I've been somewhat slightly optimistic ever since FT paid the $400k licensing fee. Can't imagine anyone doing that if they were on the verge of bankruptcy.

lol if you were facing 20 years in prison and could pay 400k to the country that thus far hasn't extradicted you yet, you'd pay them 4 million if you could - especially if it wasn't your $$$

My friend said hes 110% sure he saw Phil Ivey driving downtown Montreal today in a Lamborghini talking on the phone. If true, I have no clue what he's doing here. Hopefully meeting up with potential investors or something.

Kanahwake is about a 15 minute drive from downtown Montreal, for what it's worth.

And no, this isn't an attempt at trolling. Obviously I would of loved to have seen it with my own eyes, but my friend is also a poker player and said there's no way he would not recognize Phil Ivey with 100% certainty.

I saw Ivy kicking an ATM in Vegas!!!!!!!!!

Yeah.. Didn't expect to get taken seriously on NVG. Obviously it's not huge news or anything, but it makes me wonder.

He comes top Montreal a lot. He has his own private craps table at the casino...

Very easy to find out if this is true. Just ask some of the talkative poker dealers and they will spill if it's true or not.

+1 to that cuz it's true

Yes, I've been there before.

I've also been told, they give him specifically cash back on losses. But that may or may not be a rumor started by one dealer and passed around the lunch room.

No-one as interested in PK's financial statements as Harry and I? I thought there was some good stuff in there, but I could be wrong. I'll cast a sharper eye over it later, hopefully someone with more solid accounting fundamentals than me will also.

Where can I find their other public documents like this? It was interesting contrasting their '09 numbers with 2010. The jump in Gross Profit is extraordinary - to me this says all their rake inducing ideas (Rush, Multi-Entry) Meant they knew the game was almost up and they wanted to siphon off a final £100m before it was.

Also, am I wrong in being confused by the jump in Gross Profit with an almost exact jump in costs? It would appear Tiltware costs are actually to pay the old boy's club in Vegas, whilst ordinary shareholders get to split what's left. Am I way off here? Or am I stating the obvious? (Much more likely)

Just in case you need some light relief, there are some unintentional comedy moments in there. If you're in to accountancy humour that is...



I like how those are rules for prepraing the statements, not for actually running the business

I dont think lumping rush poker and multi entries together as far as rake generating mechanisms is a fair statement...the one was actually a very neat innovation

??

Why call a spade a fork? I think it's quite clear they were rake generating innovations, especially backed up by cold hard financials.

I don't even know which one you mean was the 'neat innovation' I think they can be both viewed in that way, but it's quite clear they were introduced to send profits through the roof (and they spectacularly did)

Ray and Howard must have had difficulty understanding the report sense they don't speak or understand the Irish language. Must be why FTP did the exact opposite

How much info is there on the relationship between PK and the other FTP companies? Which owns what, and where is the game run from etc?

I took a brief look, and it was very hard to say anything without knowing more about what they were doing. The related party transactions was of possible interest, and they acknowledge Tiltware as the ultimate parent company. Beyond that, without knowing more about the structure of the business i think it's hard to say much.

(and antimalware bytes oked the download as clean )

Rush poker is a neat innovation. Multi-entry tournament can hardly even be called an innovation. Many people did it before, just against the rules at the time.

"Over the two years preceding Black Friday, the US government seized approximately $115M of player funds located in U.S. banks. While we believed that offering peer-to-peer online poker did not violate any federal laws - a belief supported by many solid and well-reasoned legal opinions - the DOJ took a different view"

I havent seen or read any conversastion on this point in the FTP statement, if if has been discussed can someone provide some legal advice on how the US goverment could do this without laying any charges against the company.

If the charges of running and illegal gambling site are proven false, would the US Goverment be liable to return these funds?

If this is infact true maybe the US player can ask their goverment for their money back

Absolutely. I wouldn't want to volunteer for that job, either.

It appears to me that PK pays Tiltware a substantial sum of money, who then disperse to Ivey, Ferguson et al - while other (PK) shareholders are paid in the traditional way, and are listed on financial statements.

It would explain a lot if the payment to Tiltware is listed as a 'admin cost' with the amount paid depending on projected profits.

After exposing FT's insolvency would it be naive to assume that Rush was about innovation and player satisfaction? Would it be cynical to think they knew they didn't have long left and had a genius brainwave of how to triple profits from £45m > £130m in a year?

A year ago I would have gone with the former, now i'm not so sure.

The seized funds could be released if:

1. The doj loses on ALL counts in the indictment; AND
2. The doj loses the civil case as well; OR,
3. The seized funds are proved to be not forfeitable proceeds of illegal activity (such as, for example, if all or part of the seized funds are proved to be player funds and the court rules player funds are not forfeitable).

#3 above is very tricky, legally speaking. I wouldn't want to bet on us getting our money back on this basis alone.

You raise an important point. If FTP does sink without trace, particularly if it taints the regulator, the Christian right wing/anti-poker lobby has all the ammo they need to vindicate UIGEA.

The ability of Pokerstars to pay out (essentially protect its consumers) and the fact that they did so in order to adhere to IOM's regulations provides a credible counter-argument that online poker can be done properly and that a model set of regulations is out there for new regulators to consider.

Just noticed I got a couple of numbers wrong in my OP, I knew it was too dull and too late! When I sit down with a coffee later I want to highlight what I found interesting so people smarter than me can tell me if i'm on the right track or if my fears are way off.

NVG has had a plentiful supply of Lawyers recently, where's my Accountancy man dem?

do you think the owners and red pros **** their pants and prefer paying their bills instead of risking their families lifes? do they even have family?

I think you're jumping the gun a little.

I don't have time right now but, in short: a long long time ago in a galaxy far away I used to do some equity analysis, and what occurs to me to do is to try to compare FTP to some of the listed poker sites - i.e. Party poker - to see how their cost structure etc. stacks up - were they less profitable (e.g. by massively overpaying for endorsements to their owners), were their liquid assets lower, etc.

But these accounts are not the whole picture so you're not comparing like with like. It doesn't make it a worthless exercise, but you need to have a good idea of what parts of the business these accounts are for. I don't really have any money tied up at ftp, so i have not really been following the issue closely, maybe such information is around, I dunno.

One thing that surprised me about party's accounts (it's important to recall that party is not pure play poker, but there is some info on the poker sub business, too) was that their cash and cash equivalents was like double the total player deposits. I had kinda assumed that the business didn't really need that much cash to run on beyond the player funds, but it seems like i was wrong.

We'll I'm not very good with the I's, wee's, you's and dems, so I'll leave that up to you's experts, but I gotta say these Poker bigshots are stand up guys and dey can't trow away everyding dat they have worked for. I'll skip the Gabagool...

http://www.chrisferguson.com/faq

Question 3: Do you own this site?
Our poker stars designed the Full Tilt Poker software. We do not run or own FullTiltPoker.com. We do however represent the site and put our reputations behind the software we designed and the integrity of the site.

I expect dem to "Make Good," so I wouldn't sweat it. All's I want to see is a sit-down, where dey say...

Your letter arrived 5 months ago and I must confess that this obligation completely slipped my mind. Needless to say, there is no excuse for this and I extend my sincerest apologies along with the attached check.

You pays your money and you takes your chances, but wee's uste to have a saying in the old neiborhood that sums up everything qouite succinctly.

Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wouldn't you?

Yes! Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wouldn't you?

Yea...Maizy doats...now you's got the picture? NO SWEAT!

I would assume that the online casino Party runs requires a large amount of cash to back it since casino payouts can create money out of thin air.

like you ever win in the partycasino,....rigged scam

Yeah I don't expect it to reveal anything sensational, I would however like to read between the lines and get some expert opinion on the things I thought were telling.

I'll make some screenshots of the content I think deserves some more thorough analysis in the hope someone more knowledgeable than me can enlighten us on what it all means.