Chad “lilholdem954” Batista, one of the original online poker stars, passed away on Aug. 20 in Las Vegas. He was 34, but had already accomplished a lifetime’s worth in the game of poker thanks to the Internet.
Batista, who had nearly $1 million in lifetime live tournament earnings to go along with millions more in cyberspace, was known for having an aggressive style and playing on instinct.
- What’s Left of US Online Poker After Black Friday and Black Tuesday Thursday, June 2nd, 2011 Written by Renee After thirteen US poker sites were shut down by US authorities, the poker community is baffled and absolutely at a loss when they try to predict what will happen to the US online poker industry.
- Jun 08, 2017 This Chart Shows The Impact of Full Tilt Remissions Payments on US Online Poker Traffic By admin on March 11, 2014 12:57 PST. How did the injection of nearly $80mm into the poker economy from Full Tilt Poker payments impact traffic at US online poker sites over the.
- One interesting barometer for what the poker industry was like before and after Black Friday is the Bluff Power 20, which is an annual industry poll of the 20 most influential people in poker. The lists before Black Friday were made up almost entirely of famous players and staff from the live and televised side of.
- PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker blocked US customers after the FBI's action on what poker players are calling 'Black Friday' on blogs and in online forums.
Card Player had the chance to speak to his aunt who raised him, Louise Batista, about his life on and off the felt, as well as how Black Friday negatively impacted him, like so many others in the poker world.
Poker's 'Black Friday,' as it has been called by most of the media, has had repercussions felt all over the poker world. First, both Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars have banned all U.S.-based players from real-money tables. Players also may not withdraw funds or conduct player-to-player transfers. Online poker was the backbone of the poker boom. Without real money games available, many experts predicted that Black Friday would lead to the end of the poker's popularity in the United States, but there's little concrete evidence for such claims beyond a predictable decline in traffic on poker sites. Apr 18, 2017 - Six years after the U.S. Department of Justice took down major online poker sites, many players are still waiting to get.
Brian Pempus: What did Black Friday really do to Chad’s life?
Louise Batista: It affected him in every way shape and form. We were living in Florida at that time, while Chad was still in Las Vegas. It seemed like he was never quite the same after Black Friday. He resented the fact that in order to continue playing at the same level he would have to commit to playing live games or leave the US, which would leave him little opportunity to be around family throughout the year. When it happened, it was like the rug being taken right out from under you. I don’t think he thought something like that could happen. It affected a lot of people, but especially him, because he did not have another profession, something that he could go back to. After that he left Las Vegas and moved back to Florida for a year. From there, he decided to go to Mexico, because that was one of the only countries he could go to and drive, and bring his dogs. He wasn’t going anywhere without those dogs. Mexico was hell, though.
BP: Why didn’t he like it there?
LB: Mexico was not a good place at all. He got stripped down I don’t know how many times. It is a corrupt country, and it’s not a safe place for a guy weighing 110 pounds soaking wet with two little doggies. You know, he basically walked around with a target on his back. After 10 months, he had over-stayed his welcome. He got the heck out of there. He did have his biggest score when he was in Mexico.
BP: What happened after Mexico?
LB: He went to Oceanside, California, and stayed there for a little while because he could play at the Commerce [Casino]. He was there for about five months, and then he ended up going back to Vegas. All this time his stuff had been in storage. He thought if he was going to be on the west coast it might as well be Vegas.
BP: Do you think all the moving around contributed to the depression?
LB: Yes, it did. Live poker games were not Chad’s thing. He didn’t like the crowd, and he never played poker for the celebrity status. Chad really wanted to be with family, and for a time my family and I did move out to Vegas. We all lived together in Vegas, then moved out to Henderson. But having [multiple] adults under one roof, and we all have our opinions, and Chad was very volatile and had a big personality, so it was tough. We eventually decided it wasn’t for us anymore. Chad went and got his own place, and we moved back to Florida.
BP: Did he have a lot of money tied up on the defunct poker sites after Black Friday?
LB: Yes, he lost a lot of money there. Chad never had the patience to deal with [trying to get it back]. That was my job. You had to provide all this information to get your own money. They wanted all his documentation and I provided what we could. We had to take a settlement [for the Full Tilt money] like a ton of other people had to because we couldn’t prove [how much was in his account]. We had to take a percentage of what he had. It was a nightmare. Everything got handled, but we had to accept what they gave us. He had to wait it out, and luckily he had some funds to sustain himself.
BP: What about poker do you think clicked with him?
LB: To be honest, anything that Chad ever did he always did well. He played travel soccer as a kid, and a lot of people don’t know that he was an amazing bowler. He could also play pool. As a high school kid he used to bowl against adults and that contributed to him leaving school in 11th grade. He would play these tournaments and be up all night, and he wouldn’t want to go to school. We used to fight about that. When he switched to poker, the bowling took a back seat. Chad always was a sore loser; he never accepted second place. He wanted to win. His aggressive style was from an attitude that he had everything to gain and nothing to lose. He never really gave a shit; he made a call if he wanted to call. He had a fire and a passion for the game. He was always good at reading other people. In his mind, he could figure out sort of what you had, and he could be holding nothing.
BP: Do you wish some of the nice things said about him on social media had been said more often to him while he was still alive?
LB: No, because it wouldn’t have changed anything. Chad lived life on his own terms from the very start. He never played poker to win a bracelet. It was always about the game and the money, the payoff. It was never about titles. In one of his huge scores, he deliberately got second [after they chopped] because he didn’t want more notoriety.
BP: Can you talk about some of the other struggles he had throughout his life?
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LB: He didn’t have a normal upbringing, that white picket fence and two parents. My sister also struggled with drugs and alcohol. When my sister passed away, I got Chad permanently, and we raised him with my two boys. He never really understood why this all was happening to him. There was always a dark side to him that would really take over. Poker was an interesting choice to make. I told him that he chose such a hard thing to do professionally. For someone with depression, the ups and downs of poker are hard; you really need to be a stable person, in order to accept the losses. You can’t win every time. He was thrown a lot of curve balls in life.
BP: Did he still have a love for poker up until he passed?
LB: One of our last conversations was about him going to play a tournament in Arizona and him having to board the dogs. He loved the online game and hated the live game. I think in the end poker did leave a bad taste in his mouth, but he realized he had made a choice. What else was he going to do? He had those days when he really wanted to play, and days when he didn’t even want to talk about it.
BP: There was some stuff said on the Internet about how and why he passed away. Would you able to talk about this and possibly clear up any inaccuracies out there about him?
LB: First and foremost, to clear up two things that were said even before he passed away: Chad was never in prison, he spent time in county jail, but never in prison; and Chad quit school in the 11th grade, not the seventh grade. Those are definitely two wrong facts out there. What he actually passed away from was liver and kidney failure. Chad fell and passed out and had bleeding in the brain. It was from an over-consumption of alcohol. Chad drank to a degree that his body just shut down on him. He was so small in size, so there wasn’t a lot there to work with. He kind of threw in the towel and gave in. He didn’t want to seek professional help. We fought for years about getting help. He would never take a prescription drug. He lived life on his own terms until the end. He struggled and alcohol was his escape. In the end, the alcohol won…He was special to a lot of people, and so if this wakes up one person to stop drinking excessively, then this wasn’t all for nothing.
BP: What do you think the poker community should and will remember about him?
LB: For me, and my family, we would like for them to remember Chad as that young man with a sharp tongue, aggressive play and a heart of gold. You either loved him or you hated him, there was no in between.
With the recent Chris Ferguson video that dropped, wherein the former Full Tilt Poker exec offered up a brief apology for not being able to “prevent Black Friday from happening,” many players are brought back to that dark moment in poker’s past that deprived so many.
Players who had comfortably been grinding out a living online lost a huge chunk of their bankrolls and net worth, not to mention their source of income, when the Department of Justice unveiled a 52-page indictment against top executives of the big three online poker sites operating in the U.S. – Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and Absolute Poker/Ultimate Bet.
Countless stories of Black Friday loss endure, loads of players forced to turn to pouring drinks or waiting tables to pay the bills and rebuild after losing everything, while many others who had a semblance of a roll left resorted to seeking online poker refuge outside of the States as a result. But not all have had to exit the country to find some legitimate online poker options.
A Look Back at Black Friday
An array of charges on that fateful Friday, April 15 of 2011 included bank fraud, money laundering and illegal gambling, many of which related to the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) signed by then-President George W. Bush in Oct. 2006, which outlawed the transferring of funds to and from gambling sites.
The UIGEA went into effect on Jan. 19, 2009 with compliance required from June 1, 2010. The processing of deposits and withdraws on poker sites that continued after that date were, therefore, in violation of UIGEA. Full Tilt Poker’s worldwide operation was shut down later that year with additional exposure of fraud, namely that player and operational funds were not segregated, resulting in player funds not being available to make players whole.
While many outside of the U.S. received their suspended funds during the latter part of 2012 — after PokerStars acquired all of Full Tilt Poker’s assets and agreed to pay customers back — U.S. players had to wait much longer. The first reports of repayments began to trickle in during Feb. 2014, nearly three years following the seizure.
And much more recently, players who lost funds on Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet started getting paid back, once again in the form of a bailout.
Though the sting of the whole debacle stays with many, Ferguson has already resurfaced at the 2018 World Series of Poker at the Rio for the third year in a row, after capturing WSOP Player of the Year honors in 2017, to the chagrin of many a poker fan. While much of the poker community isn't quite ready to forgive and forget just yet, some solace has come in the form of new opportunities to play legal online poker in the U.S.
Silver Lining
After Black Friday Sales
States’ legislatures continue to mull over the potential of adding online casino, including poker, to their lists of tax revenue sources following the first four dominoes — Nevada, Delaware, New Jersey and most recently, Pennsylvania. Another promising development of late has been the interstate liquidity between Nevada, Delaware and Jersey that recently took effect.
In the meantime, players across the States can play some legal online poker at Global Poker, thanks to their Sweeps Cash model that makes it possible to play poker using Sweeps Cash that can be cashed out for real money prizes.
Add to those positive nuggets the recent monumental ruling against the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) that has opened the door for states besides Nevada to offer sports betting, and we can expect continued momentum for iGaming legislation across the country. As the timeline unfolds, the poker world will be watching for online poker to come along for the ride.
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