French investment company Groupe Bernard Tapie has been busy this autumn, making plans to take over Full Tilt Poker and engaging in all the business that entails while also planning a poker tournament and trying to ease the minds of legislators and players alike.
Groupe Bernard Tapie has a list of conditions that will need to be met before they’re willing to take over Full Tilt Poker. While hesitance from any company to take over what is widely regarded as a sinking ship is certainly understandable, the French company seems to have something up their sleeves. This isn’t just because Bernard Tapie, the company’s namesake and the father of current CEO Laurent Tapie, has a controversial history as a businessman, although his jail time and criminal history for match-fixing, tax evasion, tax fraud, and doctoring the books certainly doesn’t serve to make this deal look any more legit. After all, FTP has also been engaging in some seedy practices as far as the players are concerned, so Tapie, while a successful businessman, may not have the moral standing to give heart to players that have already been burned once.
Among these conditions are the hopes that the US Department of Justice will pay off the players who have seen their accounts frozen since April from the assets seized on not only Black Friday, but during the course of the last four years, as well as a full audit of FTP’s finances and approval from a licensing authority, allowing Full Tilt to begin operations again. Despite the fact that none of these conditions have been met yet (and some are very up in the air, as such cooperation from the DoJ seems unlikely, given the aggressive stance that the governmental agency has towards online poker violations, and Full Tilt’s financial practices are still in question), Tapie has released a statement that former FTP players will be offered equity in the site, and the current owners will be allowed to invest in the revived company. If Groupe Bernard Tapie isn’t paying the customers back, and former players and current owners are given a nudge towards helping to finance the company, what exactly is GBT paying for? Perhaps players are still too jaded to think clearly about Full Tilt, but the idea that there are back room deals going on with a company that is attempting to do anything other than man up and push FTP to take responsibility for the slight against the poker community leaves many people feeling completely uncomforted by this potential regime shift.
Groupe Bernard Tapie recently announced their plans to host the International Stadiums Poker Tour (ISPT), a blend of live and online play that aims to determine who the best players in poker really are. Since the event isn’t scheduled to take place until 2012, the company will have plenty of time to resurrect the Full Tilt reputation and win players back by promising a guaranteed $30 million prize-pool ($10 million of which is the first-place prize). The online element of this tournament is particularly interesting, as players will be competing (at least as the tournament is currently designed, but everything is subject to change) via electronic pads in dedicated online tournament rooms. If GBT is planning on taking over Full Tilt, this would be the perfect way to get players back into the FTP rooms that so many people have sworn that they’re done with. After all, who can resist a chance at ten million dollars?
Only time will tell if Groupe Bernard Tapie can successfully pull this off, but it certainly seems like they’re carefully lining up the pieces that they’ll need to make a successful play. If they’re not careful, however, they may just fall short of the 20,000 to 30,000 players that they’re expecting for the ISPT, as players may not be so forgiving after all.