Philly.com – Jamie Kerstetter is in her pink slippers with the pom-poms. And why shouldn’t she be? It’s a Sunday morning, and she’s settling in to a long day during which she won’t leave the apartment.
The cards are dealt, on the screen, four tables going at once, a far cry from the 20 poker games this former tax lawyer used to fire up on her computer screen in Mexico, where she would spend hour after twitchy hour playing online Texas hold ’em.
“My boyfriend and I would sit all day and not talk to each other except when one of us would say, ‘Wanna order out?’ ” Kerstetter, 31, recalled.
At least now she’s in New Jersey playing online poker, one of 150,000 accounts created since online gambling went live Nov. 21. Jersey gamblers have left revenue of $8.4 million on virtual poker tables, blackjack, and slots since, well below projections by the state. Online poker accounted for $2.89 million in revenue.
Before that, it was Rosarito, the little beach town in Mexico where she lived for two years, a place she describes as calm and welcoming – and also close to activities of a Mexican drug cartel.
Rosarito was full of resettled ex-pat online poker pros who fled the United States in shock after “Black Friday,” the April 15, 2011, ruling that made online gambling illegal in this country, their hands and bankrolls frozen somewhere between the flop and the river cards of hold ’em.
Kerstetter, then known by the screen name “AndtheLawWon,” persuaded her poker-playing boyfriend, Zach Donovan, to move to Rosarito. She then left him there, heading to the United States in November, when New Jersey made online poker legal again. Yes, the prodigal professional poker-playing daughter has come home. (And nobody’s happier than mom in Monroe Township.)
One thing is clear: The career trajectory of Jamie Kerstetter never did run smooth.
Three years of law school at the University of Michigan, grinding jobs at high-powered law firms, and she left that all behind to turn online poker pro, now grinding cash in a third-story apartment facing the ocean, feasting on the site’s newbies, having snagged a coveted sponsorship from partypoker.com.
“I ended up bluffing the river with a missed flush draw,” she says in a flash of poker lingo that accounts for much of the back-and-forth with her roommates, Patti “Patticakes” Haggerty, 39, and Haggerty’s boyfriend, John Allan Hinds, 26, known as “Beastro,” an engineering-school dropout turned poker pro and Lucky Charms-eating foil.
“You don’t know how anyone’s doing until you hear ‘Yes!’ or ‘Jesus!’ ” says Kerstetter.
