Have any of you guys read this yet...........I am sure the Costa Rica nitelife is spot on.
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Ben Mezrich, the author of "Busting Vegas" (2006) and "The Accidental Billionaires" (2009), efficiently sketches the legal gray areas that poker sites occupied before and after Black Friday. He also exposes the hypocrisy of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which nanny-state Republicans sneaked into law by attaching it at the last minute to the SAFE Port Act of 2006. (The act made it a crime to accept payments in connection with "unlawful Internet gambling" but failed to define "unlawful gambling.") Yet such crucial matters take up only a small fraction of "Straight Flush," a garish and misleading book for which a more accurate title would be "Busted Flush Draw." This is a story of failure, tendered as almost its opposite.
Absolute's ringleader is an overconfident kid named Scott Tom. His partners include Garin Gustafson, Shane Blackford, and Hilt Tatum. We get to know all the partners by name while the Koreans and Costa Ricans they do business with remain mostly anonymous. Women don't rate identification beyond "balcony babes," "some gorgeous thing" or just "talent." As Team Absolute wallows in "Hangover"-esque debauchery, Mr. Mezrich needlessly gooses their antics with cartoonish inanities: a cab taking off from a curb "like a rocket, zero to warp speed in less than three seconds" or a Porsche cruising at "Mach 5," which is around 3,691 miles per hour.
Playing to low-grade-level readers impressed by the most clichéd trappings of success, the author houses his subjects not in mansions but in "incredible" mansions. Mr. Gustafson's sales pitches, needless to say, are "incredibly convincing." If another partner "had learned anything over the past seven years, it was that there were very few things in life that were actually black and white; most things tended to be a mix of both."
Enlarge Image
[h=3]Straight Flush[/h]By Ben Mezrich
(William Morrow, 288 pages, $27.99)
Simplistic writing aside, Mr. Mezrich's wobbly command of poker's lingo and history combine with his cozy relations with the suspected cheaters who are the source for most of his material to undermine his book's credibility. He also seems copacetic with Absolute's contempt for its customers. As director of customer service, the company hires Brent Beckley, whose credentials seem to consist of having pledged Sigma Alpha Epsilon. "My God my God my God this is awesome," he thinks, before drunkenly starting his job by laughing at the long queue of customer emails. His actual responsibilities, however, he finds "mind-numbing, soul-crushing" and no doubt incredibly unawesome. Mr. Mezrich cuts past the thousands of cynically underserved customers with a blithe "six months flashed by," larding in his usual quotient of nameless women—"dark skin and incredibly long legs," meet "blond hair and enormous breasts"—and compulsively name-checked vehicles. Complaints about evidence of cheating are meanwhile dismissed as "imagined" by sore-loser customers.
They have not been imagined. After repeated denials, Absolute is finally shamed by a team of smart bloggers at TwoPlusTwo.com into admitting that a "superuser" account allowed Absolute insiders to play hands on the site while seeing opponents' hidden cards. When the account is linked to Scott Tom, he predictably protests his innocence. Mr. Mezrich's lame conclusion is that "one of the operation managers [who] was a close friend of Scott's" had been cheating "with an unknown number of accomplices."
Mr. Tom resigns, Absolute pays back the victims and the remaining executives transfer ownership to a third party. Then, after an even shadier merger with rival UltimateBet, a bigger cheating scandal erupts. Mr. Mezrich's account of who cheated this time and how, of shell companies disguising who owned what and when, is both murky and fawningly eager to absolve—even celebrate—self-indulgent behavior. Mr. Beckley, for instance, is too drunk to know he has cocaine in his pocket when he learns he is in charge of paying players for AbsolutePoker/UltimateBet, a site five times as large as the one he had flimsy control of a few moments earlier.
For the sobering details of how AP/UB players wound up with squadoosh while insiders absconded with millions, we'll have to wait for a book with more serious priorities. A big reason that AP/UB players lost their bankrolls was UIGEA, though it's also clear that the guys running AP/UB lacked the character to do the right thing in the clutch. (PokerStars reimbursed its players at once, purchased FullTilt, and is about to repay those players as part of a settlement with the DOJ.) But Mr. Mezrich keeps pushing the idea that Absolute's business and ethical failures were incidental to, instead of natural extensions of, its party-boy mind-set.
"It was kind of funny," he obliviously asserts near the end, "how despite everything that had happened," Scott Tom "was still the charming rogue." His company's IPO killing was days away when the Absolute hotshots reached the apex of their precipitous arc: sporting sunglasses after midnight at the Playboy Mansion, having been greeted by "Hef himself." Such an honor puts them, in their minds and Mr. Mezrich's, "at the top of the food chain." Parked beside their Ferrari, after all, are a Rolls, a Lamborghini, "and even a pink Range Rover," as Playmates cavort in Hef's miniature zoo. "Soak it in," the charming rogue tells his partners. "A little while longer, and we'll all be living like this—"
Not just a book about clueless adolescent venality, "Straight Flush" is that sorry thing itself, and in spades.
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[h=3]By JAMES MCMANUS[/h]'Straight Flush" concerns the rise and fall of the company AbsolutePoker, from an idea that six Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity brothers lifted from a site called ParadisePoker, to an online empire on the verge of a 10-figure IPO, to its flameout soon after April 15, 2011. That's when the Justice Department seized its domain name, along with those of two larger sites, PokerStars and FullTilt, freezing hundreds of millions of dollars in the accounts of American players. One AbsolutePoker executive pleaded guilty to bank fraud and is currently in prison. The former CEO remains at large in Antigua with what are presumed to be millions of dollars, many allegedly "won" by cheating: namely, spying, or allowing friends to spy, on customers' hole cards.Ben Mezrich, the author of "Busting Vegas" (2006) and "The Accidental Billionaires" (2009), efficiently sketches the legal gray areas that poker sites occupied before and after Black Friday. He also exposes the hypocrisy of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which nanny-state Republicans sneaked into law by attaching it at the last minute to the SAFE Port Act of 2006. (The act made it a crime to accept payments in connection with "unlawful Internet gambling" but failed to define "unlawful gambling.") Yet such crucial matters take up only a small fraction of "Straight Flush," a garish and misleading book for which a more accurate title would be "Busted Flush Draw." This is a story of failure, tendered as almost its opposite.
Absolute's ringleader is an overconfident kid named Scott Tom. His partners include Garin Gustafson, Shane Blackford, and Hilt Tatum. We get to know all the partners by name while the Koreans and Costa Ricans they do business with remain mostly anonymous. Women don't rate identification beyond "balcony babes," "some gorgeous thing" or just "talent." As Team Absolute wallows in "Hangover"-esque debauchery, Mr. Mezrich needlessly gooses their antics with cartoonish inanities: a cab taking off from a curb "like a rocket, zero to warp speed in less than three seconds" or a Porsche cruising at "Mach 5," which is around 3,691 miles per hour.
Playing to low-grade-level readers impressed by the most clichéd trappings of success, the author houses his subjects not in mansions but in "incredible" mansions. Mr. Gustafson's sales pitches, needless to say, are "incredibly convincing." If another partner "had learned anything over the past seven years, it was that there were very few things in life that were actually black and white; most things tended to be a mix of both."
Enlarge Image
[h=3]Straight Flush[/h]By Ben Mezrich
(William Morrow, 288 pages, $27.99)
Simplistic writing aside, Mr. Mezrich's wobbly command of poker's lingo and history combine with his cozy relations with the suspected cheaters who are the source for most of his material to undermine his book's credibility. He also seems copacetic with Absolute's contempt for its customers. As director of customer service, the company hires Brent Beckley, whose credentials seem to consist of having pledged Sigma Alpha Epsilon. "My God my God my God this is awesome," he thinks, before drunkenly starting his job by laughing at the long queue of customer emails. His actual responsibilities, however, he finds "mind-numbing, soul-crushing" and no doubt incredibly unawesome. Mr. Mezrich cuts past the thousands of cynically underserved customers with a blithe "six months flashed by," larding in his usual quotient of nameless women—"dark skin and incredibly long legs," meet "blond hair and enormous breasts"—and compulsively name-checked vehicles. Complaints about evidence of cheating are meanwhile dismissed as "imagined" by sore-loser customers.
They have not been imagined. After repeated denials, Absolute is finally shamed by a team of smart bloggers at TwoPlusTwo.com into admitting that a "superuser" account allowed Absolute insiders to play hands on the site while seeing opponents' hidden cards. When the account is linked to Scott Tom, he predictably protests his innocence. Mr. Mezrich's lame conclusion is that "one of the operation managers [who] was a close friend of Scott's" had been cheating "with an unknown number of accomplices."
Mr. Tom resigns, Absolute pays back the victims and the remaining executives transfer ownership to a third party. Then, after an even shadier merger with rival UltimateBet, a bigger cheating scandal erupts. Mr. Mezrich's account of who cheated this time and how, of shell companies disguising who owned what and when, is both murky and fawningly eager to absolve—even celebrate—self-indulgent behavior. Mr. Beckley, for instance, is too drunk to know he has cocaine in his pocket when he learns he is in charge of paying players for AbsolutePoker/UltimateBet, a site five times as large as the one he had flimsy control of a few moments earlier.
For the sobering details of how AP/UB players wound up with squadoosh while insiders absconded with millions, we'll have to wait for a book with more serious priorities. A big reason that AP/UB players lost their bankrolls was UIGEA, though it's also clear that the guys running AP/UB lacked the character to do the right thing in the clutch. (PokerStars reimbursed its players at once, purchased FullTilt, and is about to repay those players as part of a settlement with the DOJ.) But Mr. Mezrich keeps pushing the idea that Absolute's business and ethical failures were incidental to, instead of natural extensions of, its party-boy mind-set.
"It was kind of funny," he obliviously asserts near the end, "how despite everything that had happened," Scott Tom "was still the charming rogue." His company's IPO killing was days away when the Absolute hotshots reached the apex of their precipitous arc: sporting sunglasses after midnight at the Playboy Mansion, having been greeted by "Hef himself." Such an honor puts them, in their minds and Mr. Mezrich's, "at the top of the food chain." Parked beside their Ferrari, after all, are a Rolls, a Lamborghini, "and even a pink Range Rover," as Playmates cavort in Hef's miniature zoo. "Soak it in," the charming rogue tells his partners. "A little while longer, and we'll all be living like this—"
Not just a book about clueless adolescent venality, "Straight Flush" is that sorry thing itself, and in spades.
