Its is much better because she has no vested interest in the story, has collected a lot of infos, has a lot of sources from multiples sides, is being thorough and disciplined in the way she treat information (trying to bring the truth rather than to publish).

She has BY FAR the best track record when it comes to bringing out information about the FTP case for the last 1 year 1/2, that's the reason why she has more credibility than anyone else.

Guys to cut it short, it's pretty simple: if you are unable to understand what she has to bring it just means that you did not follow this story closely enough to bring a constructive comment. Some of us in this thread literally spent hundred of hours reading and discussing the details of this story...

Go reread the gigantic 30k+ thread and all the content on subject poker/diamondflush poker and then maybe you can start to have a clue about the work produced.

I agree she has a lot to contribute and is best placed to dissect the interviews, but it's kind of ironic that in the thread you refer to she called out Harry Demetriou for not naming his sources.

Yes Howard ruled the company with his obvious arrogant attitude and iron fist and the other owners had no say. He would pat them on the head and move on.

Yolo is correct. I'm looking forward to part 2:

Hdemet was basically whoring for attention pretending to be "in the know" of everything and getting everyone on an emotional roller-coaster by presenting as sure facts information which later revealed to be false...

Calling him out, by pointing out that he had access to very few and unreliable source was a great service for the psychological well-being of the community.

DF dont need to name her sources because she has shown to be very careful about vetting those sources and the information they provide and clearly focused on publishing real reliable news and not rumors.

Many of you seems to be attacking her about her anonymity and her sources ... why don't you rather try to point out anything she wrote that has proven clearly untrue* ? It should be easy, she has published more things than anyone else on the subject.

*they are very few small instance which have been corrected/explained (like the LA Times thingy on S:P).

It would be amazing if DF finally came forward and it was Annie Duke ...

Were any of these companies holding $300m of other peoples money. Comparing FTP to other private comapanies that aren't responsible for their customers $$ just seems pointless. It couldn't be more apples and oranges.

Tilts me when Howard keeps saying, we're not like 'Apple' where we are required to do audits. No, it's actually less important for Apple because they are only responsible to their shareholders, whereas FTP was responsible to both its' shareholders and its' customers.

The owners sold FT to PS for $700+ million.

Had there not been a black Friday that money would have gone to the owners. Instead it's being used to pay players and to settle cases with the DOJ.

I'm sure Howard believes he has made players whole by selling his interest in the company.

Howard and the other owners probably believe they owe nothing more.

As it appear everyone will get their money back the story becomes more of an academic exercise in what went wrong.

DF's articles will be the first of many to tell the story.

Pokerstars dintn't buy FT for 700+mil. Alot of that money was paying a fine for stuff Pokerstars is alleged to have done.

This is just not true. The $731m price tag is reduced by $150m immediately in money set aside for US players so the starting number is $581m. A large portion of that goes to pay off PokerStars/FTP civil indictments with the DOJ(they had fines of 2.5b). We will likely never know how much of that $581m gets credited to DOJ fines and how much was actually for the FTP asset.

If you think the DOJ calculated about a $300m fine(which is probably low), then that alone reduces the value of the FTP asset to about $280m or so.

Jeez

PS wouldn't have made US and ROW whole without receiving something in return.

It really doesn't matter how much they paid. As part if the agreement PS would pay ROW, give DOJ money to pay US players and pay FT fines as PS were dropped.

The FT owners sold their interest in the company in effect to make the players whole.

All I'm saying is that is what HL was getting at and on paper he's right.

Hm, and i learned something today.

The FT owners did not sell FT to anyone for any amount!

They forfeited their assets to the DOJ, in exchange for the dropping of charges.

I think Howard et al would argue that through the forfeiture of their asset, which will allow PS/DOJ to repay players, that they have met their obligations as owners. As such, discussion of how the former player money was used becomes irrelevant.

IMHO, if the owners of FT use the above arguement in any fashion, then they truly fail to grasp the ****ing over they have done to the poker community.

HL has spent the last month trying to convince us that Bitar and Coronado were unstoppable, if not removed by the shareholders. They flew to Ireland and hide their mismanagements from him.

This first installment says that the operations agreement gives the board the tools to avoid it and the management the order to try to avoid it.

Juicy enough, and promises a lot.

The first part of DF's article didn't really do much for me, but hopefully more concrete things will be revealed later. In fact, she comes off as quite bitter that she didn't get the interview, and though obviously she has a right to be, it doesn't help one to believe she is unbiased. She'll get the benefit of the doubt though, mainly due to her previous articles over the months.

So far, she's been quoting things from contracts and legal documents. I'm skeptical how much sway this will have, because I don't doubt that Howard and many of the other board members and owners acted in direct violation of many of these things. The problem with going this route is that their excuse is pretty much "We honestly had no idea how to run a business, and no idea what we were doing." I actually kind of believe them in that regard. We all know what Howard SHOULD have done, but unless someone comes with a recording or concrete proof that he and/or others were maliciously ignorant in order to screw the players and line their own pockets, I just don't see opinion changing much since the last two interviews. He's an idiot who shouldn't have been on the board, along with many of the other owners. In the end, the players are probably gonna get paid and they'll have forfeited a company worth hundreds of millions simply because they were too stupid to run it correctly.

I understand this is just the first of DF's articles, so maybe I'm completely wrong and something outrageous will be revealed.

the content was good, but i found myself very distracted by the very obvious lack of editing before this article was posted. way too many typos and needing to re-read a sentence 2-3x to understand what the author was trying to say.

No. The value of FTP in this case would be 731 - 300 = 431M. The fact that DOJ uses part of the money to pay off players doesn't mean Pstars paid any less for it.

It was my understanding that Pokerstars didn't buy ftp poker, they bought the assets from the doj?

HL stated in one of the tapes that he tried to get durrrr to pay back his loan so FT could meet monthly operating costs.

While the assets may have been turned over prior to the actual sale
It was most likely after agreement with PS was made and required FT signing off.

Only the beginning, folks, just setting stuff up, and please cut back a little on the elementary school teachers posts on puctuation and sentence structure, JHC

What a terribly scummy piece of text. The whole start of it screams "You don't give me my interview, then I will take you down to get those pageviews!". It's annoying that this story will get stuck with even more little tangents that have no effect on the bigger issue.

The interviews said all they needed to say about Howard Lederer, although a summary or critical look would be welcome, and an interview with Diamond flush would've been some extra popcorn.gif - this is just all very blegh.

I'm not attacking her and I respect all the work she's done, but she didn't just call him out, she accused him of trying to stiff the US players in a deal to buy FTP. Now he may well have been - I obviously don't know the truth - but in my opinion accusations like that shouldn't be made without providing some evidence especially when you're a respected member of the community and people take your word for things. I've never seen any mention of this since actually, now I think about it - was there really an attempted deal that would have stiffed US players?

Also, if I remember correctly, Harry was highly sceptical of the GBT deal and how they intended to make ROW players whole. He was right about that although he got slated for it at the time, because everyone just wanted to believe they were getting paid at last (which is understandable; just making the point that he wasn't wrong about everything).

Exactly and it is even more since 40% of the fine was for FTP.
So in this example 731M - 300x60% = 551M was paid.
They actually must have paid 498.2M for it, because the fine must have been exactly 388M.

FTP was clearly a lot more profitable than most of us assumed.


DF, you said:

"Essentially, the AGCC will need to approve:
1.an internal control system
2.gambling equipment
3.the licensee’s capitalisation status"

Isn't it understandable HF relied on the AGCC?

DOJ tells Pstars to give them $700+ and take these tainted assets off our hands, and we'll let you off on the charges against your company.

Done deal, we will never know what part of the $700+ was for the assets.

IMO, DF was just setting the basics of how FT was SUPPOSED to be run before she gets into the way it was actually run. And who was running it as it was looted and run into the ground.

I'm usually a nit about grammar and spelling, but am cutting slack this time because of DF's family or whatever hassle as the time to publish came close.