It’s not quite over yet, but we’re close. Another round of payments was made to former Full Tilt Poker customers in the United States last week, more than four and a half years after player funds were frozen – some thought long forgotten – on poker’s Black Friday. This was a somewhat small block of payments, but that was not unexpected, as most players have been paid already and there are only a relative few straggling accounts still to be handled.
In early October, Poker Players Alliance (PPA) executive director John Pappas made the unofficial announcement that a new round of payments had been approved, writing:
Update
I just spoke with my contact at DOJ AFMLS and learned that another batch is ready to be issued, but it could still be a few weeks till it hits player bank accounts. This next wave includes roughly 2,000 petitioners totaling $5.7M in funds. These are petitioners with disputed funds, those with missing info and those who they consider “new petitioners” (e.g. did not file with valid log-in credentials).
The remission has been approved. They expect about 1-2 weeks to transfer the money to GCG, then GCG will do its bank testing and finally, the money will arrive.
My contact says this leaves about 3,800 petitions unresolved. Most of them are “new petitioners” and there are some others, including pro-players, who are mixed into that bunch. There was no timeline provided for those final petitions, but the expectation was that they could all be done at once.
That is all the info I have for now. Be checking fulltiltpokerclaims.com for their official updates.
And while unofficial, if Pappas was letting everybody know, it was a near absolute certainty that he was right, as he does not mess around with raising false hopes. Sure enough, the Garden City Group (GCG), the Full Tilt claims administrator, confirmed the news a couple days later, saying, in part, “In all, the distribution will include approximately 1,900 Petitions totaling approximately $5.5 million. After this round of payments, we will have paid approximately 92% of all Petitions filed.”
Those payments have now been made, as confirmed by happy posters on poker forums such as Two Plus Two. Of course, people are disappointed that it took so long (SO LONG), but as the saying goes, “better late than never.”
Approximately $109 million has now been repaid to former U.S. Full Tilt customers, spread across seven rounds of payments and nearly two years. That’s still a far cry from the $184 million set aside for U.S. player refunds in the settlement PokerStars and the U.S. Department of Justice agreed upon when PokerStars bought Full Tilt and took over its obligations. Unfortunately, there is a good chance that much of the remaining money will end up in the pockets of the GCG and the U.S. government.
