More Full Tilt Disgust

Man I could ruminate on this full tilt business forever. This morning I have two quick thoughts I've been focusing on.

For starters, take a spin around the poker blogs you read these days, and you will still see a ton of people defending full tilt against the allegations that they were a ponzi scheme. I mean, I've seen or heard like five or six well known voices in the poker blogiverse saying that exact thing over the past 36 hours or so. Never mind the fact that, during the last year of its existence, full tilt operated at a massive shortfall in actual cash of some $130 million below the amount of funds in player accounts on their site, because the site was unable to find payment processors willing and able to transfer them the cash from depositors' accounts. They never told anyone this -- went out of their way to hide it in fact -- and spent the better part of their last year as an online poker site with again a 9-figure amount of "phantom funds" that were in play on full tilt's site, but which full tilt was never able to actually collect from its players' bank accounts. As a result, the last year consisted of full tilt funding player withdrawal requests out of other players' deposits (actually, out of what was left out of other players' deposits after the 19 owners and board members took their $5-10 million a month in distributions, that is), while only maintaining a small fraction of the total player poker funds available on the site in actual cash, resulting in the figures announced from Black Friday when full tilt had $390 million of player fund obligations, but only $60 million on hand with which to pay them. The whole thing was not designed as a ponzi scheme, no -- and the system has nothing to do with the traditional pyramid-style scheme that often many ponzi schemes take the form of -- but over the past year when funding player deposits became a huge challenge for tilt, the owners and those in control simply let those funding discrepancies linger, unnoticed and unannounced, and kept their business running in the hopes that no more than 15% or so of their players would make cashout requests at once which is all it would have taken for tilt not to be able to cover the withdrawals given the Black Friday figures. By June 2011 it would have taken just 2% of players to request withdrawals of their funds on full tilt for the company not to have had the money -- anywhere -- to pay their players out. This, my friends, is basically the textbook definition of a ponzi scheme, as asserted by US district attorney Preet Bharara in the amended complain filed earlier this week. And yet, I've read in several places in the poker media this week how it was wrong to use the term "ponzi scheme" to describe the site, that full tilt was just poorly-managed but not at all a ponzi scheme, that the district attorney is just trying to use the well-known and sensationalistic term in the media to gain the upper hand against the poor site being depicted falsely, etc.

Face it guys. Full tilt quickly became a way for the owners and founders to loot their players of our cash and live their extravagant lifestyles basically for free. But when things got out of control, the powers that be knowingly and willingly turned the site into a ginormous ponzi scheme scam, and when the events of April 15, 2011 caused massive withdrawal requests from U.S. players, the proverbial shit hit the fan and the jig was up, just like when Bernie Madoff could no longer meet his own fund's withdrawal requests and was forced to turn himself in. Pay withdrawals out of other people's deposits, and never actually have close to enough money to return everyone's investment near the end -- this is how ponzi schemes almost always end, and it's the essential nature of what makes them a ponzi scheme in the first place. But my question is: Is it seriously not time yet to stop defending these pieces of shit thieves just because you like to think of some of them as your friends? Stop posting that they're being mischaracterized (they aren't), stop posting that the district attorney is lying to get the media and the public on his side (he isn't), and stop saying that this was all just an innocent business enterprise gone wrong (it wasn't).

The other thing I just can't help thinking about these past several hours is the BBT. To be honest -- and frankly I wrote about this here a few times so this is no surprise to anybody -- but after those first couple of BBT series, I never really could understand how full tilt could willingly continue forking over 30 or 40 grand a pop for these BBT series, only to see the winners repeatedly pocketing the cash and not even playing in the WSOP with the winnings, or better yet, people taking the money and going out and playing, but then never blogging one whit about the experience in the first place. Several people commented on this over time on their blogs actually -- it just seemed odd that tilt would keep coming back and offering up more and more free prizes to us, when the BBT participants as a rule pretty much consistently fucked tilt off when tilt looked to get the benefit of their bargain by someone posting publicly about the experience that full tilt enabled them to win.

Well now we know how Full Tilt "had" the money to keep "spending" on "free" stuff for us in the various BBT tournament series, don't we? Full tilt "gave" us all this "free" stuff for the BBT series, over and over again, because in the end it was our money all along that they were just giving us back a small fraction of! I mean, when you're paying yourselves $443 million over a few years out of accounts into which players have deposited $390 million but which have only $60 million left as of Black Friday, what's $150,000 spread over four BBT series to help get a bunch of poker writers to write posts that are sure to bring at least some new players to the site, thereby generating more funds which the founders could pilfer for themselves? Why not give us the money and see how much we can generate in deposits? Since it was the deposits themselves that the full tilt owners were stealing -- and just not the rake from all the participants as we had all believed when the BBT series were going on -- what on earth would possibly make these people hesitate for a second in spending $150,000 of our money -- not theirs in any sense of the word -- on prizes for us, to try to generate more deposits to allow the company to keep its fraud going for just a little while longer. That $150,000 sure seemed like a huge amount of "free" "prizes" to be giving to little old us back in the day....Doesn't seem quite so large an amount anymore these days, does it?