Ben Mezrich Discusses New Book About the Rise and Fall of Absolute Poker

Ben Mezrich, author of non-fiction New York Times NYT bestsellers Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions and The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding Of Facebook, FB A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal, both of which became movies, appeared on CNBC's Squawk Box to discuss his new book 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…. "It was a group of frat brothers at the University of Montana, and these were kids from very poor backgrounds, one of them sold a cow to buy his first car, um, real kind of cowboy American kids," said Mezrich. "And they used to play poker in an underground bar, in the basement of a bar in Montana. And they decided to put it online, and they became on of the biggest online poker sites in the world." The founders of the company, Absolute Poker, were about to have an initial public offering and become billionaires, when right before, the United States government passed a bill that made gambling through online poker illegal. Now they're all fugitives, spread out around the world, with the exception of one who is in prison and left with nothing after paying his fine. While there was a cheating scandal that came out of Absolute Poker that was discovered by users, in which a player within the company was able to see other players' cards, cheating scandals weren't the reasoning behind the U.S. government going after online poker sites. According to Mezrich it went unexplained. Now, ironically, gambling through online poker it's starting to become legal again. "These guys were kind of the first people, and they're kind of paying the price for being to early, " said Mezrich. Mezrich joked that he became the go-to-guy for books like Straight Flush, saying that he gets 20-30 emails every week about kids in college who did something crazy and/or lucrative, saying that half of them come from prisons. He looks into them to see if there is an interesting story to pull out. This one caught his eye. "They were making a million dollars a day, bringing in. There's girls. There was a big brothel essentially right next door to their offices. It was kind of this crazy story that involved everything I was looking for," said Mezrich Mezrich said that he's intrigued by the legality of the gambling situation. "Whether they took it too far, or whether they just got screwed, because, you know, they were in the wrong timing in terms of their industry. Um, they were days away from being like Mark Zuckerberg and instead, you know, they're sitting on islands," said Mezrich. Mezrich noted that in most countries, gambling through online poker is legal, and that at the time, Absolute Poker was asking to be regulated. Cheating scandals would be less of an issue due to that oversight if it was in place.