Aller a Montreal, Partie 1

Sorry I’ve been so slow in posting this. I didn’t want to talk about this at all before everything was squared away, and then as you’ll see it ended up taking me a long time to tell the story of how I ended up back on PokerStars and playing from Montreal. I’m going to post it in two parts; here’s the first:

One of my first thoughts, upon hearing the news of April 15th, was that I was suddenly going to have a lot of time on my hands. My girlfriend and I were already going to a wedding in North Carolina, and we quickly made plans tovisit friends New York and invited another couple up to visit us in Boston, and . Then I began to realize that actually there were some poker-related things that I ought to do, such as go to Madrid for the EPT event there, and that our lease in Boston was up at the end of May.

Given that we had no permanent residence anyway, leaving the country seemed like a very viable prospect. Less than a week after Black Friday, though, there was very little information about what would be required for expatriates to start playing on PokerStars again. I figured that I ought to get all my ducks in order in the few days that I had, because I wanted to avoid moving out of the country without even knowing for sure that I’d be able to continue playing online. Plus, even if the relocation thing didn’t work out, there were rumors swirling that having a non-US bank account might expedite the process of getting money out of my PokerStars account, which remember at the time we had no idea when that money would become available.

So I (or I should say “we”, my girlfriend was a big help with this) did some research and concluded that I ought to be able to open a Canadian bank account without a Visa or proof of residency. Several posts on 2+2 corroborated this.

We drove from Boston to Montreal on Easter Day. We didn’t lie at the border, but we never mentioned poker, either. We just said we were visiting, which is indeed how we spent most of our time. It was the first time my girlfriend had ever been outside of the US.

We spent that night in a hotel in touristy “Old Montreal” but had reserved a studio apartment with a landline, which our research indicated would be important for the PokerStars verification process. The next morning I woke early and walked a few blocks to a UPS store.

“Bonjour. I need to get a mailbox.” The woman behind the counter looked like a deer in headlights. She was barely twenty years old and clearly did not speak much English. I’d come to Montreal under the impression that it was a bilingual city, but really it’s a French-speaking city with many residents who can speak English. All of the signs are in French, and in most neighborhoods, people will presume that you speak French.

“Une boite postale?” I studied quite a bit of French in high school and college (well I didn’t do much studying in high school, had a terrible relationship with the French teacher, but that’s another story). As you might guess from my nom de internet, I was interested in French philosophy, and at my best I was translating Foucault. I can still read most anything in French, but I was never much for speaking or especially listening, and of course it’s only gotten worse without practice.

The woman still looked confused, but it turned out this was because she was knew and had no idea how to sell me a mailbox. “I must call my supervisor,” she stammered. The supervisor spoke English very well and explained the options to me, then had me hand the phone back to the employee in order to walk her through the process. Fifteen minutes later, I had a mailing address in Montreal.

I rendezvoused with the girlfriend back at the hotel, where we checked out and then headed to the nearest bank. A young Asian man at the reception desk told us that there were no appointments available until late in the afternoon (appointment? to open a checking account?) but directed us to a larger branch a few blocks away.

The receptionist at this large downtown branch, which was on the first floor of a skyscraper named for this bank, was a snooty-looking woman who seemed put-off that I was even asking her about a checking account. In her defense, I was dressed like a tourist and wearing a backpack and probably looked like I’d be keeping a balance of about $500. She told me that I’d need to have a tourist visa or work permit.

Thinking that I was calling her bluff, I asked, “Do you have anything in writing that I can take with me? That says which documents I’ll need.”

Without missing a beat, she reached under the counter and produced a sheet of paper that explained exactly what she’d just told me. This was not at all what the bank’s website had led me to believe, but it was clear that this woman wasn’t budging, so we left.

Another major Canadian bank had a branch just across the street. This time my girlfriend waited outside with my jacket and backpack, and I looked about 70% more professional. I asked the receptionist what I’d need to open a checking account as an American. “A tourist visa, a work permit, something that proves your address.”

“I have to have a proof of address?”

“That’s right.”

Once again, she had this policy in writing, though she was much friendlier than the woman at the first bank. Ugh, this was just not consistent with everything we’d heard.

Dejected and a little embarrassed, we checked into our apartment and did some more reading. People were still saying that they’d opened Canadian bank accounts with no problem. One 2+2 poster even said that he worked for a Canadian bank and knew for a fact that Americans could open accounts without any kind of Canadian documentation.

The next morning, I made an appointment to meet with an account specialist at a bank in a more residential location. It wasn’t particularly close to the apartment, but Montreal has a great bikeshare program where $5 gets you virtually unlimited use of bikes parked all around the city for 24 hours. Pick a bike up at any station, drop it off at any station. It’s one of my favorite things about the city.

I rode a bike up to the bank at the appointed hour, and when I went to drop it off at a station across the street from the bank, I encountered a

dark omen: a deck of playing cards had somehow spilled in front of the bike rack and was now dingy and rain-soaked and generally dismal-looking. Sighing, I went inside.

The account specialist immediately started explaining to me the accounts that were available. There wasn’t a single question about where I lived or why I wanted the account, and the only ID I needed was my US passport and my Maryland driver’s license. I don’t know if it was the residential location or the fact that I had an appointment, which seems to be standard for opening a bank account in Canada, but it couldn’t have been easier, and I walked out with a checking account and an ATM/debit card.

Unfortunately, by this time it had become clear that PokerStars was going to require more than a phone number, an unsubstantiated address, and a bank account, and also more than the few days we had left in Montreal to consider my case. The good news, which incidentally reduced the utility of my Canadian bank account, was that they’d also made arrangements for US players to withdraw funds. I returned to the US with a Canadian bank account and mailing address that may or may not prove useful and without a guarantee that I’d actually be able to play on PokerStars if I were to return to Canada.