This myth lives on. Everyone DID NOT get their money back. I for one never got a dime. And I am far from the only one.

Never mind that that the money that was paid out did not come from Tilt or anyone associated with Tilt. (The payoff came from Pokerstars in a deal with the Feds to get them to stop suing PS.)

The persistent myth that everyone got paid has no basis in fact. I lost a little under $2000. I was told that I was paid out but I never received it. They blamed the payment processors, just as if hiring conmen and criminals to handle payments was not something Tilt was responsible for.

I am not American and do not live in the USA. That is defiantly one of the reasons I did not get paid. But that doesn't mean that you can discount or ignore me when you make blanket statements like "everyone got their money."

Lucky me the amount I lost was small enough to be merely annoying and not enough to damage my financial well being. But it was my money and I won it fair and square they had no right to keep it.

The Full Tilt debacle was one of the most successful scams of our lifetimes. Lederer, Ferguson and Ivey each made $$$MILLIONS$$$. Many others made big money from the scam. And they all walked away scott free, at least form a legal standpoint.

Ivey is so Teflon, he even avoided the reputational hit that Lederer and Ferguson took, despite the fact that he was the big shareholder and apparently made more coin from Tilt than anyone else.

Totally agree. I ultimately received a portion of what I was owed, but the amount was worth much less to me by the time I was paid. The balance on Black Friday was material to me at that point and caused some financial distress. Submitting a "petition for remission" that resulted in getting a portion of what was owed three years later in no way made me whole.

Although one could argue that the source of the funds should not matter if repaid, I would have felt better if it came from those unjustly enriched and Jesus and Howard are at the top of the list. If I recall, Ivey was the only one who spoke up when **** went down and he had not received large payouts via their ponzi scheme like Ferguson and Lederer did.

You guys should check into that, and make sure you didn't miss a step in the process somewhere. Everyone who submitted a valid claim was paid out in full, if they did it right. Granted, it was not an easy process (you even had to keep an eye out for snail mail to get instructions on a postcard for the next step in the remission process), but still.

this was the greatest banner placement at the WSOP I have ever seen...

They robbed all of their customers and refused to do the right thing which would have been giving back their ill gotten profits to repay players. Pokerstars only paid their debts so that they could operate in the USA again. They are scumbags and should never be forgiven in any way.

They were all Royalty back then lol Poker Royalty

It would have looked better if it was facing the wall!

There both solid, not one spec of dirt stuck

This angle explains so much.

I don't think the guys would have stole the money point blank without an ethical system to justify the embezzlement. It's possible that paying money to top players (friends) so that they could gamble it, and make the money effectively flow down (whether in the tables or with at will quid-pro-quo arrangements). All this would have been disguised, to investors and to themselves, as marketing budgets, which would all work out in paper as long as the site was growing, when the site stopped growing, it all went to ****, effectively making it a ponzi scheme, whether intended or not.

I don't think it was as direct and stupid as unlimited credit, that would have no justifiable defense, no one is that dumb.

How was there no trial on this? I mean not even a civil trial for like theft or embezzlement, but just a commercial trial for breach of contract or fraud or something. They should have released information to the public, explained what happened.

I think the expectation that the owners were just criminals who were out there to steal money was misplaced, it was in their best interests for the website to keep running for 10 years and to keep their reputation clean, their mismanagement even hurt them, the incentives were not there for this to be premeditated.

Isn't selling all the assets to pokerstars under the condition that they would pay back users the right thing?

The solution you propose would have had no actual benefit to the users, it seems more about removing the wealth from those that were benefitted.

The issue with your solution is that Full Tilt itself paid the profits to different parties in exchange for services, sure it may have been something as ridiculous as paying 1M/mo to a poker player for playing poker, but it may also be something reasonable like paying for advertising on traditional media or servers, or salaries for software development. Even if you made some of the expenses be returned, (at the expense of the provider who was not necessarily guilty) you would not expect ALL the money to be returned, mostly because there's a chain of costs in the case of providers, and because poker players probably gambled or lost fees to casino rake. Somebody would have to be in the hole for that money, and that somebody was PokerStars.

Not seeing the issue if everybody got paid.

Weren't all debts settled once they sold to PokerStars? What other amends would you expect?

Exactly. Interesting parallel with the .com boom.

Not against this, it's possible that at some point they took money with some sort of moral guilt, but they may have had debts to pay, it can start as a very reasonable thing as start spiralling out of control. But regardless of what ethical guilt might or might not been present, here's an important fact that's more important than whether they felt wrong or right:

It was their money, it was not illegal.

If someone deposits money to your company, you now hold their assets and have a liability to them, the company can shove their money up the butthole if they want to, that's not illegal because it's their money, what they still do have is the liability to return that money though, but these are 2 separate positions.

Banks, of course, do this all the time, and it was surely a point that might have been brought up when justifying this during executive meetings:

"Hey banks do this all the time"

A very basic setup would have been to have 2 separate accounts, one for player deposits and the other with rake profits. It's possible though that they didn't even have this basic accounting setup, but even if they did, if their growth operations and salaries went overboard as income and growth slowed down, and they were out of money would you have:

A) Asked for a loan.
B) Taken money from that huge bank account with player deposits.

That's when the "Banks do it all the time" excuse would be brought up, maybe even the "it's our money" excuse, BOTH true and legal! Of course, they weren't a bank, had no banking experience, were not subject to banking regulations, etc...

But I'm definitely in the band that considers the case mismanagement rather than fraud, something that is settled with a chapter 7, an asset liquidation to creditors, and that's it.

In a sense when one plays poker one assumes risk, they aren't playing poker in a vacuum, you don't have an inalienable right to play poker and the poker rules are not the ones that govern the world, poker is a subset of business rules, and you are allowed to play poker always because a business allows you too (unless you are playing home poker), when that business fails, you really don't have legal rights to your deposits in excess of the assets available to the business.

I'm not familiar with bankruptcy procedures though, I know that it's a crime to embezzle funds before a bankruptcy, but as long as you liquidate existing assets, the business dissolves, business as usual.

If you are going to cite your freedom to play poker, then be prepared to deal with the consequences of that freedom.

This is the nature of any business, and Poker out of any industry is not going to be exempt or especially prosecuted beyond the corporate veil to ensure the assets of degen gamblers are respected, not anymore than the assets of actual banks or real businesses. What do you think happens if your business signed a yearly contract and you are behind on payments and your business goes bankrupt? Do you think I would chase you down personally so that you pay the debts of your business? No you would file for bankruptcy and I would take it as a loss of doing business.

Business as usual, if you can't handle risk don't play poker.

Forgiveness is good to give, but for forgiveness to happen people have to repent.

If they just hid out a while, then re-emerged without admitting what they did, you don't forgive yet.

Like Ivey? He got forgiven.

I wouldn't.

I'll entertain the thought once they pay at least 100% of their ill-gotten gains back, inflation adjusted of course

**** no. /End thread.

The asset they held and "sold" to PokerStars was utterly worthless (and were regularly offering to anyone who would assume the player liability, of which there was no one). There was nothing in their software that many other sites didn't already have, so the value was the brand, and the brand value had been annihiliated.

If Isai Scheinberg didn't care more about the poker world than making a good deal, he'd have inserted a clause requiring the former FTP board to come up with a 100M goodwill payment towards player refunds, and how they put it together and who they get it from isn't his problem, and if they can't do it, the deal is off and the DOJ can figure out how to deal with the justified player complaints with Jesus and the Professor.

Should any individual user be ultimately unhappy if they were made whole? Beyond the lost access to their money and the associated stress, maybe not. But that should be as a result of +10 positive vibes towards PokerStars and +10 negative vibes to Lederer and Ferguson for an overall neutral.

Granted, I totally recognize that this isn't at the same level as actual cash, but nobody got reimbursed for their legally obtained Full Tilt points. For most it was a small, almost (almost!) meaningless amount of FTPs. For others who had put their trust in FTP and allowed their points to accumulate, this loss could be much bigger.

Would 90% of a brand new Harley Davidson motorcycle complete lost qualify?

This^^^^.

Not to defend Ivey because he doesn't need me to defend him, but Ivey wasn't involved in the day to day operations and very likely had very little knowledge that the money used to reimburse him came from player deposits.

There is a huge difference between being unknowingly paid from player deposits and knowingly taking money from player deposits. Huge.

I almost had the damn car. Zero compensation for all those points.

And a huge difference from not being able to prove they knew the money was stolen and them actually not knowing it was stolen. Hint when they keep it after finding out it was stolen you know they will keep stolen money.

Ok.

You work for an employer. You put in your hours, do your job as listed in your job description. You get paid.

Months later you find out that your employer was stealing money to run his business. You had no idea.

Do you give it back even though you worked for that money?

Ivey had a contract to provide services in exchange for money. He fulfilled his side of that contract. Why shouldn't he get paid?

Yes, to most of us what Ivey did was relatively easy for the amount he was paid, but that isn't the point. He had no part in what was going on and was just fulfilling his contract. Why should he pay anything back?

Put another way, there were likely hundreds of peons who worked for FTP. Programmers, testers, secretaries, customer service reps, etc. None of them had anything to do with stealing money from the players, yet they were all paid with stolen money just as Ivey was.

Do you think they should pay it back? Other than being poker famous, how is Ivey different than them?