Poker fan takes a gamble on politics
At his monthly Silicon Valley poker game in February 2006, Michael Bolcerek was dealt a life-changing opportunity.
One of the guys at the table had helped raise $18,000 for a local school in a charity poker tournament only to learn that California prohibited that kind of fundraising. Frustrated, he had turned to the Poker Players Alliance, an advocacy group with about 5,000 card-playing members.
Bolcerek asked whether there was anything he could do to help.
“Well, they’re actually looking for a president,” his poker buddy said. “You’re not doing anything right now; why don’t you put your resume in?”
It was no bluff. A few weeks later, Bolcerek, a former technology company executive who lives in San Francisco, was the alliance’s president.
By last fall, he was holding a fateful hand: After years of trying, Congress had passed legislation to stamp out online gambling by making it illegal for banks and credit card companies to process payments to those sites. Poker players’ outrage, combined with some aggressive outreach, has since built the alliance’s membership to more than 360,000.
With numbers like that, the San Francisco-based Poker Players Alliance is becoming a political player, and it’s acting like one. It commissioned a poll showing that angry poker players helped defeat one of the law’s chief sponsors, Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa), who narrowly lost in the November elections in what the alliance called a “green-felt revolution.”
Now, Bolcerek is aiming for a membership of 1 million as the group tries to persuade Congress to exempt poker from the online gambling law.
Becoming the alliance’s president seemed an unusual career move for the 45-year-old Bolcerek, a husky man with a bald pate and an easy smile. Despite a love of poker, he isn’t a big-time gambler. The stakes aren’t high at his monthly games with technology industry pals: The most anyone wins or loses is a couple of hundred dollars.
But Bolcerek is viewed as a wild card in the conservative world of chief financial officers, a post he’s held at several small technology companies.
“He’s very different from most CFOs that I’ve ever worked with,” says Timothy Jones, who hired Bolcerek at two high-tech start-ups. “He’s willing to embrace risks to get higher returns.”
Bolcerek had just finished a temporary CFO stint at a Colorado computer storage company when he heard about the Poker Players Alliance job. He was all in, jumping at the chance to build an organization, even if his wife, Julia, initially reacted by asking quizzically, “Poker?”
She came around. “He always wanted to get into politics, and I think this is a great way to do it without having to go through an election,” she says. “Although you do get sick of hearing poker 24/7.”
Bolcerek learned the game at 15 in Concord, Calif., from his grandmother Florence, a fervent Bingo and pinochle player.
“We played for nickels and quarters,” he said. “I wish I had learned statistics before I started playing with her because I probably lost more money than I should have.”
Poker wasn’t big at Brown University, where Bolcerek earned an economics degree. He started playing regularly in Silicon Valley about a decade ago.
For him, poker nights are as much about the mental challenge as male bonding or fattening wallets.
“It’s one of the weirdest things,” he says, “when you have a group of 10 40-year-old men who will sit together for four hours and no one will have a beer because you’re so competitive at the table you don’t want to lose a bit of an edge.”
Even in the high-powered group, Bolcerek’s poker mind stood out, says Theodore Tanner, a regular before he left Silicon Valley for a job with Microsoft Corp. in 2000.
“You could see him analyzing the hands,” Tanner says. “I never did seem to beat him.”
Looking back, Bolcerek says the Poker Players Alliance job wasn’t a radical departure for him. “It was really just another entrepreneurial venture, another type of Internet entertainment.”
Working to raise the group’s profile and wield influence, Bolcerek brought a trio of well-known professional players, including Howard “The Professor” Lederer, to Washington to convince lawmakers that poker is a game of skill, unlike craps and other gambling. Then, in March, the group hired as its board chairman former Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.), an avid poker player with deep Washington connections.
And although it was unable to stop the federal law, the alliance helped persuade the California Legislature last year to permit charity poker events.
Bolcerek says his intense travel schedule means he now often misses his monthly game. He doesn’t play online often -- he prefers the live game -- but believes anyone should have that right. And his appreciation for poker has deepened as he has become immersed in it.
“I’ve done a lot more discussion on strategy. I’ve done a lot more reading on poker,” he says. “By leaps and bounds, I’ve become a better player.”
Lederer, who has joined the group’s board, has noticed.
“I’m not saying Michael’s turned into a shark in the last year,” Lederer says. “He’s just someone who gets poker now, and that passion comes through.”
*
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Around the table
Michael Bolcerek
Age: 45
Education: Bachelor’s degree in economics, Brown University
Career highlights: Chief financial officer and senior vice president, Liquid Audio; chief operating officer and vice president of finance, Mongomusic.com; president, Spatializer Audio Laboratories
Personal: Married with two children. Lives in San Francisco. Hobbies include golf, skiing and softball.
