Shay, whose eyes were wide. The girl saw them and smiled amiably.

  “Hey, guys,” she said, in heavily accented English. “Where’s Scott?”

  Pete coughed. “I don’t know. I think he went to get some beer.”

  It was a stupid response—there was probably enough alcohol in the place to satisfy an army. Before Pete could come up with another lie, the side door that led to the back lawn opened and the girl with the red nails strolled in, followed by Scott. The girl’s shirt was completely unbuttoned, and she was in the process of adjusting her bra. Scott, for his part, was fastening his pants with one hand while taking a swig from the wine bottle with the other.

  There was a frozen moment—and then suddenly the room seemed to split down the middle. The girl on the stairs came bounding down at full speed, her braids whipping out behind her. She caught the shorter girl by the throat and threw her to the ground, then leaped on top of her, screaming in Spanish. The shorter girl was screaming as well, trying to use those nails to defend herself.

  A split second later, five huge bodyguards raced into the room, two from the kitchen, one from behind Pete and Shay, two from the backyard. It took all five of them to break the girls up. Finally, one of them got the tall girl over his shoulder and carried her back toward the stairs. Two of the guards grabbed the short girl by the arms and dragged her, still kicking and screaming, out toward one of the sedans.

  Scott dropped to the couch, then put his head in his hands.

  “And how was your night?” he mustered as the sedan screeched away.

  CHAPTER 28

  It was a Wednesday afternoon, sometime after two, and Pete was in a rush as he arrived back at the office. He wasn’t in the habit of taking two-hour lunches, but there was just so much new marketing to go through he’d started using lunch as a way to meet with his affiliate reps. The way things were going, he would soon be using every hour of the day to cover all the ground he needed to. Too much business was never a bad thing, and in many ways he was in charge now—which was ironic, considering that he was the one who hadn’t initially believed in the business, had never intended to join, and was most hesitant to cont
inue after the UIGEA passed.

  Yet here he was, rushing up the stairwell to get back to his desk. He had six phone calls to make before five, and two more after that, once the Korean software people came online. All of it had to do with managing marketing projects—a couple of new television shows on cable networks, a few promotions involving poker tournaments in cities around the world. If UIGEA had scared off the public companies on the London Stock Exchange, it had done nothing to curb the hunger of U.S. television networks. Although officially the online poker sites couldn’t advertise money games, they could promote their free games, which easily linked into their real money games. AbsolutePoker.net was all free play, for fun—and that’s the site that was promoted in the ads. But AbsolutePoker.com was for money, and that was where a good portion of the players eventually ended up. Because whatever Senator Frist and the good people in New York’s U.S. Attorney’s Office believed, people still wanted to play online poker—no matter who they had to give their credit card numbers to in order to get there.

  Pete reached his floor and headed straight toward his cubicle. It was funny that he still had a cubicle; even though Scott and Hilt weren’t coming to the office anymore and were no longer officially acting in any leadership capacity, nobody had yet claimed the one walled office on the floor. Perhaps it would always remain empty; it was kind of a metaphor for the business as a whole. Absolute Poker was a machine without a brain; all the gears still worked, the money still flowed in and out—but it was all automatic now, except for what Pete was doing in marketing and what Brent still did in payment processing. Joe Norton had brought in his own management team, including a CEO and a COO, who called the shots, but in many respects Pete and Brent were the new guard; the old guard had stepped away. Scott and Hilt still cared about the company, still wanted it to succeed. But they weren’t living it anymore, day to day.

  Pete had reached the entrance to his cubicle when he saw Brent approaching from the back of the office, followed by one of their in-house programmers, a squat fireplug of a guy named Angelo, a Costa Rican they’d recently hired to take the place of one of the Americans who had resigned shortly after UIGEA had passed. If Pete remembered correctly, Angelo worked part-time in Brent’s old fraud-detection department; he checked the software for flaws and made sure the game play seemed kosher—looking for signs of player collusion, things like that. Every now and then the department found something it didn’t like, and once in a while a player would get suspended. Nothing serious, but it was important that they monitored themselves as best they could, since there was no overarching regulation and, after UIGEA, it was unlikely there would be anytime soon.

  Angelo was a head shorter than Brent, with thick glasses over sunken eyes, and he had one of those faces that always seemed to emit worry. Still, he was a good programmer, and even though he wore the Costa Rican unofficial uniform—shorts, T-shirt, and flip-flops—he was a solid worker.

  “Cheer up, Angelo,” Pete said by way of a greeting. “The rainy season will be over in four months. And then we only have the mosquitoes to look forward to.”

  It was a running joke between Pete and many of the Costa Ricans in the office; Brandi’s dislike of the third-world country had become grist for a near-constant back-and-forth complaint session. Costa Rica was hot, dirty, lawless, and heavy on insects. The United States was uptight, moralistic, overregulated, and full of religious freaks who pushed Jesus like he was Colombian cocaine. But the look on Angelo’s face seemed even more anxious than usual—he wasn’t there to sling jokes.

  “Pete,” Brent said, his voice low. “There’s something we need to talk about. It might be nothing—it’s probably nothing—”

  “What is it?”

  Brent led Pete and Angelo into Pete’s cubicle and ushered the programmer into Pete’s seat. Angelo went to work on the keyboard, pulling up a website. Pete recognized it immediately as one of the more prominent poker blogs—a website called Two Plus Two. As a poker marketer, Pete knew the site well; the online poker community was pretty tight-knit and often rabid, and Pete had spent a lot of time reading through all the blog sites, although recently, he’d been too busy with all of the current promotional work to check in on them.

  “What is it now? Someone complaining about our table felts again? Thinks they look too plush? Or is someone whining about not getting a withdrawal on time? If they knew the sleazy fucks we deal with since Neteller went down—”

  “No, it’s not that,” Brent said. “Angelo?”

  The Costa Rican began gesturing toward the screen. “This came to my attention a couple months ago, but I’ve been hoping it would just go away, as these things often do. Just people griping because they lost. But, well, it hasn’t gone away; it’s actually just getting bigger—”

  “Spit it out,” Pete said.

  “There’s been a bunch of players complaining on one of the High Limit tournament forums that three other players on Absolute Poker are winning a ridiculous amount, playing pretty suspiciously.”

  Pete cocked his head. “What do you mean, suspiciously?”

  “Playing almost every hand pre-flop. Then, on the river, when they get bluffed, they seem to always call or raise. If their competition has good hands, they almost always fold. Like I said, a little suspicious. Anyway, after posting about it, a bunch of players analyzed the play history as much as they could, and now they’ve e-mailed us, asking us to take a look and see what the hell is going on.”

  Pete nodded. The truth was, this sort of thing happened all the time—accusations of cheating, either by other players or by the site itself. Usually the accusations were unfounded; everybody who’d ever lost in a casino believed, deep down, that the casino must be cheating. In games that employed some level of chance, strange things happened—and most of the time those strange things looked like cheating. But this sounded like a little more than common paranoia.

  “And what did we find?”

  Angelo shrugged. “Nothing yet. We’re still analyzing all the hand history. It’s going to take some time. But the idea that there’s a superuser out there—”

  He didn’t need to finish the thought. Superuser accounts—accounts that could see all the cards as they were dealt, kind of like God mode on a video game—were the ultimate boogeyman of online poker; the idea that there were people on the inside, able to play so unfairly—it wasn’t something anyone who worked in the industry ever wanted to even mention. Even the rumor of such an account existing could destroy an online poker company, because the whole industry was built on trust. If the players couldn’t trust the online poker companies to keep the game fair, they were throwing their money away. If such a rumor spread on online forums, people would leave in droves. There would be a run on the bank.

  There was a reason Absolute Poker had always been at the top of the industry’s rating lists: it took the security of its game very seriously.

  “Send out a press release,” Pete said, both to Brent and the engineer. “Explain that we’ve looked into this, that our investigation is ongoing—but that there is zero evidence that there’s any cheating going on, or that anything like a superuser exists in our software. Nip this in the bud. A rumor like this could kill us.”

  “But what if—” Brent started. Pete shook his head.

  “No what-ifs. Even a whiff of something like this can cost us millions. This has to end here. These guys are just jerking each other off, trying to find a reason why they lost money. Everyone gets paranoid when they lose. It’s human nature.”

  Pete waited for them to file out of his cubicle, then headed toward his phone. He couldn’t spend any more time on bullshit accusations from a poker forum. He had TV accounts to deal with.

  Like he said, this had to end here.

  A few days later Angelo and Brent were back in Pete’s cubicle—and this time, both their expressions were equally grim. Not only had the situation not ended with the press release, it had gotten a whole lot worse. In fact, it had turned into some
thing that might bring the entire company down.

  “This can’t be right,” Pete was saying as he dropped into his office chair. He was only a few pages into the report Angelo had pulled together about what was going on, but already he could see—it was worse than anything he could have imagined.

  “I’m afraid it is,” Brent said. He looked at Angelo, who nodded.

  “Does anybody else know about this yet?” Pete said.

  “You mean apart from everybody on the poker blogs?”

  Pete swallowed. His face was heating up, and he could feel the sweat beading on the back of his neck. “I mean Scott.”

  Brent shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  They’d have to bring it to him right away. Because if what he was looking at was true, even just the broad strokes, it was a disaster.

  According to Angelo’s report, the Absolute Poker press release had landed in the online forums like a lead balloon, but at first the complaints that continued to crop up all over the blogs were just that—complaints, without evidence, just more griping by losing players.

  But then things took an unusual turn. A new player, who’d been hitting the AbsolutePoker.com tournaments under the handle CrazyMarco, had previously lost another tournament under what he considered to be suspicious terms. A player named Potripper had played almost all his hands pre-flop, then had played almost perfectly from there on—folding whenever he was up against a better hand, betting when he had the higher cards. It was almost as though he could see what everyone was getting dealt.