SmashMouth

Families Face Dire Straits After Online Poker Shutdown - FoxNews.com



Things had been looking up for Brian Mogelefsky in the weeks preceding “Black Friday.” The bursting of the real estate bubble, which almost overnight sank the mortgage company he ran with his dad, was two years behind him, and he, his wife and two children now felt firmly established in Charlotte, N.C. They had moved there in 2009 to escape the high living costs of Long Island, New York, where Mogelefsky had run his mortgage company.
But, best of all, his dream job was finally paying off -- two years earlier, after careful consultation with his wife, he had become a full-time online poker player.
Not only did his work allow him to spend as much time as he wanted with his two children, but he was now on pace to make $80,000 to $90,000 this year – almost twice as much as he brought home in 2010.
“It’s just like I was finally starting to see the fruits of my labor,” he said referring to years of study and practice.
What happened next has come to be known as "Black Friday" among poker players, and “it came at the worst possible time," Mogelefsky said.

On April 15, the government cracked down on online poker. To most, this simply marked the prohibition of an online pastime. But for a reported tens of thousands of Americans, the day the government indicted the three major U.S. poker Web site operators -- PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker -- on charges of bank fraud and money laundering was indeed an exceedingly bleak one.
The crackdown stripped the players of their primary source of income. For players like Mogelefsky, a young father of two, it brought something still worse – the loss of his family's livelihood.


Read more: Families Face Dire Straits After Online Poker Shutdown - FoxNews.com

Poker anyone?

SmashMouth

An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger.
Confucius

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