Brandon Shane Moved to NJ to Play Online Poker, Looks Forward to the Borgata Poker Open

Brandon “shanetrain22” Shane was a well-known American online poker tournament grinder before Black Friday rocked the world on April 15, 2011. Many American poker players were left in the dark when the biggest online poker networks in the world were permanently blocked by the US Department of Justice from offering services to players in the country.

Shane explained that due to being staked for his tournaments, the effects of Black Friday were not as big as it was to other players who either were left without a source of income or moved on a full-time basis out of the United States.

“I was mostly a mid-stakes grinder before Black Friday and was backed, so I wasn’t making a ton of money at that point,” Shane said. “After Black Friday, I continued to play poker, but on gray market sites and did very well there as the games were quite soft. Moneywise, I wasn’t affected nearly as much as some of the higher stakes guys, so Black Friday wasn’t actually too awful for me.”

Part of the reason Shane wasn’t affected as much as some of his peers is that around the same time Black Friday hit, he began getting involved in coaching on a large scale for a large international MTT stable.

While coaching, he did all he could to improve his game without leaving the country.

“I was also being coached by a great high-stakes cash player, so I was able to continue improving my game even without the ability to play on PokerStars, Full Tilt, etc. from the U.S.,” he said.

While more opportunities would have presented themselves to Shane as an online poker player if he left the United States, he had personal reasons to stay around his home in Columbus, Ohio. However, Shane did share that he traveled to Canada quite a bit for some of the bigger poker festivals including the Spring Championship of Online Poker and the World Championship on Online Poker (WCOOP).

“I was also in a fairly serious relationship at the time,” Shane explained. “So for this and all the reasons I mentioned, I didn’t feel the need to move outside the U.S.”

Two years after Black Friday, New Jersey became the third state to permit legal and regulated online poker across a variety of licensed online poker rooms including BorgataPoker.com. During the past year, Shane moved to New Jersey to take advantage of the currently online poker climate in the state since he no longer had anything serious to tie him down to Ohio.

“Eventually I started transitioning to small-and-mid-stakes cash games and was doing pretty well at them, though I was never super confident when it came to payouts, etc. on unregulated U.S. sites,” Shane said. “People started complaining all the time …

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