Student loans, balance transfer offers, free overdrafts, 0% financing. For all of these its smarter to keep the cash invested for as long as possible than to repay early. I would recommend taking full advantage of all of them.

If total distributions over time have been greater than current net debt, how can they not have had an operating profit at some point?

I believe the company did have operating profits until around the time the UIGEA regs came into force and seizures and phantom deposits became a major issue.

Operating profit and profit after distributions and/or loans are two separate things.

The more news come out about Full Tilt thing the more dirt comes out.

A player with some kind of honour should pay his debts back and should do that before the money is requested.

Especially Ivey doesnt look good in this whole Full Tilt situation. First he wants to bring Full Tilt to court now it comes out that he owes Full Tilt millions and this guy plays Aussie Millions instead.

Some years ago Howard Lederer didnt give someone his hand after a tournament because a guy behaved in lowclass way he thought.

who would give his hand to all these Poker pros today? It all became disgusting.

If people have a credible reason to believe a better deal is reasonably possible, then they shouldn't support the current deal.

On the current disclosed evidence, that is not possible. Even with new evidence you'd have to change the word "property".

On what is your confidence based?

If you truly believe it is worthless, then you are right to oppose it.

Do you think that the DoJ will be less effective than GBT at collecting those debts? If so, you are right to dislike my proposal. Otherwise it is either a wash or an improvement.

It is quite evident you do trust your interpretations. Your faith is remarkable.

So do I. Todd Terry and Joe Tall, among others, seem to question this belief. I'd like to know what evidence they have that we are wrong.

Technically true, but I'm not sure it makes a material difference to the point I was making.

So, was FTP's loan to Barry

• One that had an interest rate greater than zero
• One that had a set term (i.e. not a demand loan),
• One not authorized by his friends at FTP, or
• One not made in the real world?

When is this bad dream going to end ):

he owes money and instead of paying it back he comes up w/ a robin hood like excuse of why he's holding it back - how's critizing him irrational trolling?

i love barry, but i'd love to see a succesful deal b/w GBT and FTP, so i obv want him to pay the money back, as he should. what's obv too is that barry >> most other players who owe, because he is actually open and honest.

This, if online poker wasn't some kind joke business where real world rules don't apply, most of these guys would be facing court and/or jail.

+1

The fact Phil Ivey did a PR stunt (fake lawsuit, then dropped it "once a deal was inevitable that would return player funds") and gets a free pass is absurd, especially how it was tremendously shady & self-serving.

This is the same type of illogical reasoning for people who hate stars for raising their rake or lowering their effective rakeback, even though full tilt basically treated its players' funds like monopoly money.

If I were a betting man, I'd say the people who are more mad at barryG than pIvey are the same intellectuals who have more anger at Stars than Full Tilt.

It's unreal how much hate BarryG is getting compared to Phil Ivey who did a complete Public Relations move on us, and (to his credit) duped more poker players than a full tilt ".net" commercial.

I hope the BarryG haters get an IOU from GBT rather than a check in the mail. It is unbelievable how people believe Phil Ivey's fake "heartfelt facebook announcement" written by a public relations firm, but cannot comprehend the easy discussion in this thread.

/rant

I don't think anyone fell for what Ivey pulled and gave him a free pass. Just there's easier targets to attack if they open themselves up to it.

Tony G is here for you!

It does make a difference. Let's say FTP had an operating profit, but their "loans" and disbursements to shareholders exceeded their operating profits. If so, then there can be only three possible sources for this extra money: newly invested capital, a draw down of operating capital and/or looting of the players funds. There is no indication that there was any newly invested capital. And we know that the looting of funds started at some point before Black Friday.

The crucial thing to know is when the looting of player funds started. It is at this point that FTP turned into a criminal organization.

As a loyal customer of FTP, I was never offered such a loan and clearly Barry was not an employee of FTP. So that only leaves the "loan from a friend" option.

As such, in my moral universe (and also in Ace on the River's universe) Barry was obliged to pay back this loan as soon as he could.

lol some fulltilt pros immediately decided to pay back the money the owed to fulltilt but barry finds excuses to not pay funny that some of you guys believes the **** hes talking just for him to have a better image, who was he in first pl.ace to borrow money from fulltilt without paying instantly i dont remember him being ftp pro, this is outrageous and mmakes me puke on his disgusting behavior. and the thing with the money has to go to us plrs is ridiculous what if he lost the money to some european plr who than never cashed out, that means his money belongs mroe to european plrs than american players.

this thread is ridiculous

Can't they just sue all the pros that owe FTP money if they won't voluntarily pay back?

And I don't get Barry's response. He says "I always pay back my debts," implying that he's a man of his word but then he's saying "I won't pay it back until US players are assured they'll get paid back." I don't see any connection between him paying back GBT and US players getting paid. And he's basically saying that US players are more important than ROW players.

The veteran Pro Poker world is a VERY Small World.

As soon as the "looting" at FTP started years ago...
Meaning Customer Accounts became a Huge Degen Slush Fund...
Shoveling easy-term "gambling loans" to friends of FTP...
This rapidly became Common Knowledge in that Small World.

Dozens of Big Name hustlers developed elaborate strategies...
To repeatedly back up the truck.

Today, these same Big Name hustlers...
Are all lawyered up and working on elaborate strategies...
To hang on to as much of the LOOT as possible.

How any of this surprises anyone is beyond me...
The truth is far worse than anything we already know.

For me...
The amazing thing is that no one has been killed YET...
In many criminal cultures a hit would be a formality...
There can't be anyone important with an FTP account.

^^ Red man seems to have the right handle on the situation.

I don't get all the Barry hate. He's one of the few pros willing to be transparent on the issue. He stated he plans to pay the money back he just wants to be sure it is going to the right place. I'd be more outraged at guys like Matusow. Has he even said anything on the issue?

That is also because 2+2 kept this quiet (since December 2008!).
Same as in the Microgaming scandal.

He was not transparent until he was outed. He is refusing to pay the money. He has no right to chose to pay to anyone other than the entity he owes it to. Being transparent is of no help if it does not lead to payment.

As for the other pros no one that is criticizing BG is likely to have positive feelings towards them but this is the BG thread so it’s no surprise that there is an emphasis on his debt in this thread.

Oh I wrote it off the second DOJ finally did their job. It's fine. The fact that Howard has left the house in months and probably weighs 400 lbs is more than enough for me. Though I want to still see him in cuffs.

I'm upset with anyone who took a loan in this matter.

If it seems like a bad idea for sites to be loaning players money and if I had known full tilt was secretly loaning money to players I'd have been concerned.

Yet, these guys couldn't piece together this might be a bad idea?

This is like the guy who accepts a large transfer on a site without doing his homework and then gets upset when he is implicated in whatever scam they were running.

Everyone seems more concerned with the fact the loans haven't been paid off than the fact these players took the loans in the first place.

It seems fairly obvious to me that FTP shouldn't have been loaning players money on the site.

Not only that, but I'm guessing after a while it was common knowledge amongst these guys that FTP was handing out free money and never came looking for it.

Except he's not, because he won't actually pay the money back. Tapie offered him a discount on what he had to pay back if US players weren't paid in full, what can go wrong? Obv Tapie doesn't get any of the money unless the agreement goes through.