You have not seem him featured on ESPN or GSN, but Nat Arem is a significant player in the online poker industry. He started out his business creating the popular thepokerdb company (now aquired by Bluff Magazine), a website datamining cash-games at numerous online poker sites. He is currently still working with Bluff Magazine while he’s also focusing on other exciting projects such as PSDollars and thepokerfilm .

Nat really got alot of attention after being one of the few people who really took action when the rumours around the Absolute Poker cheating started circulating in October 2007. He and a few other started investigating the incident personally, leading to a complete bust of Absolute Poker. You can read more about this in his blog.

Nat has been friendly enough to let us have a few words with him. We hope we can squeese something interesting out of him.

BTN: Okey, before we go indepht, I really want to ask you what you are up to right now?

I recently moved to Costa Rica to pursue more business projects. I’m now a part of the organization that runs, among other things, PocketFives and PokerSourceOnline. I was basically brought in to develop new ideas, make our sites stickier, etc. While I am not involved in P5s or PSO, I am involved in some of the others (which I, unfortunately, cannot list off) and I have thrown my two best ideas at some new projects down here. One is pretty close to being launched and one is still in the early stages of development. I’m really excited about both of them and I’ll be posting more info on my blog as I can say more about the projects.

BTN: We really dont want to bother you with too much questions about your involvment in the Absolute Poker scandal. We feel there is so much info out there already. You did a great job uncovering the shady business going on over there. What we would be interested to know is what you felt about being put in the spotlight having the eyes of the poker community staring at you. Did you at any moment feel uncomfortable with the situation?

It was at times. I was happy to do whatever I could to make sure that my friends and fellow online poker players were refunded fairly. I also wanted to make sure that AP and others knew that it was not okay to do something like this for about 20 reasons. Some of which are that it’s simply unfair. Some are more along the lines of how behavior like this only hurts online poker. As I generally derive my income in some shape or from from the online poker community, I felt angered at how some cheaters didn’t even think about how many livelihoods they were threatening by pulling a stunt like that. So regardless of how uncomfortable it is to be seen as someone hunting for dirt on AP executives, I did it nonetheless.

However, at this point, I’ve moved on from that scandal and I’m focusing all of my efforts on my business projects. While I committed upwards of a month of my time to the AP scandal without any expectation of compensation in any shape or form, I am, at the end of the day, a businessperson. I like making websites that people enjoy using and I like monetizing them in a way that benefits everyone involved. It’s my passion and I plan on focusing on that from this point forward.

BTN: You made a blog post saying there will be a good chance of 60 Minutes airing a story covering the Absolute Scandal. There is a good chance you will be one of the participators in this show. What are your toughts on this and do you think this will have an impact on the online poker industry?

I’ve been asked by 60 Minutes to not talk about the show anymore. I was actually asked by 60 Minutes not to talk about the show in the first place, but I received word from a friend of mine that Nolan Dalla had written a piece about it already and was going to post it on another site (I won’t mention them, they have enough links already). I was also told that a lot of people had gotten wind of the whole thing and that it was no longer containable. I figured that if it was going to be posted about in a bunch of places I might as well get my story out there too. I wish I could say more about how the show itself is progressing, but I am going to respect the wishes of the producers and stay quiet on that.

BTN: Okey, enough on that Absolute thing. You and Eric Strauss created thepokerfilm together and it came out really entertaining. Was this a business project or something you did for fun?

thepokerfilm was a really interesting project. I’ve known Eric since I was two and we grew up directly next door. While we moved away from each other when we went off to college 7.5 years ago, we’ve remained very good friends. Eric was nice enough to fly out to Las Vegas last summer (first class on my dime of course) to help me pack up a Penske and move a bunch of my stuff back across the country. It was basically impossible to move all of that stuff on my own and driving for 3 or 4 days by yourself in a big truck while towing a car is kinda nightmare-ish.

So anyway, while spending 40 hours in the truck, we had a lot of time to talk. We’d always thought it would be a cool idea to do a documentary-style piece on poker players and we figured that the two of us had the perfect set up to do it. I know a lot of online poker players. Eric had equipment, editing expertise and various other know-how. So on that trip in July 2007, we just decided to do it. Then it was a matter of getting some players to agree to it, setting up dates, etc. That took a month or two and we ended up shooting it in early September 2007.

In terms of the intention of the project, I knew that it would not make a lot of money. As it turns out, having content like drinking contests and whatnot actually makes a documentary nearly impossible to sell. We made very little money on it, although it did turn a profit. But that wasn’t the point. We had fun making it. It was entertaining for people. It also got us noticed by a number of reality TV production companies and we’re in on-going talks to turn the general idea into a TV show on a cable network in the US. That was the real idea from the beginning — get it noticed and see where it can go. Not necessarily to make money on it.

BTN: You’ve probably encountered a huge numbers of known poker players during your years in the industry. Who came of as the biggest douche and who made the biggest impact on you (positively or negatively)?

I have met a lot of them. It’s hard to say who came off as a douche. In terms of the live poker players, I’ve never received dirtier looks from anyone than Chip Reese. Granted I was only taking pictures at live events like the WSOP and WPT Championship, but he absolute glared at me like no one else. I hate saying that because of his passing, but it did bother me a lot at the time. All of that being said, I never said a word to the guy and I’m sure he was nice.

With regards to people who I’ve met, no one immediately stands out. Justin “stealthmunk” Schwartz is obviously a loud and obnoxious drunk, but I wouldn’t call him a douchebag and I consider him to be a friend. There are lots of cocky players too but that’s just their nature. No one has really been a big enough dickhead to me for me to call him out.

In terms of positive influences, I’ve learned a lot from Ozzy “Ozzy 87″ Sheikh, Jeff “yellowsub86″ Williams, Steve “stevesbets” Jacobs (www.stevesbets.com) and some of the guys at BLUFF. I also think Shane “shaniac” Schleger is a really cool dude, it’s tons of fun to talk to him and he’s my favorite poster on the major poker forums.

BTN: Do you have a crazy story to tell featuring known poker players (you dont have to mentions names)?

Well, one crazy story I actually wrote about on ZeeJustin’s blog. At least, I think I did. I’m not sure if it’s still up, but this was in December 2005, just before I had a blog. I was out in Las Vegas with Ozzy and Justin to see Gigabet play the final table of the Five Diamonds. It was the table where Doyle, Phil Laak and Patrik were also there. Patrik took a terrible beat heads up for around 1 million real dollars. Pretty brutal. Anyway, we drove to LA after the FT and a little ways into the trip, Justin looks down and is like, the gas light just came on. So I pulled out my nav system which I had for reasons that I can’t remember and looked to see if there was a gas station anywhere close. We were basically 50 miles from a gas station in either direction and it was like 3 AM, so it wasn’t clear if anything was going to be open. We decided to keep going to see if we could make it to the outskirts of Barstow. We BARELY made it. There were probably 5 miles left in the car when we pulled up to the station. It was nerve-wracking because there was almost no one on the road and we had a pretty sizable amount of cash in the car. At the time I wasn’t used to being around so much cash and the thought of running out of gas and hanging out on the side of the road until we could get help was pretty scary at the time.

BTN: Do you have any future business projects going on?

I do. As I stated earlier, I’m in Costa Rica to work on new projects. I have a crapload of good ideas (at least, I think they’re good … time will tell if others do too), so I’m actually going to be spending the next few years (hopefully) implementing them. I’m lucky to have a good team of programmers to work with and I think we’ll do some pretty big things in the future. There are lot of things that have never been done and there are also lots of things currently being done that I think we can either do better or do cheaper. It’s really exciting actually.

BTN: Where do you see yourself in forty years?

Crap, I’ll be 65. I’d better be retired by then. Hopefully I’ll be healthy and happily married with a few healthy kids (they’d better be out of the house too). I have no clue if I’ll still be involved in poker then, but I plan on staying involved as long as I love what I’m doing, I’m challenged by the work and the market is healthy enough to sustain a decent income.