{"id":2383,"date":"2013-06-02T01:41:04","date_gmt":"2013-06-02T05:41:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/?p=2383"},"modified":"2013-06-02T02:39:25","modified_gmt":"2013-06-02T06:39:25","slug":"ben-mezrich-absolute-poker-straight-flush","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/ben-mezrich-absolute-poker-straight-flush","title":{"rendered":"Ben Mezrich on Absolute Poker &#8211; &#8220;They were Days away from being like Mark Zuckerberg&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/ben-mezrich-poker.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1622\" title=\"ben-mezrich-poker\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/ben-mezrich-poker.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"180\" height=\"279\" \/><\/a>Ben Mezrich continues to receive mainstream coverage on his book <em>Straight Flush<\/em>. The <em>Accidental Billionaires<\/em> author&#8217;s newest work dives into the story of how six University of Montana frat brothers founded Absolute Poker. As many know, Absolute would become one of the world&#8217;s largest online poker sites, pulling in $1 million in profit a day at one point.<\/p>\n<p>Mezrich&#8217;s depiction of the Absolute Poker story is generating quite a bit of press. He recently appeared on <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/id\/100770105\">CNBC to discuss Straight Flush<\/a> (interview in link) and had some very interesting things to say about it.<\/p>\n<p>One of the more intriguing subjects that Mezrich discussed was how Absolute Poker owners were just days away from launching an initial public offering. However, the multi-billion dollar company&#8217;s 2006 IPO was derailed when US President George W. Bush signed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) into effect in 2006.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;These guys were the first people and these guys are paying the price for being too early,&#8221; Mezrich stated. &#8220;They were days away from being like Mark Zuckerberg.&#8221; But as fate would have it, Absolute&#8217;s owners, Scott Tom and Brent Beckley, essentially lost their poker site after Black Friday (April 15th, 2011), when the US Department of Justice busted AP.<\/p>\n<p>During the interview, Mezrich also went into detail on the UIGEA and legalized gambling today. &#8220;The (US) government, in my opinion, passed some hypocritical bill that went after online poker for reasons unexplained,&#8221; he said. &#8220;And now it&#8217;s starting to come back &#8211; now online poker is starting to be legalized. But these guys (AP founders) were kind of the first people, and now they&#8217;re kind of paying the price for being too early.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Mezrich also mentions how he hopes Straight Flush will eventually become a movie. Kevin Spacey was brought up during the interview since he starred in <em>21<\/em> &#8211; the film adaptation of Mezrich&#8217;s\u00a0<em>Bringing Down the House<\/em>. Assuming Straight Flush does get turned into a movie, watch for Spacey to grace the screen in a prominent role.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ben Mezrich continues to receive mainstream coverage on his book Straight Flush. The Accidental Billionaires author&#8217;s newest work dives into the story of how six University of Montana frat brothers founded Absolute Poker. As many know, Absolute would become one of the world&#8217;s largest online poker sites, pulling in $1 million in profit a day [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[954,739,1194,1886,306,348,1140,125],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2383"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2383"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2392,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2383\/revisions\/2392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}