After more than five years of travel through the courts in the United States, the final settlements regarding Full Tilt Poker were quietly reached earlier this year, ending the saga of the now-defunct twice over online poker site and putting it into the history books.
The issues that Full Tilt faced were directly related to the “Black Friday” indictments by the U. S. Department of Justice against top officials from the online poker room. Indicted directly criminally in the case was Ray Bitar, the Chief Executive Officer of TiltWare, and Nelson Burtnick, who was the Director of Payments for Full Tilt Poker. In addition to those men, a class-action civil suit was filed against Full Tilt executives Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson by a player consortium consisting of Steve Segal, Nick Hammer, Robin Hougdahl, Todd Terry and Bradley Clasen, looking to retrieve monies that were taken in by Lederer and Ferguson, rumored to be in the $450 million range.
There had not been tremendous action for a few years regarding the case but, in August or September of 2015, talks began in an attempt to settle grievances between the parties. The plaintiffs in the case needed to have their court costs taken care of, which could have been into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Lederer and Ferguson needed a conclusion to the case simply to get it off their docket. As a result, in late 2015 an agreement was reached and, in January 2016, the court costs were settled for the plaintiffs and each received a token $500 payday from those court costs.
The big thing about the settlement of the case is that it will effectively end any further actions against those in Full Tilt management. After the settlement, the case was dismissed with prejudice, basically stating that the defendants could not face legal actions regarding the same case ever in the future. This brings an end to a tragedy that became even worse when it was exposed five years ago.
2011’s “Black Firday” saw the shutdown of the three most powerful online poker operations in the United States – PokerStars, the CEREUS Network rooms Absolute Poker and UB.com and the aforementioned Full Tilt Poker – by the U. S. Department of Justice. After a few days of negotiation, PokerStars was reopened to U. S. residents to allow them to retrieve their poker balances from the site. The same deal was offered to both Full Tilt Poker and CEREUS but, as it soon would become evident, neither of those rooms were in the position to refund their customers’ money.
In the case of Full Tilt, years of payment to the principal owners of the company – the official group that made up Team Full Tilt, such as Lederer, Ferguson, Bitar and others – had left the coffers depleted, so much so that there wasn’t money on hand to pay the approximately 75% of their clientele from the U. S. that had money with the company. It was rumored that Full Tilt Poker, when the deal was offered to pay back players, had only $60 million in its “ready cash” fund and could not complete the deal (the CEREUS Network rooms were in even worse shape).
Full Tilt Poker would eventually lose its license for operation in the fall of 2011 and it appeared that everyone’s money went away with the site. Then, in 2012, PokerStars stepped up and bailed out the DOJ by settling their case with the feds, paying out $731 million and getting Full Tilt Poker in return. While PokerStars walked away with the Full Tilt property, the players got paid back – although in some cases it would take almost four years and some received nothing at all for their affiliate revenues – due to the PokerStars largesse. (To this date, the CEREUS Network has NEVER had any discussions of player refunds and, for the most part, that money is considered lost.)
Of course, the settlement of all legal issues against Lederer and Ferguson led them back to this year’s World Series of Poker. While Lederer failed to cash in the handful of events he played, Ferguson was much more visible, playing in a multitude of tournaments and cashing 10 times for almost $250,000, including a fourth place finish in the $10,000 Six Handed No Limit Hold’em World Championship. Bitar, once thought to be near death when he was sentenced for his role in the Full Tilt fiasco in 2013, got married in an elaborate ceremony earlier this year and looks to be in the peak of health.
With the closure of the final legal case involving Full Tilt Poker, it may be thought that the poker community can move on. The stain left by such men as Lederer, Ferguson, Bitar and others isn’t the type that goes away easily, however.