Miikka Anttonen On PokerStars' Full Tilt TakeoverFinnish Pro Has High Hopes For Full Tilt Poker Launch |
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Miikka Anttonen is next in line to talk about PokerStars’ takeover of Full Tilt. In this series of interviews where players speak about what they expect from the acquisition and relaunch, Anttonen follows Melanie Weisner in answering questions regarding how he feels about the takeover, what it could mean, if the deal is good for poker, how Full Tilt will rebrand itself, and how likely it is to be a success.
This is what the young Finn had to say:
“Obviously it’s great for players, since so many players have so much money locked up, and just releasing those funds will help the poker economy in general. It’ll be interesting to see how it affects poker in general; I’m afraid it won’t be all just good things since PokerStars will now have a ridiculous market share and they can do pretty much anything they want with rake etc..
“Personally I feel great since I have money locked up, and I don’t see how the outcome could be disastrous for the poker economy either. I also think that this might speed up legalizing online poker in the States, which would be a massive thing. Basically I don’t think it’s a big deal apart from people getting their money back, but might be the start of a new boom if the U.S. authorities and PokerStars/FTP play their cards well.
“I think they will go with a lot of their old branding. Back in the day FTP was known as the cash game site when PokerStars was more about tournaments. I’m sure PokerStars are aware of this, and they don’t want to make it a Pokerstars 2, so instead they will focus on bigger cash games. I’m sure they will end up having the biggest cash game tables, and it will become the railbird heaven it once was.
“It’s interesting to see how they will handle the part of branding that includes dealing with the site’s past. I personally can easily think of it as an entirely new site, since it doesn’t really have anything to do with FTP except for the name and the software, but I could see people having issues trusting it again. I think it’s going to be a massive decision whether they will include PokerStars in the name/branding or not. If they do, their site will instantly gain trusted status among random players. But then again it will be considered as PokerStars 2, which isn’t good for them since it’s harder to get people to play on both. If I was in the branding group of workers, I’d probably go against including PokerStars in the marketing/branding.
“I don’t see how it could not be [a success]. I predict it’ll start booming almost instantly, and within a couple of months FTP will be the second largest site in the world.”
Check out Danny Ryan’s answers, and many more here at CardPlayer.com.
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