This week, the Poker News Daily web series “The Showdown with Jon Friedberg” welcomes Kathy Liebert. As you might expect, Black Friday takes center stage, as Liebert and Friedberg tackle a variety of topics, including what’s next for the online poker industry, whether we’ll see more indictments down the road, and the extent to which Howard Lederer is in command of the Full Tilt Poker ship.
Liebert bluntly summarized the fallout from Black Friday, which occurred on April 15th and saw the U.S. Department of Justice indict 11 members of the industry, including the founders of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker: “It seems pretty clear that Full Tilt, PokerStars, UB, and Absolute Poker are not going to be operating in the U.S. for the immediate future.”
Liebert forecasted, “The poker industry is going to be hurt by this. The brick-and-mortar tournaments… are going to be hurt because people count on the online sites to get them in cheap. There were 3,000 entries [in the Main Event] from online entries last year, so there’s going to be a big drop in the Main Event of the World Series.”
We’ve heard estimates as low as 2,500 for this year’s World Series of Poker Main Event attendance, although our guess is around 5,500.
Moreover, players who rely on sponsorship deals in order to play in five-figure tournaments like the Main Event may find their coffers dry. Liebert explained, “I can’t imagine the Red Pro deals will remain in effect when there are no online sites for people to play on, so that’s going to hurt those people who would normally play in the World Series and be sponsored.”
The Department of Justice indicted 11 individuals on counts that included operating an illegal gambling business and bank fraud. Liebert gave her take on the accusations: “The Department of Justice’s job is to go after crime. They have indicted the people that were involved in these sites. They believed they were committing a crime and that’s why they got shut down… If you look at the indictments, there are a lot of things on there that, if proven to be correct, were the wrong things to do and it cost us all.”
What about Howard Lederer? The Full Tilt Poker front man has been noticeably absent from the poker scene since Black Friday. Liebert admitted she was surprised that Lederer’s name was not listed on the indictments: “There was a Bluff Magazine article recently that listed Howard Lederer as the most powerful man in poker. Why is he so powerful? Is it because he is a poker player? Is it because he’s big? I think it was fairly widely assumed that he had a lot of power in Full Tilt.”
This week, PokerStars began processing cashouts for players from the United States. Meanwhile, Full Tilt Poker inked an agreement with the Department of Justice to regain its domain in order to process U.S. payments, but has not begun doing so. Absolute Poker and UB.com, which make their home on the CEREUS Network, have not yet solidified an accord with the U.S. Government.
“I’m not really worried about getting my money back,” Liebert confidently told viewers of “The Showdown.” She continued, “I have money on all three of those sites… I think it’s very likely I will get it… I don’t have my whole bankroll online, so it’s not going to affect me as much. If it takes a year, it’s too bad, but it doesn’t affect my lifestyle or my ability to play these tournaments, whereas unfortunately for some of my friends, it does affect them.”
New episodes of “The Showdown” are released every Tuesday on Poker News Daily.