Doyle Brunson has taken Daniel Negreanu to task for the Canadian player’s public tirade against Full Tilt Poker and its associated players, Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson. Negreanu made waves with his anger and wishes for violence against his repeated declarations of hostility. While Brunson doesn’t mention Negreanu by name in his blog at doylebrunson.com, he does make reference to some of Negreanu’s past comments (like his desire to hit certain FTP people in the groin with a baseball bat). Brunson said, “I don’t want to take a baseball bat and crush their grapes and I don’t want to keep them from rejoining the poker world. Where do you stop the level of responsibility? I don’t know, I only know all of the FT people were my friends and they still are.”
He blames Ray Bitar (but who doesn’t, at this point?), saying, “Ray Bitar for sure knew about the cover up and has to answer for his actions. You can believe or disbelieve the fact that Chris Ferguson and Howard Lederer knew about the problems. I know the majority of the poker world wants blood and believe they did know. I believe time will tell us the answer to that.” He also stated that he didn’t see any reason why Lederer or Ferguson should have been suspicious, because “if you were a stockholder, would you question the management of a company that was sending you hundreds of thousands of dollars each month? I doubt you would, I know I wouldn’t, I’d think life is good!”
Brunson’s statement has caused quite a bit of stir in the poker community, where players seem to have broken into two camps: the first says, “Come on, how could the players NOT have known what was going on with Full Tilt?” and the other says, “Maybe there’s a chance that the players didn’t know what was going on.” The poker community hasn’t seen a clearer line drawn between cynics and idealists in a long time. But really, what’s the truth about what happened? Negreanu cries fowl while Brunson says that it was all a misunderstanding– but when this misunderstanding cost a lot of players a lot of money, and they lose more and more hope of seeing those funds ever returned to them, it’s easy to see why so many people are not only anti-Full Tilt, but avidly anti- the players formerly associated with the sinking company.
It’s true, as it’s been said on various poker forums, that sometimes the details can just fly right on by when you’re delegating responsibility to someone else and trusting them completely. It’s also mostly true that Lederer, Ferguson, and the rest are poker players and not businessmen (although when you start to market yourself as a brand, there’s a certain amount of business-mindedness going on there). Yet other players have agreed with Brunson that no one would intentionally run a company into the ground (history tells us that this isn’t true at all when the people involved stand to gain loads of money in the process), and that the players probably just didn’t question the ridiculous sums of money that they were being given. If you started getting hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, you wouldn’t be even a little curious about the details? Really? Even if the only crime of which the FTP-associated players are guilty is gross negligence and a heavy dose of ignorance, doesn’t that still make them accountable?
We may never know exactly what went on behind closed doors at Full Tilt. It’s been almost a year since Black Friday, and we’re no closer now to answers than we were then. One thing is for certain, however– everyone has his or her own opinion about the matter, and the heated public discussions are just getting started.