Guess you skipped over the 3rd word in my sentence: "most"

Those guys are happy and relieved that you have that impression. That means the narrative is working.

The analogy that always came to mind for me was somebody robbing your house and the insurance company recouping your losses. The fact is that you still got robbed, and the person who robbed you still deserves every ounce of contempt. He doesn't get credit for making you whole, and it doesn't wipe his slate clean.

When you take money that's not yours, that's stealing. Period. Chris Ferguson helped himself to money that should never have been touched, and still holds a lot of it to this day.

As far as I'm concerned, he stole several thousand dollars from me, and someone else made it right as he silently cowered in his mansion. I don't forgive him.

What a smarmy ****. It's like he's taunting and rubbing it in

Interesting trailer, eargerly awaiting the full vid

I had a check out as well, if I remember right I think I got that paid back as well, its been so long tho I dont really remember. I honestly don't care at this point anymore. I always blamed chris the least out of all of them, but his "apology" just really rubs me the wrong way, especially since he acts like everyone was made whole. He definitely failed by not hiring someone in PR to help him with this.

That Hellmuth tweet is so lol tho. Love the random caps and quotations, looks like a Trump tweet.

Come to think of it, wouldn’t this whole speech fit in a tweet? Society does not even need complete sentences anymore.

“Yo, glad all were paid, really sorry, I like poker a lot, #POY”

Has it already been mentioned here that the statute of limitation on the potential crimes here is 7 years, and we are one month past that deadline?

It is my honest opinion that Chris waited to apologize until his neck was off the chopping block, which makes his apology insincere and purely to meet his ends/benefit.

He doesn't give a flying **** about you or me, he just wants to come back to the tables with a clear conscience.

Everyone defending Lederen & Ferguson & other board members of FTP and blaming everything on Bitar:

Do you agree with the notion that a key point of running a healthy poker or betting site should have very strict procedures on what to do with money deposited on the site?
If yes, how can you possibly think that Lederer & Ferguson are relatively blameless?

I find it incredibly hard to believe that these procedures were in place and that they were "fooled" by Bitar, given the size of the gap between customer deposits & money on hand (I don't remember the numbers, but it was huge).

If these procedures are not in place, any poker site is running on a business model that is consistently exposed to liquidity issues. If at any time there is a liquidity problem that is visible to clients, the company is probably done for.

The only argument you could make is that the board members were idiots that did not realize this. But I do not think that is a likely scenario. Especially since FTP was not a tiny company, it likely had senior executives in charge of financial & risk management.

I only see 2 realistic scenarios:
1/ Either Bitar was a genius criminal surrounded by a combination of accomplices and idiots. Your pick who the accomplices & idiots were.
2/ FTP was deliberately run & managed in a highly irresponsible manner, with the only potential outcome being failure/bankruptcy at some point.

And from everything we know 1/ just seems highly unlikely.

On your point #2 isn't it different if there was fraud that took place? Not sure if FTP committed fraud or not, but if the officers of the company did wrong doing, not just that they were in a bad business or bad businessmen (like Borders) then that is a different situation entirely.

Everyone who runs a huge company competing to rule a given market *thinks* they are a genius surrounded by idiots.

Bitar thought he was smarter than Stars for accepting US credit cards. He was very very mistaken.

Good point. Statute of limitations is up and he issues this apology. Right before the WSOP too. It's clear he just wants to be left alone to play poker in peace this summer. I hope he gets the opposite.

yeah i mean any high growth internet business is basically going to operate the same way. This is a subscriber acquisition cost business. Spend huge dollars on marketing to grow your player pool who will return to the site over time and have a lifetime value that exceeds their acquisition cost. Stars operates the same way, as does DraftKings, TripAdvisor, SnapChat, whatever. In this case, they got clocked with a huge regulatory enforcement right as they were hitting their stride on user growth and had no financial ability at that time to withstand a liquidity freeze. You can fault them for it if you want, but without operating this way we probably never would have had a poker boom in the first place since the sites would not have had the capital to invest in marketing and grow their platforms beyond a few thousand loyalists. Cash is fungible guys, that's the bottom line. There isn't a black box of "player deposits" and an operating account. Stars (when it was still Amaya) management told me that only 2% of their players ever make a withdrawal from the site. If you're not using that pool of capital given that kind of win rate than you ARE running your business recklessly. You want them to float a bond and pay 7% interest when they have all the cash they need sitting in "float" from player deposits?

I genuinely feel bad for the founders/RedPros/etc. They probably thought they were worth hundreds of millions at one point and that evaporated after BF. Oh well, tough luck, must've been a fun ride. Rough business model when you have no control over the political/regulatory regime you operate under. This is why Sheldon Adelson's business is so far superior, because that guy will never get caught flat footed on a regulatory change...

I believe this to be true, but I think some of those involved thought they could make it work.

Also, there are massive problems with the idea that the largest shareholders had no idea what was going on. The mismanagement was common knowledge prior to black Friday. The information we had was enough for any shareholder to ask some questions. I would hope a shareholder would have more information than someone who reads 2p2.

Howards statement wasn't much better

Let me preface this post with 2 things. First, I have been friends with Chris since before either of us won the Main Event, as we met through RGP and BARGE back in the mid-90s. Second, I have no inside information, and know nothing about what happened beyond what I've read in public forums such as here on 2+2.

Obviously somebody at FTP made some wrong decisions with regard to handling the money, as well as paying dividends to owners while leaving funds owned by the players at risk. And I look forward to finding out who made these decisions, and just exactly how guilty they were in doing so. I also look forward to finding out who knew about these decisions (or should have known), when they learned about what was happening, and what they did or didn't do about it.

Until I learn otherwise, I am giving Chris the benefit of the doubt that he didn't make these decisions, and didn't know about them. Or at least didn't know about them in time to do anything useful to help the players. I just find it hard to believe that this friend I know well would be capable of knowingly risking the money of all of his players while at the same time paying himself big dividends. I just don't think he would engage in that sort of behavior.

I hope I'm right about Chris, and I hope that we can learn for certain what happened, who made it happen, and what everybody inside FTP did about it once each of them learned what was going on. For those who are still not financially whole from this situation, you have my sympathy. And I hope we can learn for certain, sooner rather than later, who deserves your ire. But until I learn facts that say otherwise, I will support my long-time friend.

Thanks, Greg Raymer (FossilMan)

Well that settles that I guess!

You should have known. PPA was in bed with this company until the very end.

Everyone defending Chris outing themselves hard.

Call me crazy, but i am super CURIOUS why Ferguson loaned Erik Lindgren 2millon dollars.
Remember that came pubic in the howard files when he spoke out? Howard said Erik got double credited

I'm not surprised, he's just like them. Fraud/scams/whatever is just business to those type of people. They dgaf.

Amazing how much money was about back then

In hindsight it was amazingly naive to trust our money to a site run and owned by poker players. Hindsight is 20/20 and all but looking back now as a full on adult it's like, "ya, of course the site owned by poker players is gonna end up in some weird ****ery." It's kinda amazing we all trusted that site.


They really were some marketing geniuses.