Players who have money tied up in Full Tilt Poker will be interested to know that the site released an “exclusive news update” to pokernews.com today, regarding their status with the undisclosed investors. Full Tilt, in the past, has been less than forthcoming with information regarding what, exactly, is going on with the site, which was previously one of the largest online poker sites in the world, and now they’ve released a short private statement, which seems to be code for “we don’t have any good news to report, or we’d be sending this out to every news source, social networking medium, and former customer.”
The long and short of the press release is this: Full Tilt has “concluded the exclusivity period of negotiations with their current potential investor”, and now the site is looking for “additional potential investors to conclude the sale/partnership of the Full Tilt Poker brand and its assets”. English translation? They’ve got nothing. No investor, about whom we’ve been hearing for months now– and so much of the hope that former FTP customers had about getting their funds back in a timely manner hinged on this alleged investor (don’t put it past Full Tilt to invent investors to keep the wolves at bay, if that’s what it takes to buy some time). Past news reports stated that this investor was working with the US Department of Justice to deal with the class action lawsuit and get American players their money back, but without this investor, players shouldn’t hold their breath for timely repayments.
If the class action lawsuit from the States weren’t enough, Full Tilt Poker has just been hit with another– this time from Canada. The lawsuit is against Pocket Kings ltd (the owners of Full Tilt) and several of their subsidiaries, although it names many of the big name players for the site as defendants, including Ray Bitar, Howard Lederer, and Nelson Burtnick. Apparently, American players aren’t the only ones getting a little miffed that Full Tilt hasn’t paid back even a cent of the money owed their players (save, of course, for their alleged payments to certain FTP Pros).
Full Tilt also lost their Chief Marketing Officer, Lothar Rentschler, this week. His farewell email, sent out to many media outlets, was essentially an apology and expressed disappointment in the way that Full Tilt Poker is going. When you have nothing left to market because you’ve been shut down, there’s apparently no need for a Chief Marketing Officer anymore.
Full Tilt Poker has their hearing with the Alderney Gambling Control Commission scheduled for September 15th. Jeff Ifrah, one of FTP’s attorneys, issues a statement that “nobody wants to come to September 15th and not have a deal which is either finalised or close to finalisation to the point that it can be shared with Alderney and result in extension of that date.” It seems that FTP will be looking to file another extension, which is likely to further anger already outraged players.
The site has carefully worded their press release to imply that giving out too many details of their situation may be dangerous in terms of finding new investors (that doesn’t bode well), and, as they go on to explain, their first priority is finding a buyer so that they can use the capital to repay the players. So, wait… if no one buys Full Tilt, what happens to everyone’s money?