Originally Posted by starvingwriter82:

"I appreciate all the legal digging, study, etc. that goes on in this thread, but I can't be the only one wondering what half the people ITT are going to do with their lives once this is over.

I can't shake the impression that people ITT are just spending hours a day reading this thread, scouring court documents, searching for new rumors, etc..."

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You overestimate how long it takes to find (and cut and paste) readily available information.

OK, so it's probable that US players would have gotten back 100% after some red tape. But no one knows for sure.

And anyone with a real roll in ROW would have been screwed over.

Hard to say, US balances are ~ $150M, Tapies $ 80M wouldn't get anyone 100%, especially if any ROW players were included. Unknown whether other funds in this case would have been available for this remission.

If by 94.9% of "players" you mean mostly empty or dormant accounts with pennies in them then yes 94.9% of players would have been repaid.

I wonder why they would think that?

Many years ago there was an article in the NY Times about 2 small nations coming to an agreement after being at odds with each other for many years. There was a picture of the leaders shaking hands and smiling. What was not mentioned in the article was mentioned in a foreign (non US) business magazine. Two companies in the two countries had come to a business deal.

So the only way this could happen was for the governments to bury the hatchet. I imagine that the hatchet originally resulted from prior business considerations.

Judges aren't obligated to recuse themselves until/unless they are making a ruling, even then many judges wouldn't recuse themselves since it is their decision to judge whether or not they are bias, but Kaplan doesn't even like the appearance of impropriety.

I didn t word it right sorry. I am getting my ino from the cliffs on page one.
The 94.9% refered to the ROW players paided in full on day 1. I beleive that meant their balances were restored but they had to play a certain amount of hands to be able to withdraw. The deal fell thru because DOJ, amoung other issues, wanted all players including the ROW paided infull within 90 days.

I think you've missed my point.

It is true that 94.9% of accounts would be instated with their full balance (i.e. all accounts <=100$). They would be able to play/withdraw or whatever else they wanted to do.

Everyone else would have their balance over $100 instated as "restricted" and have to unlock that by playing. Of course we all know this is just a bonus, effectively a form of rakeback. I don't think that should be considered repayment in any sense of the word.

My point is that the 94.9% figure, whilst technically true, is misleading in sense because a huge number of the accounts making up this number are effectively non-players with a close to zero balance, certainly below whatever minimum amount that would be required to actually use one of the withdrawal methods. It's a bit like claiming you've paid back money to someone you didn't owe money to in the first place.

It is always a rare pleasure when you post.

I must however disagree that your post was in the style of DTM.

Also, although many words were used your post was not long winded as unnecessary words, ideas and examples were not used.

I am in no way implying that DTM uses unnecessary words. I was merely commenting on style.

Disclaimer: English is my second and only language.

Your 100 % right. the firgue of 94.9% came from GBT and I would assume they included every player account regardless of the balance. the more the accounts, the higher the percentage. I would of like to know the real numbers.

1: How many accounts have zero balance
2: How many accounts have less the $1 ( anything under $1 shouldn t require repayment)
3: How many accounts have more then $1

Myself, I don t think DOJ really pulled the 11th everyone has to be paided back with 90 days. i suspect it was part of the talks since day one.

can someone explain whats going on to those of us without law degrees? who am i supposed to be angry at right now

It blows my mind that there are still players with money invested in this that don't realize the GBT deal was a total scam.

GBT wasn't going to pay back anyone. He was effectively going to toss everyone $100 (or the total of their account balance, whichever was less) and give them a RB deal to get back the rest of their funds.

Anyone who thinks that was a great deal, PM me for an absolutely free vacation to anywhere in the world - it's on me. You can even choose the location. (Taxes and "service fees" may apply.)

Let's nuke the whole thread and just leave this post.

Not even a guarantee of 100% RB iirc. Just some amount of RB.

The funniest (in a complete torturous way) part about this is that a year later, we still don't really know with any certainty who to blame for anything besides Ray Bitar.

We don't know who has caused delays, who has been greedy, etc. We know Bitar was a big reason for the shortfall, but we don't know who or what has prevented it from being corrected ever since. (save your responses speculating on who to blame, I know who we can speculate about, I'm saying we don't KNOW who to blame)

The secrecy behind everything in this whole situation makes it so much more difficult for everyone. And it's what leads us to clinging to every bit of available information as a sign of hope of conclusion or evidence of the demise of the deal. When in reality, the available information only gives us probably 10% of the whole picture.

To state the obvious, tough situation.

This is a pretty awful analogy fwiw

@df, do you know what was the problem in the "eleventh hour"?

actually, I wished I saved the post from FTP forum. Some guy wanted to start a classaction lawsuit over his $20 balance

Obama, obv.

Yeah, except for being 100% spot-on, it's pretty awful.

Almost every withdrawal method had a $50 minimum so I wouldn't be surprised if a crushing majority of those accounts wouldn't be able to withdraw at all actually.

You raise an interesting point.

By using the tem "Jackpot" I may have inadvertently given the impression that outcome is measured in dollars, but I don't think it is. I'm not trying to assert that the maximum amount of dollars will be extracted from Stars in a summary judgement. There may be a chance that Stars will actually part with more money under a settlement than under an enforced judgement.

What I meant was that under a summary judgement, the DoJ will get from the court all of what it wanted, whereas under a settlement they will get somewhat less (otherwise why would Stars want a settlement?).

As to public relations, that ought not motivate the DoJ except insofar as its goes to deterring unlawful acts. In that regard, winning summary judgements is more effective than making deals. Having an image as saviour of poker players is not something the DoJ particularly seeks, nor would it necessarily be regarded positively by the US population as a whole.

That's what I want to know. Also, did anyone else find it tilting that in Matt Glantz's blog post when he was finally going to write something interesting and state what a "major shareholder" had to say about why the deal was pushed back in the 11th hour, he chose to dismissively say "blah, blah, blah" instead of what he actually heard?

My name is DTM, and I approve of this post.

I'm glad to see that the average quality of posting ITT has improved recently. Munkey's was a "DTM style" post because it was rich in content. A "DTM style" post is one that emphasizes information over style. In contrast, this is not a "DTM style" post.

Because of the "clean record" factor (regarding possible future business in the US).

This is only relevant to one of the parties but not to the other, which means that "better for one side" does not automatically equal "worse for the other side". Their interests are asymmetrical which makes this more complicated than a straightforward financial EV formula.