THE MORNING OF April 15, 2011 was one of those perfect mornings at the beach, the kind of day when all seems right in the world. Aaron Been, a rising star in the burgeoning world of online poker, was splashing in the surf with his new girlfriend, Katherine, and a few of their friends on a visit to St. George Island, off north-western Florida. When they clambered ashore, a friend of Been’s approached with a look of concern on his face and asked, “Hey, did you hear the news?” The friend told him that there was something on the radio about online poker getting shut down. Been shook his head and said, “No, that can’t be right.” His friend wasn’t a poker player, and Been guessed that he was simply confused; false rumours of online poker’s demise had circulated often enough over the years that Been had learned to ignore them. Still, for Been, a quiet, nagging sense of uneasiness began to darken an otherwise beautiful day.
Hours later, when Been got back to his Tallahassee apartment, opened his laptop, and logged on to PokerStars.net, he was greeted by a message from the Department of Justice declaring that the domain had been seized for violation of the Illegal Gambling Business Act. Stomach churning, he quickly went to the Full Tilt Poker and Ultimate Bet sites. Both bore the same stark message. The online poker forum Two Plus Two was awash with panicked postings. Frantic instant messages from friends in the poker world began to flash across his screen. Many of them had tens of thousands – for some, hundreds of thousands, even millions – of dollars in online poker accounts that could now be the property of the US government. For all of them, online poker was their livelihood, their day job, and their consuming passion. Overnight, their lives had been thrown into turmoil.
If someone could read between the lines and explain what was happening, Been figured, it would be his close friend J.C. Alvarado, the talented Mexican-born poker prodigy who’d been his roommate for the previous couple of years in Las Vegas. Alvarado – olive-skinned and athletic, known to be kind-hearted and gregarious – got right to it. “Game over,” he told his friend. “The poker world as we know it has come to an end.” Alvarado’s gut feeling was dead-on – April 15 soon became known as Black Friday, as life-altering for poker players as stock market crashes had been for traders, bankers, and corporate investors. But before hanging up, Alvarado gave Been a few words of reassurance: “Don’t worry, we’ll come up with a plan. Remember: we’re down but not out.”
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