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Copyright 2005 Sun Media Corporation
Daily Miner and News (Kenora, Ontario)

May 6, 2005 Friday
FINAL EDITION

HEADLINE: POKER FOR FUN AND PROFIT

BYLINE: BY HANK DANISZEWSKI, SUN MEDIA

BODY:
Jane has won a jackpot in the macho world of poker.

Jane Jack, a 41-year-old Stratford, Ont. native and former accountant, has been running an online poker site since last September from a beach home on the tropical island of Antigua.

It sounds like one of those pie-in-the-sky schemes pitched in spam e-mails.

But last year Jack decided to quit her job as a financial controller with a Cambridge plastics company and play her hand in the booming business of online poker.

Jack started playing serious poker in the late 1990s in Ontario's charity casinos. Jack said she was a good poker player because she understood the mathematics of the game and was underestimated by her male opponents.

"The poker world is still seen as a man's world and when a woman sits down at the table she's seen a pushover."

When poker sites started popping up on the Internet, and televised poker tournaments featuring celebrities started to draw huge ratings, Jack started thinking about setting up her own site.

She lined up private investors and struck up a partnership to share a client base and technology with Party Poker, a huge Internet poker site based in India.

Before she launched PokerNow.com, there was one other detail. Jack, her husband and their five-year-old daughter moved to Antigua, where, unlike Ontario, running an Internet gaming site is legal.

The tiny Caribbean nation of 67,000 recently won a World Trade Organization ruling quashing an attempt by the United States to shut down its online gaming licensing system which brings in badly needed revenue.

Since last September, PokerNow has signed up 4,000 serious poker players and thousands more play money participants.

The serious players put up money, usually by credit cards, and play poker with each other.

Jack believes the NHL lockout dealt her a lucky break.

"With no Hockey Night in Canada, we came on the bandwagon at the right time. Saturday night is always a good night," she said.

PokerNow makes money by taking a rake of $1 to $3 from the winning pot. Players can chat to each other online but there are no web cams.

"If you really have a bad poker face, you can't see that on the Internet," Jack said.

Online poker is more comfortable and familiar than other forms of online gambling because players are competing with each other and betting with an anonymous house, she said.

Jack is trying to boost credibility by become the persona behind PokerNow. Her biography and photo are posted on the website. She personally answers about 100 e-mails a day and appears at trade shows across North America.

"If you go out and talk to people, they know you are for real," she said.

GRAPHIC: photo by Sun Media Jane Jack runs a poker website out of Antigua.

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