Skallagrim,

Thanks for taking the time to make this post. I do believe you are now addressing my actual point, and your position may be internally consistent, given your premises. Just as you reject my premises, I cannot currently accept yours. We seem to differ over the relative values of different course of action, or in our calculations of how those relative values interact. I think there is a certain circularity in your argument WRT the value of the threat of a summary judgement vs. the value of achieving a summary judgement, but I am not yet able to elucidate an argument that proves it. This could be because there is no such argument, or because the development of the argument is complicated and I am a bit rushed today, or because my head is still a bit fuzzy from all the Australian Shiraz I drank last night (BTW, has anybody seen joey? *burp*)

I'll try to address a few points in passing, but I won't be able to come to grips with the above for a few days. I'll evaluate at that time whether the issue is still current and important enough to have a go a it then.

That's about it.

I admit readily to being a non-legally trained observer who was surprised by the motion, and who, despite your assertion here, has still not accepted that the filing of this motion was inevitable. If it were, then this motion would be filed in every similar case, and I doubt this has actually happend. I have no real evidence to support this doubt, though, so on that point we are faced with choosing between the notion that a disputed assertion of fact is not accepted into a case until proven, vs. the notion that somebody who knows the field is to be believed over somebody who doesn't.

There is another angle to look at it from though. If this motion was so inevitable, why is it that none of the experienced lawyers who post in this thread, nor any of the other legal commentators here, warned us of it in advance?

For purposes of continuing this discussion why don't we accept for now that this motion was inevitable? We might return to discussing its actual degree of inevitability at another time.

That's probably correct, ignoring the possibility of different values of actions at different times. I would point out that events to date are consistent with this, especially if Eolis is correct that it was the DoJ that put the hold on the deal.

I'm not sure that is correct.

That seems to be two downsides: loss of threat, and loss of quick resolution.

By your logic, the bolded means the DoJ can never file the motion they just filed, because doing so starts the clock ticking on the expiry of the threat. They need that threat to accomplish something (a settlement) that is less of a win for them than a positive outcome to the motion would be. I don't see why they would value a negotiated settlement over a win by summary judgement.

I guess I am of the opinion that, to the DoJ, the value of quick is small relative to the value of a complete win.

The latter point is one of the reasons I believe that Star's motivation to negotiate a quick settlement is not limited to the threat of loss of assets. This in turn dimishes the value of the threat of summary judgement that you perceive. Rather, as much as it fears asset loss, with summary judgement it loses leverage over the criminal case. This second aspect is why Stars is not motivated to pull out of negotiations and fight a prolonged court battle up to the Supreme Court.

As outlined above, I don't think that a denial of a MSJ or a denial of the current motion will result in Stars pulling out of negotiations. I think the DoJ knows this, and as a result, does not fear a Stars withdrawl from negotiations. Rather I think the DoJ knows that Stars needs negotiations, and so they can afford to pull a move which might otherwise jeopardize the talks.

It is another basic principle that a threat that one is not prepared to carry out, or the attempt of which is doomed to failure, is no threat at all.

But continuing to talk of threats, Villain V threatens to perform act T in order to persuade Hero H to perform act A.
For this to work,

EV_V(T) < EV_V(A)

otherwise Villain would just perform T rather than merely threaten it.

EV_V(T) must be considerably greater than 0, in order to persuade H that it is a legitimate threat.

For the threat to be effective,

EV_H(T) < EV_H(A)

In the instant case, it is not yet clear to me that

EV_V(T) < EV_V(A)

and if it is, it may also mean that

EV_H(T) > EV_H(A)

That would be fine if your response to my later, more clearly defined post actually answered the questions posed to you earlier. I guess you could say that since you reject my premise you see no need to answer questions related to it, but I don't believe that the last paragraph, at least, of my post to you, is related to my premise.

If I understand this right, part of your ballance might have been available to play with. But how were they going to avoid that players massively were going to chipdump? New players would not have had cashout restrictions I assume. So what was going to happen? Players opening multiple accounts and "lose" their money to themselves.

Yeah, they had no idea what they were doing basically. The company probably would have collapsed again in short order.

oh I thought we'd have to deposit to clear our old roll.

thats even more ******ed

im sure they would be very liberal in locking accounts, freezing funds and confiscating funds

if you have 40k on ftp and you are a winning player, im sure they have a record that includes your typical playing patterns (buy-in range with a distribution) (most won/lost in a day, week, month, 3 months etc) (loss per game, tilt rating)

If you mysteriously lost 30k in one week, when the most you EVER lost in a one month period (prior to losing 30k) was 4-5k... im sure they would take notice and investigate...

I am sure people would get away with it, but being dumb about 40k and chip dumping on a site that is trying NOT to pay players... probably not a good idea (just sayin...)

thanks. I was just going by the cliffs in this thread. I beleive it quoted a news release from GBT. Its hard to say who is right or what the real story was on the GBT plan. repayment plan. Not unless DOJ lets it out

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29...fs-op-1089355/

not actual public discussion, but at least one lawyer ITT knew it was coming:

No, we don't know how much the US players would have been paid. They would have received remission payments from the DoJ, of the lesser of the money owed them or their pro-rata share of the remission funds available. The amount of money available from which the DoJ could pay remission would depend upon how much the DoJ was able to receive in forfeitures, and how much of that was deemed to be related to player losses. The amount available could have been considerably more than players lost, or it might have been considerably less. In the latter case, US players might have received only pennies on the dollar.

FYP

wow, thanks but I beleive I updated my post with a quote from the cliffs at the begining.

I think your explanation is better. Thank you for it. I'm going to take some time to digest it.

By now, you may have seen my own reference to EV.

As the quote you posted shows, he thought it was coming up in regard to a different matter, not with respect to Stars.

OK, I just read DF web page on the information she acquired on the proposed GBT deal. I know, I should of read it a while back,

my opinion. WOW, GBT was never serious and I don t think you could ever say the deal reached the 11th hour. GBT was basicly screwing the ROW players big time. Glad that deal never happened

A couple of cruise missiles will suffice. It is not that big of an island.

Heh, my best effort at anything is doomed to fall far short of Skallagfim's worst; but putting things in EV terms was maybe more narrowly tailored to a poster with your nick.

You had 100.00 to start. If you lost you would have to make a deposit again and the money they owed you would be paid out in Bonus increments . You never would have been able to cash out your full amount. You had to play to earn the money they owed you all over again.

That's the understanding I have had from the start.
So 100.00 was the maximum limit you could cash out at the beginning. If you wanted the rest of your roll then you had to play to earn it like first deposit bonuses or re load bonuses.

Yeah, it was immediately obvious that it would affect Bitar and the FTP case if he stayed in Ireland. I'm 70% or so sure that we actually did discuss this issue way back when the indictments first came down. But I'm less sure that it came up ITT; it could have been in one of the legislation forum threads.

I'm far too lazy to go back and search.

ITT, we never paid any attention to the stars case until stats became a potential buyer, and we never found out that stars was a potential buyer until the deal was (prematurely) announced as essentially done.

I do agree with Skallagrim that the parties to the litigation have been pricing fugitive disentitlement into their discussions all along.

This should be stickied at the top of every single page of the bloody thread.

Just so it is crystal clear because a lot of people think the Tapie deal was now a missed opportunity, the calculated amount of payouts, for row I believe, was 16 million dollars out of several hundred million dollars.

Tapie was always only going to buy FTP on the cheap and the DOJ finally called their bluff. Getting eight cents on the dollar and the rest in rakeback was not a missed opportunity.

are the chances of row players getting their money back more than 50% now ?

lol DOJ didnt call any bluff

you think Tapie thought that he could get FTP cheap, so let's just do it?

No, he manages takeovers for a living and there was no bluff in his attempt.

It wasn't common knowledge. There were maybe 10 instances documented before black friday.

None of them created a lot of noise, it was only after the fact did people realize that it was the shortfall.

And many people, since a very long time ago, such as DTM wrote and analyzed ad nauseum that the the position you wanted the players to take was not likely at all to be fruitful. In fact, many people with legitimate legal background provided analysis that said plainly that clawback was not likely to have a high success rate.

Also consider that today, the lawsuits are now thought to be inhibiting any deal that could be made between PS and DOJ.

where might this be?

When you bought and sold many internet companies for hundreds of millions?





edit: and for the encore:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...ostcount=10986



desert:

yeah, some ppl really have short term memory


anyway, did some one ever talk about the 'phantom money'. several sources told that something like $130M of the debts developed b/c FTP couldn't charge bank accounts of the players due to problems w/ the payment processors.

i don't want to be a moralizer but a lot of ppl profited from that (knowing that FTP can't charged them, but 'cashes in'). will they get trough w/ it?

A statute doesn't provide for extraterritorial application simply because it 'doesn't say it doesn't', extraterritoriality must be written into the statute, and even the statute they are trying to use to seek the forfeiture of PokerStars foreign assets (IGBA) has no extraterritorial language.

Neither is a person a fugitive simply because he resides extra-territorially and you charge him with a crime, so this motion fails on three different levels, but succeeds on the only relevant one to both parties: pausing the proceedings.

If you believe in the chances of the DOJ getting a summary judgement, I'll give you 5:1 odds that they don't, my $500 to your $100.

I'm going to restrain myself from asking any questions in here as there is no way I'm reading all of that up there ^ I'll just assume f*** all is happening

http://www.tightpoker.com/news/poker...t-glantz-3646/

His cardplayer article came out a while ago and has been discussed.