100% if BF didn't happen, Full Tilt would have been fine. At least in the short term, it's clear now looking back that having those two in charge of everything was a poor decision that would probably have led to some other disaster happening so I couldn't say it'd have been still here today but 2011 wouldn't have been the end that's for sure.

An example of that last point would be a terrible decision that Bitar made post Black Friday.

Phil Ivey came over to Dublin (i want to say late summer 2011) with a proposal that would have saved Full Tilt, but meant each of the ownership percentages being significantly reduced and the new investors, a prominent Vegas based business family let's say, taking 55%. Bitar talked the other owners out of taking the deal saying they'd recover if they could convince the AGCC to keep the lights on.

When it was obvious that wouldn't happen, he open a bridge call and told IT to switch back to the Khanawake servers and go rogue. Impulsive. He was talked out of going rogue on that front.

A lot of the former team as I said previously were and are still in the industry. With Malta and Gibraltar being home to so many big players, a lot of former team members traded in the rain of Dublin for some sun that's for sure!

There were groups for sure that knew things were bad, 90% of the employees would have seen no reason not to recover, even post AGCC involvement. How wrong they were.

I know that there were delays with larger Affiliate payments, being made at the end of 2010 - but this was discussed internally as more questioning the validity of the (significant) traffic they were sending. One affiliate in particular, I'd say the biggest tbh, had noises around bots.

In hindsight, looks like that was Bitar/Coronado nonsense.

No. Too much politics on that one buddy.

There's a few points to consider on this. The vast majority of FTP's traffic was US. ROW accounted for around 35%, they wanted a way to keep the US players online. So outside the box thinking was obviously happening.

PokerStars had a much better balance of traffic, largely thanks to them realising the spread was needed early on and the EPT played a huge part in that. It was easier for Stars to ditch the process.

On Tilt, if the player was a winning player, we'd deduct the deposit value from a withdrawal - so there were ways of collecting some of it, just not at the scale required.

There were discussions around using collection agencies also, and the security system in Tilt was pretty good - if it's a losing player, no way to collect, the system could trap the player in the comfort that the device fingerprinting technology would now allow a multiple account unless the player literally bought a new machine, used a different name, different ISP, different router etc etc (ie, became a fraudster) - and post trap, go down the route of using debt collection agencies to collect cash. The plans for this were in place, though not fully rolled out, shortly before BF.

FYI there are specific episodes of the Lederer Files that have been scrubbed from the internet for some reason.

Anything that mentions Gil Coranado has a funny way of disappearing from the internet.

How frequently did we work together?

I don't know who you are I'm afraid. Despite a quick google and check on your post history.

Nods, I knew the US market presented major troubles, I didn't realize the extent to which FTP was overwhelmingly American players though.

It just seems like it would have been easy for security to wait until the previous echeck was collected before allowing the same player to make another echeck deposit on the same account. I wasn't referring to players bouncing between usernames, the system literally let them continuously deposit by echeck on their account.

I do wonder if like 90% of echecks were clearing thus allowing people to continuously deposit was fine, but I got the feeling closer to 0% than 90% of echecks were clearing for a few months there, is there anything you can add about that, was the rate of echecks clearing higher than I'm expecting or was it very close to 0% and thus people like Chad Elie etc. were brought in as a hail mary?

Cheers!
John

How much did well-known pros like Patrik Antonius and Gus Hansen make from their FTP contracts?

What did FTP do about high stakes regs who were multi-accounting?

Did any large-scale cheating occur on high stakes tables?

What the biggest amount of $$$ that was ever confiscated from a single account?

Full Tilt was already wobbling in early 2011 - they were experiencing slow cashouts even to places like Neteller; industry savvy people were starting to realize that basically they couldn't process cashouts to Neteller until they had enough deposits come into their Neteller account to cover them. I wholly disagree they weren't about to fall over before Black Friday.

With that said, I think they did have a path to recovery. It involved some very basic steps:

1) Bitar calling a shareholders meeting and informing them of the processing backlog/blackhole of likely bad deposits that would never be realized
2) Informing shareholders of the current size of the backlog
3) Informing shareholders that all disbursements would be ceased until the backlog was cleared
4) Turning off echeck deposits for US players unless working with a processor who was clearing them consistently
5) Turning off any crediting to FTP team pros and collecting outstanding markers from them

I do believe there was enough actual funds on the site and enough new legitimate deposits coming in that if they stopped digging, they could start filling the backlog. The downside of this would have been an immediate drop in site liquidity and an abandonment of the concept that they were a legitimate competitor to PokerStars in terms of size.

However, between continuing to accept new bogus deposits, increasing their marketing, and continuing to pay out immense disbursements to the shareholders, they just kept digging a bigger and bigger hole.

What I have always believed is that Bitar knew that if actually came clean, the shareholders would realize he was an incompetent boob, and he'd be immediately fired. I also believe a number of shareholders knew or strongly suspected how bad the situation was, but hid behind "well no one explicitly told me" or "I'm not part of the executive team", and figured they'd just keep collecting their disbursements. The situation could have been saved, but it wasn't going to be.

As it stands, I suspect Black Friday probably saved a lot of Full Tilt customers from losing even more. You can't imagine how much it pains me to say anything remotely complementary about Black Friday, but it's true.

I am curious where you learned Iovation integration and who from Portland you had to communicate any issues with. Do you know how much Full Tilt was paying to use to Iovation software?

Did FT ever use bots in order to boost traffic on their site and make games run better? Specifically micro-mid stakes

Dude, that is Pmarrsouth, come on.

everyone knows him, his reputation proceeds him. /sarcasm

Is this something that actually happened or a metaphor?

Come on now, this is what I found within 20 seconds or so.

reference to seinfeld

Who was ultimately responsible?

Who had to know what was going on?
Who should have know what was going on?
Who actively deceived management or owners?
Who tried to help remedy the situation?

I’ve spent many hours researching this over the years and ive come to the conclusion that Bitar and a group of a select few of his trusted employees caused the situation , attempted to cover it up and deceived others the entire time.

This group does not include Lederer, Ferguson or any other owners. I think they were naive, unqualified, and deceived. I also think it’s unfair that some owners received backlash and some either faced no repercussions publicly or were oddly enough, celebrated by the poker community.
Is it fair that Lederer received the brunt of the backlash when 4 other owners owned more shares than Lederer and he stuck around when the **** hit the fan. Siedel walked away with millions and not a bad word said about him, same with Gordon, Juanda, and Ivey.

Would you care to comment on what you think might happen to any operators still offering services to this day to U.S players?


Can these operators get shut down any time?

golf balls?

really?

Before BF where you aware of the agreement with SunFirst for the bulk on Tilt processing transactions? Do you think that a bank compliance officer working with the feds was the first domino of BF happening or do you think the feds already had a case built before SunFirst came into the picture?

What happened to the people who worked there for the most part. Did most leave the industry or did they find work at other sites. Was being part of Full Tilt a bad thing in that regard (ie: finding other work) when it finally hit the fan.

Was a lot closer to 0% than it was 90%, that's for sure.

I agree with everything you've posted outwith the bold, I had full access to the cashier - I could see the money coming through in real time.

I was first introduced to Iovation while at Full Tilt, have subsequently used it since in dating, digital finance and ecom.

I can't recall the names of the other team members but Greg was definitely on a lot of the early conference calls.

I don't but I know to replicate the functionality that the tilt integrated system had later in other industries, it was anything from 5k per month to 100k per month.

No, only for UAT.