When Will the Party End for Online Poker's Refugees? Sarah Laskow - Atlas Obscura
go to original April 25, 2017

The life of a poker-playing expat can be sweet - but how sustainable is it? (Artiom Gorgan)

On the very first evening after Ryan Garitta moved to Jaco, Costa Rica, a small beach town on the Pacific Coast, he had dinner with about 20 other recent arrivals much like himself. Garitta had only just graduated from college, and had never spent much time out of the United States before, but “right away I wasn’t alone in a foreign country,” he says. “We were all in the same weird boat, and all shared our passion for poker.”

Not long before, on April 15, 2011, the day online poker players came to call “Black Friday,” the U.S. federal government had unsealed an indictment charging the founders of the world’s largest online poker sites with fraud and money laundering. Immediately, the sites stopped letting American players bet real money and cut them off from their accumulated winnings. Within weeks, some professional poker players started moving abroad - to Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, and more far-flung locales - to regain access to their accounts and keep playing.

Black Friday nudged these players - mostly men, mostly in their early 20s - into a dream life. They alternated the grind of online gaming with the thrills of living well off their winnings: drinking, dancing, and exploring the other pleasures of their exotic new homes. But, six years later, the legal situation for online poker in the United States is little changed, and these “poker refugees” have become a special class of digital nomads, stuck in a sort of exile. To come home, they would have to find new careers. After years of living large abroad, some are starting to wonder: What comes next?

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