Full Tilt Poker Back In Business Again

The sign on the door of the Fill Tilt Poker office in Dublin says 19 days to go. Inside, the corridors, cubicles and meeting rooms are a hive of focused activity.

The hum of industry and positivity has replaced the morale-sapping hush of the previous months. What was once broken is now fixed.

The world’s second largest online poker site is about to make its comeback.
Rewind 18 months or so to April 15, 2011 — Black Friday — and Full Tilt Poker was shut out of the U.S. along with its greatest rival PokerStars. This momentous event, triggered by the Department of Justice, saw the company quickly unravel to the point where, six months later, its license was suspended by the Alderney Gambling Commission and its operations in the rest of the world ceased.

The story that unfolded about mismanagement at the company is now the stuff of legend and poker players around the world were stuck to the tune of almost $400 million.

The rollercoaster ride which followed saw the company engage in a public war of words with its former poster boy (and shareholder) Phil Ivey, dance with several potential white knight suitors before closing in on a deal with controversial French businessman Bernard Tapie, watch helplessly as the net closed in on chief executive officer Ray Bitar and head of payments at the company Nelson Burtnick and finally, in a plot twist worthy of any whodunit, look on as its one-time arch enemy PokerStars rode to the rescue with a bailout that would see all players repaid and the company re-launched.

But that was then and this is now. Things have moved on apace.

Under the aegis of the Rational Group, which now owns both PokerStars and its former nemesis Full Tilt Poker, the one-time pariah of the poker world has shed its baggage, is back, and means business. Serious business.

The Professionals

The first tangible indications to the poker community that Full Tilt Poker was about to get serious where when it re-hired former Full Tilt Poker pros Gus Hansen and Tom “durrrr” Dwan as ambassadors along with cash game king Viktor “Isildur1” Blom — collectively known as “The Professionals”.

Sarne Lightman, head of marketing at the company, says the company will strive for authenticity and respect right from the get go and Hansen, Dwan and Blom serve as a perfect metaphor for change and progress.

“They [Full Tilt Poker] always had big, professional players who were very respected,” he points out. “It was a site that was built and promoted by professional poker players who played for a living. What we’re trying to do especially with our television products and our professionals is produce something everybody respects.

“Nobody can deny that Gus had a huge impact on tournament poker in the way he played. The same online with Tom and Viktor.

“When Gus started playing tournament poker and everyone was watching him saying, “That’s crazy”, but it was incredibly successful and old school pros had to go back and revisit their game and learn from him and adapt to a new way of playing poker that Gus had brought.

“It was the same thing when Tom Dwan came online to Full Tilt Poker and started playing the high stakes cash games, the old school pros who were sitting there losing millions of dollars to him suddenly had to up their game, change and really work out this new way of doing things.

“Viktor straight after that as well. Again, everybody thought they knew how to play, thought they were the best, then this young kid, who nobody knew who he was at the time came on and all of a sudden was taking huge amounts of money off them and totally reinvented how people had to play at those stakes.

“And that’s what we’ve been looking to rebuild and that’s what we’re continuing to do.”

The Return Of Real Poker TV

Lightman, who started in marketing with PokerStars in Australia and launched the Asia-Pacific Poker Tour and Latin America Poker Tour before throwing his hat into the ring for the Full Tilt Poker marketing job, says the company also plans to get back into TV poker in a big way.

“While some companies may create different types of poker TV shows like tournament TV shows with small stacks, A-K Vs jacks etc… our TV content, the product that we’re trying to push out there will be much more deep stacked with professional players playing against each other so you can see the actual play,” he explains.

“You can actually learn more about the game. Everybody knows that if you’re short stacked in a tournament and you have A-K or pocket queens you’re going to go all in. What you don’t know and what is extremely interesting is to watch how professionals with deep stacks will play against each other — the three-bets, the bluffs, the reads, the calls. That’s what we mean by authenticity in our TV product.”

The return of Poker After Dark and Million Dollar Cash Game will also provide a point of differentiation from sister company PokerStars and the company intends to give its most successful online players the opportunity to wear the Full Tilt Poker badge both live and it its TV tournaments, pitting them against each other until the cream of the crop emerges.

“We want differentiation. To stay different to PokerStars. We’re looking to create TV product that stays true to that,” says Lightman.

“PokerStars is very tournament focused in its offering and its TV products and its pros. Ours are big cash game pros. Our TV productions, Poker After Dark and Million Dollar Cash Game, traditionally they’ve had professionals playing at high stakes.”

Software Success

Full Tilt Poker’s famously cutting edge software also makes a welcome return and Lightman says it will also help propel the new brand back into the hearts of poker players.

“It’s a place where people love to play. Where they play for the quality of the games, for the quality of the software,” he argues.

“Full Tilt Poker was always an emblem, a badge, to say, ‘I’m a serious poker player. I want to wear a Full Tilt Poker patch because I take poker seriously’ because that’s what it always used to mean and I hope that’s what we hope we can make it mean again.”

To get to where it wants to be has been a long hard slog in a short space of time according to Lightman and he believes the software, and the people behind it, is another key to rebuilding success.

“There was a huge amount of work needed to be done by getting a license in the Isle of Man, we needed to take down all the IT infrastructure, fly in that Hercules plane [full of servers] you may have seen, rebuilding that, testing it, getting it working. That’s where the huge workload is.

“We definitely inherited a lot of good stuff but it was a skeleton crew compared to what was here before. There were a lot of good people here but there were very, very stretched.

“Across all departments the big thing we’ve been doing is re-hiring. Trying to bring back the strong Full Tilt Poker people that were here before to keep the authenticity of the product and brand. Full Tilt Poker was very strongly the number two brand — competing in some areas as the number one brand — through the back to the work of the people who were here.

“We obviously want to keep that, make Full Tilt Poker everything it was and more. So from my side its been looking to rehire good talent while they’ve [the IT team] been rebuilding the IT infrastructure, looking to rebuild the brand, create new advertisements and campaigns, that speak to the authenticity of Full Tilt Poker and hopefully re-ignite the passion for the brand in its core demographic and working to secure pros who we feel match the new Full Tilt Poker. “

Innovation Remains Key

Lightman’s colleague, poker room manager Shyam Markus, has been with Full Tilt Poker since 2005 and has spearhead its innovative software. He promises it won’t be long before the company starts innovating again. “Hitting the ground running is going to be a little difficult because as Sarne said it’s a bit of a skeleton crew,” he said, “but we are rehiring as fast as possible.

“We have a long list of pretty exciting features in the pipeline but its just a matter of getting them out there. I wouldn’t expect anything huge by the end of this year but starting next year you’re going to start seeing some good stuff again.

“But that doesn’t mean I feel like we’re on our back foot or behind the curve anymore. This is going to sound brash, but I took a long time for Full Tilt Poker to catch up to everything else. We launched in 2004. We didn’t even have re-buys until early 2007 or something ridiculous like that.

“So it was very much a game of catch up for a very long time and sometime around, I think, about 2008 I felt like we had caught up. And then all of a sudden it was, ‘How far ahead can we get?’ and I would say by the time we shut down we were a good way ahead and it seems like now others have started catching up.

But I don’t feel like anyone has really surpassed us so I think we’re going to hit the ground in a very competitive state and nobody is really that far ahead technologically speaking or feature wise and anything they have in the last year and a half I think we’ll catch up very quickly.”

Community Comes First

Another main pillar of new Full Tilt Poker’s plans for re-ascendancy is community and it didn’t waste any time re-engaging with its former players and fans. “The first thing we’ve done is Shyam is back on the forums,” says Lightman. “A big part of staying authentic and engaged is with the biggest poker communities and that is what Shyam is doing. The poker product and what he does is very involved with the communities that he talks to.

“The initial email we sent out to players had a survey. One of the things we want to do is reach out to the players, learn what opportunities, like running satellites to the EPT and things like this, might be of interest to them. We’re not making decisions which immediately mean, now that Rational own us, that we should be satellite-ing these events. If that’s what our players want then that’s what we’ll offer.

“If that’s not what they want, if they want something different then we’ll offer something different. And that’s what we’re going to start doing. Much more community engagement. All of these plans aren’t yet set because we’re concentrating on the launch but part of our plan going forward is continual engagement with the community, understanding what it is they want from us, what it is they’re looking for.

More engagement with the poker community isn’t the only new direction the company is embarking upon. The brand has changed in subtle but fundamental ways. “We wanted to move away from ‘Learning, Chatting and Playing with the Pros’ Lightman says. “We wanted to move much more towards, ‘If you wanted to take poker seriously this is the site where you’re going to play’. Were professionals will play.

“Anybody who has a passion for poker, that takes it seriously, would want to play on the site. So we moved from ‘Learn, Chat, and Play with the Pros’ to the new brand ‘Where We Play’ but professional players are not the only thing we’re about anymore.”

In With The Old, In With The New

Indeed the company’s biggest battle will be to both retain old players and attract new ones and it will launch a high-profile promotional plan of attack in its first week back in business.

“We’re going to have $250,000 worth of freerolls,” Lightman boasts proudly. “We’re going to have something called the ‘deal me in’ bonus, which will be the largest non-deposit bonus that Full Tilt Poker has ever done. In the coming weeks we’re going to have a full ‘Happy Hour’ week, double points on all people’s favorite games.”

“We’re going to have a satellite frenzy for the FTOPS [Full Tilt Online Poker Series] which starts on November 11 with $300,000 worth of added tickets. We’ll start with our re-launch FTOPS on December 2. And we’re having a VIP store sale.
The return of the FTOPS will be music to the ears of many online poker players.

“It’s going to be very recognizable,“ Markus confirms. “The guarantees are a little bit up in the air. It’s a little bit smaller; there are a few less events but otherwise its pretty much everything that it’s always been. We also have a new tournament type with one double chance and one triple chance tournament.

The company’s new rewards program has been the subject of heated debate on poker forums after it was revealed that its 27 percent rakeback would be ended and a replaced with a more inclusive program.

“Under 30 percent of all of our real money players had rakeback,” explains Markus. “So this shift is more towards giving everyone the opportunity for these rewards rather than this very select group of people who haven’t signed up through the correct affiliate.

“So to say it’s a shift in the ecosystem I guess is right because now instead of a very small group of players getting a flat rakeback percentage there is a tiered system like PokerStars. While it doesn’t go anywhere near as high towards the mega-grinders as much as PokerStars does, it rewards the bottom and middle end as much or more than PokerStars at the same levels.

“So that’s sort of where we’re staking our ground in the reward scheme of things. In a sense it’s a bit of an experiment. It hasn’t really been done like this before but I think we’re pretty excited about the possibilities. I’d much rather see everyone be able to get something.”

Managing The Ecosystem

Lightman concurs that the new system will create a more level playing field. “There are a lot of other issues as well,” he points out. “We always had to deal with promotions in a weird way because of rakeback. There were literally two classes: players that had rakeback and players that didn’t.

“And we just couldn’t give as much to everyone because we always had to keep in mind there were all these players who might be getting more than 100 percent back if we did a particular promotion so we have a little bit more freedom now which is nice.

Lightman suggests that another major poker ecosystem improvement will be the ability to transfer funds between PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker. “There will be a button in the PokerStars cashier and the Full Tilt Poker cashier which will allow you to instantly move money between those two sites,” he confirms.

“The majority of liquidity in the poker world is sitting on PokerStars right now. We know that most people like to play on more than one site and after Full Tilt Poker pulled out the market shrunk and the other sites that are out there are not interesting to the majority of those players as a viable second site to play on and that’s what we want to offer.

“You’ll have the ability to move your money between PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker to play and we’ll have promotions that are different to PokerStars but still the software and the games that everybody liked that were there before, backed with the security and safety that everybody knows that PokerStars and the Rational group give.”

Bumps In The Road

Of course a project of this size is not with out its difficulties and its difficult decisions. Many affiliates are unhappy at the news that Full Tilt Poker is effectively severing their old relationships in a bid to start afresh. This means players will not be tracked to where they signed up from and, more importantly, affiliates will not be paid.

Eric Hollreiser, head of corporate communications at PokerStars says strong business relationships with affiliates will return. “Clearly this is a difficult time for them. It’s a difficult time for a lot of people in the industry. I think the reality is we have been as transparent as possible, as communicative as possible and realistic.

“The deal that they had made was with a previous company and we’re doing something new here, taking the assets of Full Tilt Poker and making a second brand. 
“So while its difficult, and there’s no doubt about that, I think that at the end of the day we’re dealing with business people who want to have good strong business relationships that last into the future.”

Another issue currently being addressed is the patent of Full Tilt Poker’s revolutionary Rush Poker, a product so far advanced of its competitors it took them 18 months to catch up and duplicate.

“We’ve got patents pending for both Rush and Zoom,” says Hollreiser, “and we think that they’re distinctive products and we think that Full Tilt Poker created that category, or genre if you will, and we fully expect to be able to gain patent approval and once we have that to use that portfolio and to defend it so that we can own that intellectual property and keep it unique and innovative and in control.”

He also believes the return of Full Tilt Poker will grow the overall poker market, a good thing for the industry if it turns out to be true. “Clearly PokerStars has a history of doing what it believed was right for the industry and for poker players and for the company,” he says.

“I think we see an opportunity here with two great brands. When Full Tilt Poker stopped operating we saw a decrease in the overall market. There wasn’t that excitement and choice and we want to bring that back and we think that we have the opportunity to grow the market.

“It’s not really our responsibility to grow the market but from a business perspective we want to do that. And having two strong brands that compete against each other that are innovative, that are constantly challenging each other to come up with something new while staying close to the community is good for everybody.”
I think every poker play and fan can say Amen to that. ♠