ROFLcopters.

Remind me why I've even heard of the DoJ? Oh yeah the US couldn't regulate online poker like the ROFW. They had to deem to money laundering in the US, then freeze bank accounts not in the US...makes sense...then blame these foreign companies which are really located in California...hmm...then accept a tiny offer (with some money later honest) from a euro crook

Anyway, I think Tapie gonna pay well before the DoJ - those slow pony even made a statement yet? 'Apply for a payment from the poker player relief fund'...if u dare

Anyhow, back to 25 tabling Pokerstars

Why would they want to screw ROW players? They are their only customers. You don't spend that kind of cash and then screw your customer base. Especially people as experienced and competent as GBT. No credit to this whatsoever

Plenty of trash talk on 2+2 directed at Russ Hamilton and even Hellmuth and Duke during and after the UB scandal.

Nobody stepped up though.

Something like this was bound to happen; as if Tapie would just stroll up and hand out hundreds of millions of $'s straight from the get-go.

ROW players will have to play for their own money, and will be contributing towards the DOJ fine too.

If this turns out to be true then it sucks big time for the players who were from the US but "moved" out of the country to cash out their rolls.

It would be wrong for DOJ to collect their fine and the money for US players and forgetting about the ROW. Any fine the DOJ issues, should only be collected after every player is paided. I dunno, maybe therer are too many non confrimmed reports floating around. I can understand the DOJ insisting the US players get paid and I can also understand the DOJ agreeing to drop any fine if the players are paid.

But it would be very very wrong for DOJ to have the US players paided back and collect a fine from FTP. Not as long as ROW players don t get paid. Has DOJ issued a news release on this?

many of these people won't even be at the same address as listed on the account. some % of those would even be in the USA. There's going to have to be some leeway in regards to US players who changed their Full Tilt address

I disagree, there doesn't have to be any leeway. This is FTP and the US government were talking about here, all common sense and logic are thrown out of the window.

when Tapie bought addidas he was short 250 million Euros (about 550 milllions of todays money) and addidas was bankrupt that didn't stop him from making a big succes of it.

LOL @ all the people desperately trying to hang on to their "DOJ is completely evil and out to screw everyone blah blah blah they'll never do anything to help anyone other than lining their pocket hurr fat cats lol land of the free" mantra.

This is (sadly) very plausible, especially the bolded.

Sure people will be outraged to start with and will adopt the attitude of "f them i'm not going to deposit and play for the money i'm owed".

However, if a nice deposit bonus was offered, plenty of fish/recreational players would deposit and play without a second thought and I believe as a result, the juicy games, coupled with getting previous balances back as a bonus would eventually result in a fair % of those originally outraged returning to the site.

I'm certain though that GBT can think of a more optimal line to take than this.

Haha cool name and a nice way of it being a new company/brand but keeping the FTP for convenience.

If it would be so easy to get a lot of traffic why doesn't it work for the other 100 sites that offer poker?
You think FTP would just need to offer a first deposit bonus and the fish will turn up and the grinders follow.Well,almost all sites offer huge first deposit bonuses,also very small ones and still there is hardly any traffic on those sites.

So I hope it won't be that easy for the new FTP,if they would really follow through with the option of only getting your roll back once you deposit and then need to grind it back players will be so angry that they will turn away from the site very soon.
I for one would just grind my roll back and after this they would never see me again.But if they offer a good service and treat the players/their customers with respect I would surely play on their site a lot.

Also I can't think of a worse advertisement for a new site that wants to get customers back and regain trust from players!!!

People that think attracting good players is unimportant have no clue how the poker economy works. Four fish and four grinders makes four tables. Four fish makes zero tables. This is why small sites have props and large sites offer big rewards for high volume. Make all the good players hate you and you have a site like bodog. Make them love you and you have stars.

A good promotion for the grand opening of the site would be a rake race where the top finishers get to flog Howard Lederer.

The bonus could be awarded % of your br. As in 20 installments of 5% each for every x ftp.

Still pretty bad for ROW players though, because even after bonuses, the site makes money by raking more than it pays out. This, plus time value of money really means you're getting much less than 100% of your balance.

Just wondering something, if GBT tries to pull off this 'superbonus' wouldn't that create some leeway for ROW players to continue with their civil suits?

0 chance this will happen. These guys are smart businessmen. No smart business men will do stuff like this that will piss off almost all their most valuable customers before the business even opens.

I doubt the company will even come online if that is what is likely to happen. The deal will be subject to challenge in court by the players which will hold everything up for months. The US court system is offers numerous chances to be an obstructionist pain in the ass. Try to screw over tens of thousands of people and you can count on at least a few of them making it as painful and drawn out a process as possible.

I was suspicious about whether GBT had anything to do with the initial surveys, but it seemed harmless so I ignored it, this survey however is complete BS - and even more suspicious that they are calling the same dozen 'random' people.

There is no way Tapie is behind these calls, if this was his intention he wouldn't need to ask anyone if it was cool if he screwed them.

My guess is that either the magazines or the people claiming they were called are making this up for attention and drama, or some other site you guys play on is calling it's HS regs to scare people away from FT.

Thx tamboss, this makes me feel better. I was starting to dislike this bread.

My first tought was 'what a bs' too. But, how did they get the phone numbers? It can't be other sites because these sites have no idea if you have money on FT or not. May it be through an affiliate??? We also don't know if these calls, the last ones, are really coming from the french magazine who apparently made the first ones... The ties between the magazine and GBT seemed quite obvious if the information reported was true. I also wonder why the media who have been spoken with GBT recently didn't ask about the phone calls, it would have been a good question.

Exactly - this is why it would be super-mega-horrible for Tapie/FT to screw/semi-screw people out of their existing balances. The only way the investment pays off is if they get huge traffic from the ROW grinders going forward, which will only happen if they feel they've been more than made right, factoring in the circumstances.

At the worst withdrawal limts/month + a sick deposit bonus would be a great investment in the long-term financial success of FT. Any extra $$ spent to speed up payback could pay off many times over with site/new owner loyalty from the mega-rake generators/game starters.

Just hypothetically let's say Merge called a bunch of it's current regs with a survey, the ones who answered they didn't have money on FTP wouldn't bother with these FTP threads, those that did would come here with these "WTF?" queries.

That's one possibility, there is still the possibility that the callees were never really called, there is the chance that everyone who was called is a subscriber to a magazine or signed up through a common affiliate or something else.

All the possibilities that this is not being done on behalf of Tapie seem much more likely than the idea that it is, especially after all the bad press about the last survey which was fairly benign, I refuse to believe for a second that Tapie would sponsor a new round of surveys asking if you would be mad if you got screwed.

Tapie has himself positioned to be a hero to the poker world, next step profit, he isn't going to throw that image away and flush the ISPT down the toilet just to cut costs, repaying FTP ROW will be the best advertising campaign in the history of online poker - forget play with the pros, play where you actually get paid.

somebody mentioned that the survey asks you IF you have money on Full Tilt, which means the people running the survey didn't know if you had money stuck on Full Tilt

i am one of the people who got called (yesterday)
- i didnt make it up
- i was never called before that
- i signed up via rakeback . org
- now that i think about it, the caller didnt know if i had money on ftp, he asked if im currently playing online poker, then he asked where i am playing, and then if i have money stuck on ftp
- im not playing mid/high stakes nor particularly high volume (i think i paid around 20k-30k rake lifetime playing mainly 100NL/PLO)