Casinos without borders: 'I moved to Mexico to keep my job playing online poker'
By Trent Wolbe on February 7, 2013 12:00 pm
theverge.com
"Effectively, there’s no online gambling in the United States." Shane Schleger is a professional poker player with a remarkably chill grin on his face, considering. "Well,” he goes on, “except for fantasy sports. The fantasy sports lobby is strong, I guess."
Shane collects all his income from the biggest online poker portal in the world, PokerStars. For eleven hours a day he’s plugged into their software, playing in a dozen simultaneous tournaments at any given time, which amounts to five or six thousand hands every day. Needless to say, he's good at it: he's part of the site's elite "Team Online," and in addition to the money he wins at the virtual tables he's also compensated for simply trotting his avatar ("shaniac") out in public — his mere virtual presence inspires other players to buy more chips. His screen optimization isn’t just impressive: it’s a competitive edge.
And get this, haters: he’s a Mac and a PC.
Before he had poker, Shane held a pretty standard résumé for an aimless 20-something living in New York City: waiter, bike messenger, customer service representative. "I came up playing poker in clubs — the successors to the ones you'd see in the movie Rounders. That was my scene," he says. "There was a poker boom in 2003 — it became a huge fad, and you started seeing things like the World Series of Poker [on ESPN]. Online poker started coming around at that point too, and I started meeting people, smart people, who were making their living playing online."
And so began a new career. He eventually moved from New York to Santa Monica, where he still lives with his fiancé. Like me, he used to enjoy a five-second commute from his bed to his desk. But now his office is three hours south of Santa Monica, near Rosarito Beach in Baja California. George W. Bush signed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Actinto law in October of 2006: it was an eleventh-hour congressional add-on to an unrelated port security bill, but up until then, online gambling still existed in a legal gray area. Players bought online chips with e-wallet transactions and were able to withdraw their cash winnings directly into their American bank accounts. But on April 15th of 2011 (Shane and his colleagues call it Black Friday) the gray area was blackened: the federal government indicted PokerStars (and its poorly-run competitor Full Tilt Poker) for violating the UIGEA. Money laundering, bribing banks, and miscoding transactions were a few of the items on a laundry list that eventually spelled a very specific end to their doing business in the United States.
Real border, virtual address
HE NOW WORKS FROM A HIGH-RISE ON THE BEACH THAT'S FLANKED BY ABANDONED REAL ESTATE DREAMS"For all I know, there are people that use VPNs, but it's completely against the rules. Most serious players would never do that from a risk / reward perspective. The idea of being forced out of California, of having to move to a different country — at the time it was very shocking and disturbing to me," Shane recounts. He decided to move to Vancouver with a partner who was in the same predicament, but trying to maintain a life in both countries proved to be disastrous. Canada is known for taking its admissions very seriously, so Shane's partner had tried to legitimize his northward border-hopping with a Canadian student visa: a good concept, but when he tried to enter the country in September, the authorities wanted to know why he was coming to school four months before classes began. He was ultimately denied entry, and that’s when Shane saw the writing on the wall. Apprehensive of an unwanted knock on the door from the Mounties, Shane began poking around and discovered a community of expat players that had set up shop a half hour south of Tijuana, and suddenly a new path made itself crystal clear. "I rented a car, packed up all my computer equipment, and by the next week I was set up in Mexico."
A big reason Shane had initially looked north instead of south was linguistic. "It feels very weird to not speak the language — I'm very reliant on people who facilitate the gringo passageway." He now works from a high-rise on the beach that's flanked by abandoned real estate dreams, huge concrete skeletons that will never see glass in their window frames or paint on their walls. It's a common enough sight on Mexico's newly-renovated Highway One, a bilingual toll road that shoots down along the beautiful rolling coastline. It’s captivated adventurous American minds (and wallets) for centuries: it seems as if every native Southern Californian I meet blew a chunk of their college years on trips to Tijuana (also known as "TJ") for the lower drinking age and cheap thrills the border town served up to depravity-seeking co-eds. All of that ended in 2007 with the wild narcoviolence that destroyed the tourist trade Tijuana had thrived on: nothing spells terror in UCSD moms like the public decapitations Mexican druglords are particularly fond of.
While Tijuana is slowly outgrowing its violent reputation, the drug violence there has migrated away almost completely, favoring the larger and more desolate expanses of the Texas border. A small culinary boom in taking shape in TJ, and its most visible outpost is Javier Placencia’s upscale taco joint Mision 19. Shane and I met there to discuss the ins and outs of living with his feet in two worlds.
“I live a compartmentalized life. I’m down here for work, and I go back to LA for, you know, living.” Shane’s work week in Baja is usually four days, Saturday through Tuesday. He has a Mexican debit card, a Viva Mexico plan for his iPhone, and a Mexican iTunes account, since he couldn’t buy the real-money PokerStars app through the US store. “It’s about a three-and-a-half hour drive from LA, plus the wait at the border. That’s the big variable. Once you’ve waited two or more hours at Tijuana, that’s when you really start to feel like something is wrong, like you’re trapped and isolated.” His crossing methods are always becoming more refined — he recently acquired a US Passport card that allows him access to the “ready lane.” He travels late at night on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Wednesdays, the relatively quiet crossing nights. And he never crosses through Tijuana, preferring the relatively less-busy Otay Mesa crossing.
Continues... |
