Full Tilt Poker Saga Over – Or Is It?

With the recent guilty plea and conviction of former Full Tilt Poker chief executive Ray Bitar, the ongoing saga of the fraudulent online poker operator seems to have come to an end. Of sorts.

The hugely obese — and no doubt equally stressed — Bitar avoided jail because he needs a heart transplant but will forfeit in the region of $40 million of his wealth and enter a heart transplant programme instead of prison in May.

His Full Tilt bedfellows Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson have done deals with the U.S. Department of Justice which saw them also avoid jail upon forfeiting large amounts of cash and assets.

Less lucky was payment processor Chad Elie who, without a ton of cash and assets to hand over, got five months in jail.

While European players have been paid back the money they were owed, U.S. players are still waiting on around $160 million.

PokerStars paid this money to the DOJ last year when it also acquired the assets of Full Tilt Poker and while that absolved the new Full Tilt of any responsibility for the actions of its previous bosses it would appear that players continue to punish the site by deserting in their droves.

Full Tilt’s continued slide in terms of cash game players has seen increasingly frantic marketing attempts to shore up its market share — it was overtaken in April by both PartyPoker and the iPoker network according to PokerScout — and its once mighty reach would appear to have been reduced to that of a mere mortal online poker operator, scrabbling around for new players while trying to retain old ones. It will, like its direct competitors, have a significant battle on its hands over the coming years to stop continuing contraction.

There are many capable people working at Full Tilt Poker but without the massive fillip of accepting U.S. players it now has to fight it out with the likes of 888 and PartyPoker for the rest of the world scraps, a long way behind its owners at PokerStars.

Settling for second best may even be aspirational now as others snap at their heels and the twin strategy of pitching itself, on the one hand. towards recreational players while on the other sponsoring three of the most mercurial, milllionaire online cash game fiends, one of whom is down many millions playing at the site and one of whom is a rarely seen American, seems flawed.

So six months after its relaunch Full Tilt Poker is finding the world of online poker a very different place from when it exited the game and while it is no doubt still making a healthy profit it needs to find its own voice very soon or a great opportunity will be lost forever. ♠