There’s a new player on the Full Tilt Poker scene, and rumor has it that they’re looking to step in and strike up a deal, since Groupe Bernard Tapie has been having some problems working out the details with the United States government.
Unlike Groupe Bernard Tapie, this British-based private equity company doesn’t seem interested in relaunching the Full Tilt site, which seems to be where a lot of the current negotiations are running into problems. Instead, the new interest seems to be solely in purchasing the Full Tilt Poker software, and they’re willing to pay between 30 and 35 million dollars for it. Between the considerable amount they’re offering and the potential formal death of Full Tilt Poker once and for all, it seems quite likely that the US Department of Justice would be willing to accept their offer, although what this means for players who are still hoping to reclaim the money that they’ve lost has yet to be seen. Since the company’s debts to its players are roughly ten times the amount offered by the new company, it doesn’t bode well.
At this point, Full Tilt’s software, which was widely considered the best online poker software on the market, is the former company’s only viable asset. The Full Tilt brand means next to nothing now, having been tainted (likely forever) by scandal after scandal. Even if the company is bought out by another taker, players will be unable to forget that they’ve spent the better part of a year associating the name “Full Tilt” with getting ripped off. Since the software is the only thing that Full Tilt has that’s worth anything (apart from its customer database, which could be valuable to other online sites), it makes sense that this new company would buy the software and then resell it to the highest bidder– 888 Poker and bwin have both been rumored to have interest in procuring the software for their sites.
Chances are, despite what Groupe Bernard Tapie has been saying about relaunching Full Tilt, the “buy and resell” tactic is probably what they plan on doing as well, but they fear endangering the state of their negotiations with the US DOJ if they openly admit it. If they can drag down FTP and scare off other buyers in the process, they can snatch up the company and its associated software for much less than it’s worth and then use it themselves for the International Stadium of Poker Tour (ISPT). The longer they can stall before making the purchase, the less the software is worth to competing sites, who have seen developments of their own in the past year, but that doesn’t really make it any less valuable to GBT, who would be getting some excellent software for far less than market value.
While rumors state that the company is only interested in Full Tilt if the deals with GBT and the US DOJ fall through, much is still unknown about the company and its motives, so it will be interesting to see how the presence of an alternate solution affects the outcome of current FTP negotiations.
Remember to bookmark MaxPokerBonus.co.uk so we can continue to bring you all the news about Full Tilt Poker and other poker legalization and post-Black Friday updates, as well as tournament results and all things poker!