This month, the PocketFives Podcastshowcases Poker Refugees, our one-stop relocation service that helps distressed poker players move to poker-friendly countries. We’ve moved quite a few people since Black Friday, including several not from the United States. Poker Refugees has been featured in major news outlets like Yahoo’s PostGame, ESPN, Covers.com, the Independent, the New York Times, and Bloomberg. Learn more.

Kane Kalas, who goes by the moniker Nascar_1949 online, told PocketFives Podcast listeners about the process of relocating to the Central American country of Costa Rica: “It takes a couple of weeks. I came out here about two-and-a-half or three weeks ago and it probably took me two weeks to get back up and going on PokerStars. The bank accounts were actually pretty easy. I was able to set up two bank accounts. The first one took a couple of hours and the second one took about 20 minutes.”

Kalas is camped out in Escazu, a suburb of San Jose, but noted that moving to a larger space is in the works: “Right now, we’re staying in a condo in Escazu, which is nice, but we’re probably looking to go a little bit more upscale – either a house or a penthouse apartment. We’re either looking in Escazu or Santa Ana. We want something a little bit bigger.” Both Escazu and Santa Ana are quite safe and within a reasonable distance of downtown San Jose.

Kalas shared his overall experience with Kristin Wilson(pictured), the brains behind Poker Refugees, telling the PocketFives Podcast, “She’s been great. We would have been in the dark without the service. We got here and for a really small fee, we’ve been able to get on the internet, get back on all of the poker sites, and get help opening a bank account. She’s helping us get a phone line attached to our house and get real estate. It’s been a huge help to all of us.” Wilson has been specializing in Costa Rican real estate since 2005.

Serious online poker players require a reliable internet hookup. Wilson has been able to set Kalas and company up with a stable internet connection, with the latter explaining, “Right now, we’re planning to have internet with a backup internet. It hasn’t been a problem except for one day, when it went out for 20 minutes. We also have an air card that we can plug into our laptop and that works as well.”

Wilson has quite a unique story. A former champion professional surfer from Florida, she has been traveling the globe since age 15. She explained how her passion for traveling led her to the rain forests of Costa Rica: “I used to surf professionally when I was in college. That led me to travel internationally and I traveled a lot by myself. I majored in international business and ended up studying abroad for a little over a year. One of the places I came to was Costa Rica back in 2002 or 2003. That’s how I learned Spanish fluently and fell in love with the area.”

One of the misconceptions about moving out of the United States is that Poker Refugees, in some capacity, must relinquish their U.S. citizenship. Wilson, however, debunked that myth: “There’s never really any need to denounce your citizenship in the U.S. unless you’re trying to get citizenship in another country. For the purposes of poker players, you can essentially just be a globetrotter and live all around the world staying on temporary visas in different countries.” Who doesn’t want to travel the globe, anyway?

Finally, as we said in the opening paragraph, we’ve had plenty of non-Americans take advantage of Poker Refugees, which has sent players to locales like Canada, Panama, and Costa Rica. Wilson contended, “A lot of poker players are realizing that even if they didn’t have to move out of the country, maybe they’d want to. We’ve also received a lot of inquiries from people who are not U.S. citizens from countries like Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, and Australia – a lot of people who love their countries, but are looking to travel around.”

Check out PocketFives Poker Refugeesfor more details and be sure to listen to this month’s Poker Podcast.