They would of opened it before the WSOP started, much more advantages rather then wait untill its over.

Im afraid if 80%+ was cautiousy optimistic, then 60% would have to be pessimism, which quite clearly is not.

I like to think we are somewhere around 65% =) and id hope 65% can be called caoutious optimism too =)

lol but you will give your input on everything else, your honestly the worst reporter or what ever the **** you call your self. you give input on everything but that, its a simple qeustion. # banDiamond Flush

Ok I know you were already warned once in this thread about this b.s., then banned from posting here, so you sent me smartass p.m.'s instead. Not sure why you are back, and sorry that China's and your "source" has failed you so badly, but knock it off.

She's a reporter, not a bookie. It surprises you she'd be uncomfortable laying specific odds on a potential deal?

Here's the honest truth: Anyone who says they are "80% sure" or "90% sure" or "67.4% sure" about a deal going through is just pulling numbers straight out of their ass.

I'd like to know where you got your education that makes you think "refusing to pull stuff out of your ass" makes you a "bad reporter."

Thanks Diamond_Flush for giving us so much information (i do not post normally ...) . Its pretty hard for me to find some varified news cause normally i am not able to understand the articles because of techniacl terms (thanks Leo to understand a bit). So i appreciate your work,the way you write and you express. Thanks for giving us some ligth in the dark. It seems to me that most of the guys who told something in the media/blogs or where ever in the web mostly speculate and focus to benefit from the situation.

I dont know why you are working that much on that case if you are not also one of those you had plenty of money(relative) in full tilt and i dont wanne know, but so thanks for giving us some pieces of the f... puzzle. thanks a lot

Diamond Flush. I stopped looking at this thread for a long time already and don't plan to rummage the massive pages as I assume nothing different has happened since FTP is still closed.

Can you give us your opinion based on what you know present and past that is this deal still trying to be worked out? FTP is out of money and cant pay any bills at this point. Unless a interested investor is footing the bills to keep the company running, I don't see how this company is not dead and our money is gone thanks to Tapei taking so much time trying to make a crap deal to be accepted.

You are as transparent as glass. What a waste of time

You are better off talking to your dog about FTP then DF. At least your dog might show you some sympathy

Apparently no one bothers to read my post. I said the DOJ used the Wire Act in conjuncture with UIGEA to bully banks into rejecting internet poker transactions which in turn forced internet poker companies to money launder in order to stay in business. So, they forced them to actually break the law to stay in business. The Wire Act was no used directly against them. I never said it was.

Mostly right, but you should have added they forced them to break the law to stay in business in the USA. So PS and FTP and AP UB actully chose to go outside the law (and the law sucks I agree) to make money. Much blame for all here IMHO

Dude just read the last few pages. DF has answered this question about a hundred times already. Stop being so lazy.

+1000

I must say I agree with him to a large extent. I don't condone any of the crap FTP did to risk player funds. But totally unrelated to that, the DoJ deserves so much blame for the mess in the USA. People saying 'they were just following the law' do not understand at all how the DoJ operates.

They don't just randomly go around trying to enforce all the laws they can. Instead, they make a very calculated decision of where to focus their limited resources. Any respectable DoJ and president would have said "we have a lot bigger fish to fry than wasting our time and energy going after a victim-less 'crime'" but this is not what they did. They went after poker for many years for political and financial gain, period. For all the posturing about going after things like Wall St. fraud, they chose to devote significant amounts of their limited resources to internet poker. This is indefensible and totally independent of the also pathetic congress.

There is also a lot of truth into them scaring banks into not doing business with poker sites regardless of whether they believed it violated the wire act or not. While we can all appreciate the DoJ doing what they can now to try and help make players whole in the FTP mess this doesn't just dismiss the fact that they have been the enemy of poker players for many years and this was a CHOICE.

There is a lot of truth to this. When I practiced law I used to tell business clients that they couldn't run a business in the US without committing a felony a week; years later a lawyer named Harvey Silverglate wrote a book called Three Felonies a Day in which he makes the case that most businesspersons and professionals probably commit three felonies a day. BTW, the US wasn't like this when I started to practice law.

What it means is that prosecution is all about executive (prosecutorial) discretion and when someone "gets out of line" the state can always find some legally valid reason to prosecute (and the press it just too happy to support the state in its pursuit of "criminals"). It can be pretty scary; it allows businesses with political connections to cause the feds to go after their competitors (I saw this occur in the meat packing industry). We will never know for sure if it happened in the online poker industry but there are signs it may have.

There is nobody else to blame but the FTP owners. Blaming anyone else is idiotic. They stole 400 million dollars of player deposits. Which cracks me up when people claim FTP was making 150 million a year in profit. Zero chance that was true and there is nobody to blame but FTP and yourself for trusting your cash to such a sketchy set up. (this goes for all poker sites)



People seem to forget the whole thing where poker deposits etc were being listed as flowers and golf balls as the poker sites and their processors conspired to commit bank fraud.

Wiki:

Celine's Third Law

Citing Lenin and his successors as examples, Wilson argues that the most tyrannical and brutal regimes in history were created by honest politicians who believed in a good cause.

An honest politician is a national calamity.

Celine recognizes that the third law seems preposterous from the beginning. While a dishonest politician is interested only in bettering his own lot through abusing the public trust, an honest politician is far more dangerous since he is honestly interested in bettering society through political action, and that means writing and implementing more and more laws.

Celine argues that creating more laws simply creates more criminals. Laws inherently restrict individual freedom, and the explosive rate at which laws are being created means that every citizen in the course of his daily life does not have the research capacity to not violate at least one of the plethora of laws. It is only through honest politicians trying to change the world through laws that true tyranny can come into being through excessive legislation.

Corrupt politicians simply line their own pockets. Honest idealist politicians cripple the people's freedom through enormous amounts of laws. So corrupt politicians are preferable according to Celine, despite the possibility of an honest politician who honestly opposes the formation of new laws (or wants to do away with some).

Honestly I really don't blame the owners. They operated just like every bank does, and kept even more funds on reserve than the banks do. The only difference is the banks have a lot of friends who are politicians and lobbyists. The DOJ found an easy target to get a lot of money without any repercussions. Easy game. It's very convenient to freeze all of a companies assets, prevent them from operating, then call them a ponzi scheme because they can't pay anybody.

Forced them to break the law? That is a very criminaesque / sociopathic viewpoint.

How come they did not force party poker to break the law?

I've wondered for a long time how things might have been different if Party, or any public company, had remained in the US market after the UIGEA was announced.

I'd guess that public scrutiny of both sides (DOJ and the operator) would have been much higher, and would have resulted in a very different chain of events. Perhaps the authorities would've issued a cease and desist notice for a start.

Haven't heard the bank analogy in a while, good one.

Except this isn't what happened at all. FTP's owners and shareholders were funneling customer deposits out of the company and into their own pockets. Even if you add up all the money frozen on BF and all the money FTP had on hand at the time, there wasn't enough money to cover the amount in player accounts. The people behind FTP (Ray Bitar, Chris Ferguson, Howard Lederer, et al.) stole our money.

He wasn't before, but he is now.

Travis, you are now banned from this thread for repeated trolling/unprovoked attacks. If you post in this thread again, you'll be infracted and/or banned. If you have any questions or complaints, you can PM me or start a thread in About The Forums.

I feel like people should be given a pass if they post something that has already been posted in this gargantuan thread that is littered with nonsense. Who could possibly read every post here?

This is what you get when no one knows anything, but everyone is intent on acting like they know something. Bad combination.