Awesome job on that video Arty!

So... Twoplustwo Publishing should send them to their publisher?

I thought borders was their publisher?

Borders was a retailer - Twoplustwo is a publisher.

I don't mean to be rude, but how have you been here 5 years and not know that this is the site of Two Plus Two Publishing?

That is kind of my point. Seven years later the person who chooses to harass this guy at the table is the random one, and odds are nobody else is worried about what he is saying or thinking. To most of the world it is old news (if they even know about it), where people pretty much got their money back - so to most people's perspective at the WSOP in 2018 the rando yelling as he is fueled by his 2011 inspired frustration is just someone who needs to move on with his life. May not be fair or just, but it is human nature and reality.

This, just move on people. Be like Jesus and forgive.. or STFU so I don't have to hear about it anymore. Create a FB page so you guys can cry all day and night about it and stop ruining NVG.

this isn't a case where your car was scratched or a borrowed golf club was snapped in half. peoples lives were ruined. hell ... some ppl probably committed suicide as a result of what happened.

i agree with you if someone has already had the chance to say something to his face, but goes back for more. but in the case of someone that has never come across Chris, i'll side with the aggrieved former FTP player, and not with the culprit, if the former player wants to address Chris directly (no matter how many years after the incident took place). that is the least we can do.

"Scandal person"

Ferguson's bank account is still loaded with stolen money. It doesn't matter that someone else paid his victims back. It would be irresponsible to just forget about it and let it slide.

Poker players have a reputation for being pushovers that let cheaters and scammers get away with everything. All we ever really do is apply social pressure by shaming these people. This is a mild deterrent, but at least it's something. If you guys are suggesting that we shouldn't even do that anymore, then I'm really baffled as to why you think so.

This community needs to grow a spine.

Did you see Ferguson's bank account? If not STFU cuz you're speculating. 2+2 is letting so much speculation talk like facts. Bring facts or you're an idiot.



2+2 used to be about facts, stats and knowledge. This thread has shown the opposite. Show some data to say that Ferguson is the one who stole your money or you know... you might as well be saying every game is rigged like the fools you are. Step your game up 2+2ers.


As far as I can tell he was another idiot poker player trying his hand at business and failed. Seriously unless you bring facts you guys are on some weak BS. Step your game up fools.

This exactly. It baffles me this clown is even allowed to play. The poker rooms should grow some balls and not even let him play these events. Or our ****ty government should grow some balls and claw that money back. If I were sitting in a room with this pos one of two things would happen. Either they would need dental records to identify him or it would take every security personnel they have to throw me out of the place. And same goes to fat ass Raymer also. That post you posted a few pages back was absolutely abhorrent. Save your mindless drivel Raymer, we dont care that you and your pos buddy were friends.

Your post is pathetic and unfortunately ill informed. But you did get one part right, he is an idiot poker player.

Sure, you can start by reading the DOJ press release which states that FTP was hundreds of millions of dollars short of player funds. This money was supposed to be untouched in segregated accounts: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr...-federal-court

The FTP board paid themselves $10 million+ per year salaries. You do the math.

Unfortunately this guy doesnt appear to understand math. Its clearly obvious he doesnt understand reading comprehension or history.

Hi Everyone:

I think there's something that very few people here understand relative to FTP. Also, to preface these comments what I'm about to say doesn't have to be completely accurate, but it is the way I understand things and I'm in no way defending FTP.

What I understand is that at different times FTP was having money seized and problems with payment processors. Everyone here should know this.

So at a high level of management, and my guess is that it was Bitar, but that's just my guess, a decision was made to run FTP like a community bank instead of a gambling site. Now for those of you who don't know, a bank does not keep on hand all the depositors' money. They keep only a small percentage of it which allows them to operate on a daily basis -- deposits and withdrawals, with the rest of the money being lent out to the community.

Of course, there's a problem when doing this, and that is what is known as a run on the bank. If too many of the depositors want to withdraw their money at the same time, the bank won't have enough money on hand to meet the demand and then they'll have problems. Of course today, there are safe guards built into our banking system to account for possible runs on a bank, but that's not the purpose of this post.

Again, my understanding is that someone in upper management of FTP, most likely Bitar (but I don't really know) decided that FTP, because of the money seizures and payment processor problems decided to run more like a bank. But instead of lending money to the community, money was sent in the form of dividend payments to the partners. But enough money was kept back, along with the daily rake that was collected, for the company to operate under normal circumstances.

But then two things happened. First, the US DOJ shut them down in the US, and their license from Alderney was revoked. This caused the inevitable run on the bank, the money wasn't available, and FTP collapsed.

So in my opinion, the intention to steal all the money was never there, it was to run like a bank (which went against the requirements for their license) which could be subject to a run on the bank. And of course when this happened, the partners who had received money, didn't want to give it back, and in some cases, with Erick Lindgren being the best known example assuming the reports are accurate, didn't have it anymore.

Best wishes,
Mason

How is that not stealing?

If player funds were initially segregated, as regulatory bodies require them to be, there's no honest justification for changing your mind. If you decide one day to run it like a bank and help yourself to the players' money, you're taking something that doesn't belong to you. That's stealing.

Facts, stats, and knowledge? Are you thinking about a different site maybe?

Hi SrslySirius:

It's certainly, assuming I'm right, a violation of the law. Also, and this is where hindsight is 20-20, they should have realized that the chance of the US DOJ shutting them down was high enough that they should have never done this.

However, the other side of the argument is that much money was being seized by various governments and there were payment processor problems, and this would be a way to stop that. Now I'm not an expert on this stuff so it's certainly possible my understanding is not very good. But it seems to me that an effort should have been made to find another way out of this dilemma.

One other point. If the US DOJ wouldn't have started the events that led to the run on the bank, I think there's a good chance that FTP would still be with us, most everyone would be saying what a great company it was, and this includes both of us.

Best wishes,
Mason

A lot of bad things happen in this world, and the reality is as time passes the rest of the world moves on, and they tend to not really have as much sympathy for those who cannot let things go.

This is not about defending the owners of Full Tilt. They were morons. They should have had more consequences. However, as time passes - more and more people will care less and less, that is just the way these things work.

Imagine 15-20 years from now - do you think it will still be healthy to be upset about this and consider berating this guy at the tables if he is still playing surrounded by those who were not even born when Black Friday happened? That's just a function of time passing.

Shrug. There was a video someone posted last year where he insulted the guy. Find it and watch it and enjoy it. Realistically, time moves on and the number of people who feel the fire you do diminishes, and the number of people who just think it was an semi interesting piece of poker history (if they know about it at all) increases.

Lederer and Ferguson were both involved in day-to-day running of FTP. When the **** hit the fan they then both conveniently said how they had both stepped down as managers and were letting Bitar run it long before Black Friday and how they had no knowledge of players money being used to run the business blah blah blah. I don't believe this for a minute. they were both well aware the business was using(stealing) players money.

They were only concerned about themselves and their years of silence speaks volumes. There were people that had their life roll tied up on FTP and went bankrupt, had to get a slave job etc. etc. Ferguson and Lederer made zero effort to help or even to acknowledge the ****storm and personal tragedy that they caused to some of the players.

The apology is for only one reason. The get the heat off to play at the WSOP. I'm sorry now means nothing.

How about the justification of having hundreds of millions of dollars stolen by payment processors and the government. People love talking about "segregated funds". But then if a ****ton of segregated money was stolen, then what? Stop all employee payments until the shortfall is made up, even though they have contracts? Perhaps that would have been a better choice. I think they were put in a bad place, because they continued to operate in the USA, and because of the horrible place they were in made a few more bad choices that compounded. The site was going to be ****ed almost no matter what they did, unless they pulled out when UIGEA happened. Only reason pokerstars was able to "segregate funds", is that when they had 100s of millions of segregated money stolen, they only had 2 non-degen owners that can just immediately replace funds out of their pockets. When you've got like 40 degen owners all getting paid and 1/2 of them blowing it and probably in debt, what is the exact process for replacing players hundreds of millions of stolen funds? You're acting like they just decided to blow all the players funds on themselves. But I think around 2-300 million was payment processor theft, govt theft, or phantom deposits. Which explains most of the shortfall. Phantom deposits was another ****ed up situation. They got put in a real bad place, where if they admitted the phantom deposit issue, there'd be a run on the bank b/c of the previous thefts, so they had to hope to just stay afloat by then and not say what really happened, in order to keep the rake coming in to hope to run it as a bank long enough to stay afloat. Was it the most ethically run business? Nah. But they and their customers were all gambling online after UIGEA, so everything was gray area. Payment processors theft, government theft, and phantom deposits would never have had a chance to happen if not for UIGEA. I've been a professional for a long time and had lots of money stolen during UB and money locked up during FTP. Don't really care too much about the FTP scandal. It was always a big risk gambling after UIGEA as it was a pretty gray area. I was getting checks processed from an "online flower" company; it didn't take a rocket scientist to realize everything might not be on the up and up. I'm just happy they were able to work out some deal to "sell their IP" to pay me in full. After black friday, I kissed that money goodbye.

This might be true for forgivable missteps, but it doesn't really apply to the big stuff. Harvey Weinstein can't simply wait for all this to blow over. The general public will never forgive him, just as they never forgave Roman Polanski. People remember.

What FTP did tore this community and industry apart. You may be growing apathetic about it, which is very strange, but everyone else is always going to remember Ferguson and Lederer for their part in the largest scandal in poker history. If anyone is holding out hope that this might all be water under the bridge some day, that's incredibly naive.

I'm glad Monteroy is good at pointing out what people will or won't care about 7 years from black friday and explains it in his usual condescending attitude.

Losing your life roll in a ponzi scheme is terrible, but ultimately who's to blame?

Mason, a bank does not take depositor money and pay it out to owners, or use it to create deposits for others, it takes depositor money and makes investments that back those deposits. In FT's case they simply used depositor money to protect their own equity, not depositors. This is not how any bank runs.

If processor money was seized en route to FT then FT owners should have either been fronting that money to new depositors from their own equity or never credited deposits, but in no case should this money been taken from other deposits. They were free rolling with money entrusted to them and defending that type of action is very naive and misleading.