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?

Full Tilt Fully Sinking In

Wow. With a day to really absorb all the latest news from Wednesday's amended complaint by the New York attorney general in the online poker ban case that, among other things, adds Howard Lederer, Jesus Ferguson, Rafe Furst and Ray Bitar to the charges, it already feels like just an amazing revelation, one that is far and away the story in the history of online poker as we know it thus far.

Long story short, yknow that bunch of the biggest poker pros we all know and (used to) love from tv -- "the Professor", "Jesus", Phil Ivey and several others -- who started full tilt poker several years ago now? Well, guess what? Turns out they were actually literally stealing money out of your and my accounts -- yes, your and my money -- and paying it mostly to themselves over a several year period, while simultaneously running the entire poker site as a massive ponzi scheme. For real. I've seen some other bloggers arguing that ponzi is not really a fair description of what happened here, but I have to differ with that view, as I'll get to.

To provide some summary details for those not inclined to read all the various press reports about the amended complaint, or the new complaint itself (which you can read in full directly from the source right here, if you're interested), here's the basic gist, with quotes directly out of CNN.com's front page coverage of this story on Tuesday, with the emphasis and brackets mine:

"The prosecutor said that, as of March 31 [2011], Full Tilt Poker owed about $390 million to players around the world, including $150 million to U.S. players. But the company only had $60 million in bank accounts to pay them back.

Full Tilt paid more than $443 million in player funds to the board of directors and other owners, with $41 million going to Bitar, $42 million going to Lederer, and nearly $12 million going to another board member, Rafael Furst.

The company paid $25 million to Ferguson, and said that it owed him another $62 million, according to the prosecutor's office, noting that much of the money was transferred to Swiss and overseas accounts."

So that's the basic gist of what happened. Over the past few years, full tilt paid 19 owners and board members more than $443 million, including 42M to the Professor, 41M to Ray Bitar, 12M to Rafe Furst, and owing over $87 million to Jesus Ferguson, having only paid out some 25M of that amount thus far. Forbes also reported that "another owner, described by the feds as a professional poker player, received at least $40 million in distributions, as well as millions of dollars more characterized as loans from Full Tilt that have only been partially repaid." This statement obviously refers to Phil Ivey, so that's another 40M+ guy to add to the list of beneficiaries of cash payouts from full tilt over the past few years.

And I'd like to call attention to the two passages above that I highlighted in bold. First is the statement directly out of the amended complaint itself that much of the money from these full tilt owners and board members was transferred to Swiss and overseas accounts. Not that this surprises me per se, but there it is pretty much right there in black and white -- these guys knew on some level what they were doing was illegal, or at least that the funds might be subject so seizure and return at some point in the future. While "blithely" (to use Preet Bharara's excellent choice of words) and repeatedly assuring players in the U.S. and around the world that our funds were "totally safe and secure" on their site, the owners of the site were busy shipping their money the fuck out of the country, to Swiss bank accounts and other countries where they felt the U.S. would have the most difficulty recovering the funds when the shit inevitably hit the fan like it turns out these guys pretty much all knew it would.

And secondly, I just want to note that the Forbes coverage refers to the $4 million in loans we've all heard about to Phil Ivey not as loans but as amounts "characterized as loans", suggesting that there is some question as to whether even that was a fair description or whether what we're really looking at is just another example of someone stealing funds to support I'm sure an excessive and certainly excessively gamblerific lifestyle, with no intention of ever actually repaying that money.

I also wanted to take a minute to discuss what really turned this from your typical run-of-the-mill corporate raiding story and into a true life poker ponzi scheme, as the US attorney alleges in the amended complaint. Read this passage, also from the CNN coverage, describing full tilt's response when over the past year or so it became increasingly difficult for full tilt to actually find payment processors willing and able to withdraw the funds from its depositors' bank accounts:

"In order to maintain its false image of financial security, Full Tilt continued to credit player accounts without disclosing its inability to fund those credits," the prosecutor said. "When players gambled with these phantom funds and lost to other players, a massive shortfall developed."

So there you have it. This happened to me multiple times by the way, where I made a small deposit onto full tilt during the final year or so it was in operation, played with those funds for several days, and then at some point a week, two weeks, even a month or so later I was informed that my deposit was never deducted from my account (which I confirmed, of course) and thus my balance was deducted for the amount I never really deposited into the site. But what if I had already lost all of that money? Where did it go? Answer: (1) into other players' accounts, and (2) into the owners' and board members' pockets. Plain and simple, that's what happened. For the better part of a year, full tilt was having massive trouble actually getting the cash from players' bank accounts, and yet it still allowed those players to deposit "phantom funds" onto the sites, play with it, and either win (and presumably withdraw it into real cash) or lose (and thus transfer their losses to other players' accounts, who then presumably would look to withdraw it and turn it into real cash). I mean, you could not make this stuff up. Every time you saw Howard Lederer or Jesus Ferguson or Phil Ivey on tv over the past several months before the U.S. online poker ban in April of this year, they knew behind that face that they were literally operating at a shortfall in their own players' funds available on the site, allowing gambling of fake funds.

Note as well that the complaint alleges that "this scheme continued even after the original complaint was filed and the criminal indictment unsealed in April." Recall that the complaint alleges that, as of March 31 [2011], Full Tilt Poker owed about $390 million to players around the world, including $150 million to U.S. players. But the company only had $60 million in bank accounts to pay them back. As also reported by CNN, "As time went on, the poker site had even less money to pay its customers. By June [so this is less than three months later], Full Tilt owed $300 million to players around the world but only had $6 million to pay them, according to the prosecutor's office." So even after the online poker ban went down on April 15, the company continued to draw down on its meager cash available for depositors, owners, for everyone, raiding the company's last remaining cash that could have conceivably been used to return at least some fraction of player funds, from $60 million down to a mere $6 million, while player fund liabilities dropped only from $390 million to still $300 million owed. What a fucking disaster.

The Forbes coverage also has some good tidbits to help elucidate some of the details of this amazing, eye-opening story (again, emphasis mine):

"Federal prosecutors claim that Full Tilt’s board members got rich because the company used player funds to pay them massive amounts of money that largely was transferred to their accounts in Switzerland and other overseas locations. Specifically, the feds allege that Bitar pocketed $41 million and Lederer got $42 million. Jesus Ferguson allegedly was allocated $87 million in distributions and received at least $25 million, federal prosecutors claim. Another owner [Ivey obv], described by the feds as a professional poker player, received at least $40 million in distributions, as well as millions of dollars more characterized as loans from Full Tilt that have only been partially repaid. The government claims Full Tilt continued to make payments to its owners of up to $10 million per month even after the company was insolvent."

[Note that Tuesday's Wall Street Journal coverage pegged this number at $5 million per month paid to the full tilt owners starting as far back as April 2007.]

And later in the Forbes article:

U.S. government lawyers believe that Full Tilt Poker started to face a growing cash crunch in 2010 because it could not collect funds from U.S. players due to the federal government’s efforts to disrupt the payment processors that facilitate the flow of funds in the online poker industry. Indeed, Bharara’s office says that by August 2010 Full Tilt’s payment processing network had been severely disrupted and that the company could no longer withdraw money from U.S. players’ bank accounts. So instead, the feds claim, Full Tilt continued to credit player accounts without disclosing its inability to fund those credits, letting players make online poker bets with $130 million of “phantom funds” that resulted in a massive shortfall when other players won the bogus money in poker games.

The management of Full Tilt Poker, the feds say, “operated Full Tilt Poker with the hope that only a small number of players would try to withdraw funds at any one time, and that Full Tilt Poker would regularly receive additional deposits in amounts greater than any withdrawal requests.”,

Now if that last paragraph right up there ain't ponzi, then I don't know what is. For a period of several months, the owners and operators of full tilt poker intentionally, knowingly and willingly ran their company as a ponzi scheme, paying out those who withdrew funds from the site with the deposits of others, knowing all too well that the company was facing a potentially 9-figure shortfall in amounts deposited and in action on its site but which it could not collect and had no plan to be able to collect at any point in the future. And just like any good ponzi scheme, it was all premised on never more than a small percent of the site's users actually demanding their own money back at any given time. As long as those withdrawl requests were tiny in relative terms, having $60 million of cash on hand while supposedly "holding" $390 million of your customers' money worked out just fine. But when the shizzle hit the fizzle over the past year, there was never close to enough money to make the players whole. Oh, and meanwhile, the owners and directors paid themselves some $440 million out of those exact same corporate accounts that by April of this year contained only $60 million, and just $6 million by June.

Look, these guys raided your funds. My funds. Our money. It's like the CEOs of Tyco, Adelphia, and any other number of large company executives who have been busted over the past several years for using their company's funds to support a life of personal excess in almost every conceivable way. Only, this is much, much worse even than those examples. When the Tyco CEO took corporate funds to spend on expensive New York City call girls on business trips, at least he was taking funds that belonged to his company, and that were generated as revenues in exchange for his company's goods and services provided to customers. In this case, the full tilt guys took our money, not theirs and not full tilt's. This was not revenue in any sense of the word for full tilt. They were like a bank, merely holding on to our funds so that we could use them as we saw fit on their internet site. That's it. So while Dennis Koslowski and others in corporate America diverted money from their companies to fund ridiculous, extravagant lifestyles, in this case, Howard Lederer, Phil Ivey, Jesus Ferguson et al stole cash directly from their customers to fund similar endeavors. There's just no other way to spin it.

Oh, and by the way. I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but there seems to me to be a good chance that some of the crew of Lederer / Ferguson / Bitar / Ivey end up doing some jail time from all this, given the recent revelations. The corporate CEO's go to jail, and trust me when I say what they did is not close to as bad as what the full tilt owners are alleged by name to have done in this case. Why shouldn't these fucking pigs go to jail for a long time? Because they play a game as their professional jobs that's been frought with lying, cheating and dishonesty for the past couple hundred years? Because Howard Lederer came and blew smoke up the poker bloggers' asses at Caesars' poker room in Las Vegas at the summer WPBT gathering back in 2006, all the while he was literally stealing our very cash right out of our bank accounts and living high off the hog off of it? Seven or eight years ago, I most definitely idolized each one of Ivey, Lederer and Ferguson to some degree, without a doubt. Right now, make no mistake, I would bang the gavel myself and order them each to serve 30 years in the mutha fuckin slammer. And I probably wouldn't hesitate to cast them down with the sodomites either.

Unbelievable Full Tilt

Some of the details of the amended complaint are truly amazing, even given everything that has happened so far.

From Wicked Chops Poker (with my editorial commentary in blue font):

The Southern District of New York (SDNY) has amended its civil complaint against Full Tilt Poker, expanding the scope to include distribution payments to ownership totaling $443,860,529.89 and specifically naming Ray Bitar, Howard Lederer, Chris Ferguson, and Rafe Furst.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara went as far as to call Full Tilt Poker’s operations “…a massive Ponzi scheme against its own players.”

Bharara continued:

“Full Tilt was not a legitimate poker company, but a global Ponzi scheme. Full Tilt insiders lined their own pockets with funds picked from the pockets of their most loyal customers while blithely lying to both players and the public alike about the safety and security of the money deposited.” This pretty much says it all in a nutshell.

Key highlights from the complaint include:

■As of March 31, 2011, Tilt owed players from around the world over approximately $390,695,788 but had only approximately $59,579,413 in its bank accounts. (page 72)Yikes!
■Howard Lederer received approximately $37M in distributions as well as another $4M in profit sharing (page 72). What an asshole.
■Chris Ferguson received approximately $25M in distributions. (page 72)Asshole.
■Rafe Furst received approximately $11.7M. (page 73)Ass Hole!
■In all, it claims there are 19 owners of Full Tilt Poker. (page 73)
■An owner, named as “Player owner 1″ but clearly Phil Ivey, is alleged to have received at least $40M in distributions, “as well millions of dollars characterized as loans,” of which $4.4 million have not been repaid. (page 73)Perhaps the biggest asshole of the entire group, given how things have gone down.
■On that note, interestingly no other Full Tilt Poker owners where named in the amendment.
■Owners continued to receive approximately $10M/month even though beginning in the summer of 2010, management/the board of directors were aware of issues in collecting funds from U.S. players. (page 73) Assholes!
■Approximately $130M in U.S. player funds were never collected due to payment processing issues. (page 74)This is one of the most unbelievable statistics of the entire sordid full tilt affair, showing just how ineffectively run the company was. They had just $59 million in their accounts, and $395 million of players' funds, but failed to actually collect a staggering $130 million of that moneys. Unreal these clowns.
■The amendment claims that Tilt was “extremely insolvent” by March 2010, however owner distribution payments continued as late as April 1, 2011. (page 74)
■After 4/15, Tilt continued to accept funds although it had worldwide liabilities of over $300M. (page 75)Assholes.
■In an internal e-mail on June 12, 2011, Ray Bitar expressed concern that a company announcement regarding lay-offs and the Board (including himself) being replaced would be seen as bad news (which we find unbelievable–as most would’ve considered it great news), which in turn would cause a “new run on the bank,” adding that “it could be a huge run” and that “at this point we can’t even take a five million run.” (page 75)
■Any property, including money, used in [an illegal gambling business] may be
seized and forfeited to the United States–or better put–the accounts assets of Howard Lederer, Chris Ferguson, Ray Bitar, and Rafe Furst would be gonzo. (page 77)

We can only hope these pigs all go to jail for a long, long time. Which sounds to me like a very distinct and realistic possibility given the above.

Poker Media Still Sitting Quietly While Full Tilt Embarrasses Us All

Wow, what a bunch of masochists we all are. Seriously guys. Hasn't even one of you out there reading this wondered why exactly Phil Ivey -- the world's greatest poker player and perhaps greatest gambler -- "owes" full tilt $4 million? This is being widely reported by every major poker media outlet in the world, and has been for a good few months now as Ivey's alleged "White Knight" deal (which not coincidentally also involves the forgiving of Ivey's personal $4 million debt) is still said to be under negotiation to save the company in some form and -- hopefully -- to secure U.S. players the return of their funds that had been commingled into full tilt's own accounts. And yet, I keep waiting and waiting and waiting, and not one single person I can think of in the poker media has even questioned why, or how this could be. Pretty much all of them have lost their own money even on full tilt's site, and yet still, complete and total radio silence. The relationships, the history, and ultimately the downright adulation that these people still feel for all those poker pros you see on tv has blinded the media to providing any real coverage whatsoever of probably easily the worst scandal in the history of online poker. Sorry folks, but superuser doesn't even come close to stealing our money for their own and living high off the hog off of it. It's just not close.

Think about this. Phil Ivey is quite simply the single greatest poker player in the world today, I don't think many people would really dispute that fact at this point. The guy is a huge action junkie, he takes prop bets left and right, and he wins millions live and millions more online every year from this game. So, for starters, why does Ivey even need a $4 million loan from full tilt? And why did full tilt give him $4 million of their money, even assuming he did need it for something? Or, let me correct myself there -- why did full tilt give Phil Ivey $4 million of our money? And make no mistake -- that's exactly what commingling of players funds with full tilt funds means. They took the money we deposited with them, and then they just mixed our deposited funds in with all their money, using it for their own corporate purposes. Such as, apparently, "loaning" Phil Ivey $4 million.

Do you think Humberto Brenes ever owed pokerstars millions of dollars? What about Daniel Negreanu? How about UB, those scoundrels...d'ya think Phil Hellmuth owes UB $7 million or something? You think they lent Annie Duke a couple hundy large to complete an addition on to her house? Me thinks not.

And yet somehow, this that you are reading right here is the very first place to ever question or even mention the ludicrity of this $4 million debt from Ivey to full tilt. Somehow, I loaned Phil Ivey 4 million bucks even though I don't remember being asked about that decision, and I certainly know I didn't get to review any of his financial information or to sign off on his intended use of my funds. Last time I checked, I don't loan money to professional gamblers to throw on roshambo bouts, 18-foot puts on the greens, weight loss contests and WSOP bracelet bets against the rest of the best players in the world.

Or do I?

Along those same lines, I sat in silence for a good three weeks on this story as well, hoping against hope that at least one of these poker media outlets or bloggers would jump on this story with even a small fraction of the tenacity that was used to investigate and resolve the UB superuser scandal, but I simply cannot leave this post in "draft" mode any longer since it's obvious that, once again, the poker media is perfectly happy letting full tilt walk all over everyone, themselves included, because I guess they're just too busy staring agog like little schoolchildren at the very people who have stolen the cash right out of their pockets. But did anybody see the story a few weeks back when Todd Brunson tweeted that he had run into Howard Lederer in Las Vegas and that after telling Lederer how short he (Brunson) was on cash, Howard offered to pay Brunson what Brunson had locked up on Full Tilt at the time of the U.S. online poker ban? You're telling me the major poker media outlets never heard this story? Yeah right. Well, apparently it's true. Here are Todd Brunson's tweets of the events, which again happened just a few weeks ago on July 19 in Las Vegas:

"Look who I just ran into.. I told him the wsop killed me and I was cash short...... http://lockerz.com/s/121600156"
ToddBrunson

"He asked how much I had on tilt and I told him 150k.. He said come with me. We went to his car and he opened his trunk and paid me!!!!!!"

At first I figured this had to be a joke, especially given the complete dearth of coverage (let alone uproar) about it among the big poker sites. But nope, apparently it is all true -- the poker media is still just too busy planning how to blow the full tilt pros to spend any time letting you know that this happened. Brunson ran into Lederer in Vegas, took a picture to prove it, and when Brunson complained about being short on cash, Lederer apparently paid Brunson the $150,000 he had locked up on full tilt, right in cash out of the trunk of Lederer's car.

Now, putting aside the obvious questions on why on god's green earth Howard Lederer is driving around with more than 150 grand in his trunk (will somebody please carjack this asshole, PLEASE?!), wouldn't you think it would bother someone at wicked chops, at poker news, one of the big poker bloggers, anybody enough to mention that while little old you and me sit around waiting (forever?) to get (all? some of?) our money back that has been locked up at full tilt since April 15, the big dogs who know the founders of the site personally -- yes, those same founders who commingled your funds with their own -- are getting paid out by their friends the site's founders, in hundred-large chunks?

Wouldn't you think that it would have occurred to somebody in the media -- anybody at all -- to stop to think for a minute that maybe, if Lederer has $150k of full tilt funds sitting in his fucking car trunk that maybe, just maybe, that money could be disbursed to everyone whose money full tilt has stolen, and not just to the personal friends of the founders? Might one even suggest that this type of behavior by Lederer is more or less the exact same thing that got him into trouble in the first place, taking our poker deposit funds -- yours and mine -- and treating them like his own personal fucking ATM? I mean, can you imagine how many of us little people could have been paid out in full with just that $150,000 of my money and your money that Todd Brunson gratuitously got from Howard Lederer, just for happening to bump into him in a restaurant in Vegas?

I say again. Can you imagine if the posters on 2+2 were actually running with story like they did the UB mess a few years ago? Can you imagine if Haley was out there reporting on this complete and utter pile of bullshit every single day like she was back then with UB? Don't you wish Amy and Tim were glomming on to this story as surely as they did the WSOP missing chips scandal a couple of years back? And why aren't they? Why isn't anyone?

Seriously guys. WTF. It's getting very close to where we actually deserve what we get from full tilt here.

Is it me?

Is it me, or does it seem like the full tilt red pros really did not come up with many gold bracelets at the WSOP this year? I mean, how often have you heard Lederer Ferguson's name at a WSOP final table this summer, or even Cunningham or Seidel, or Ivey? Juanda bested Hellmuth for one red pro bracelet, but otherwise at least it looks like these guys have far too much on their mind right now to play their best.

Tilt and the Poker Media

With the news today that full tilt has been shut down globally after losing its license to run its online gaming operations, I find myself thinking, as I have often as I've read the increasing number of anti full-tilt posts out in the blogiverse over the past month or so, about the free pass that a great many bloggers and other members of the poker media gave full tilt for the first several weeks following the U.S. online poker ban, and even in many cases that is still happening today. As the full tilt saga continues to take affirmative steps that seem headed for the site collapsing under its own weight and not ever being able to find sufficient funds to pay back the full deposits of at least its American players, I can't help but think how funny it is that basically everyone we know in the poker media, among our blogger crew and everybody else in between out there is now taking credit for having been right all along in their predictions regarding full tilt poker ever since the events shortly after April 15. When meanwhile, in actual reality, six weeks ago, it was just me, one or two other bloggers, and a small handful of posters on 2+2 decrying full tilt (they deserved it), stating that the site had commingled funds and did not have sufficient money on hand to pay out their players (they did not), and predicting that things would get a lot worse for our chances of ever seeing our money before they get better (they most certainly have).

Go check it out. Over the past few weeks, I have read no fewer than five poker writers, bloggers or other posters trying to take credit for having been right all along and seeing this coming with the full tilt situation, when in reality you can very easily look and verify that they were there back in late April, swimming right along with the masses of fish all proclaiming that hey, this is full tilt, owned by the poker pros themselves, they won't screw everyone over, especially not with the WSOP coming up. What a joke. Even when the shit is right there to be proven false, linked right there on these people's own blogs, just inches of screen space away from their lies, they all still want to take credit now for having seen this avalanche coming. Right.

Everybody has to claim to be an insider, in the poker media more than anywhere else. Where six weeks ago it was "I know the full tilt guys, full tilt will come through, full tilt would never commingle our funds with their own, of course full tilt has the money", now with the very same people it's all "I always knew something was up, I could smell a rat from the beginning." Nice try, but no. I smelled a rat right from the beginning. You blindly backed your "friends" in the industry, while day by day, chess move by chess move, your rosy expectations and over-trusting naivete showed themselves more and more clearly for just that. You put your faith in a collection of some of the least trustworthy, most shady people out there, and boy did you ever get burned.

It's one thing to be getting screwed by full tilt here. We're all getting screwed, every minute of every day while we do not get our funds back. I wrote here in black and white a good eight weeks ago now that we all already had been screwed, from the moment it became clear to the unbiased and open-eyed among us that full tilt had in fact commingled our poker funds with their own, to such an extent that they could not now come up with enough money to pay all the U.S. players back our own money. So it's one thing to recognize and admit that you've gotten screwed. But to try to take credit for being out in front of this whole full tilt mess now that your "friends" involved with the company have shown their true colors -- when it was so painfully few of us who actually got it early on -- really adds insult to injury. Just own the fact that you got duped like 99% of the country, and maybe try to learn to be a little more open-minded and objective next time.

It was tough for a while back in May, being one of the only people I could find out there suggesting that full tilt might never pay us back our poker funds from their coffers. That our funds might not even exist. People have a lot of money tied up on full tilt, and many make their very livelihood from the availability of full tilt, so I took quite a lot of shit a couple of months back from the bitterest among the blogging community. Many said I was being needlessly pessimistic. A few attacked my lack of knowledge, or my lack of written substantiation for any concerns I was voicing (as if anyone supporting full tilt back then had any such "evidence", obviously). And many simply insulted and attacked me, without any real reason, for having a view that did not jibe with what they desperately wanted to be the truth, even though their view of the truth never sat well with me or seemed all that likely to happen.

For what it's worth, I don't only chuckle at all those people now who should have seen the truth coming like I did a couple of months ago but whose own world view could not allow them to see the forest for the trees so they are now vainly trying to take credit for having seen this all along when in fact they were major contributors to the lack of seeing this problem for what it really was. I actually think the poker media, bloggers, etc. contributed in a small way to the current state of full tilt's business. Most of the major poker media sites, the bigger poker bloggers and other poker outlets on the Internets basically gave full tilt a pass for the entire first month or more after April 15 of this year, and that I think gave the powers that be at tilt the idea that they could maybe actually get away with screwing everyone and live to tell the tale. When you've got some of the biggest and most widely-read writers about poker, many of whom have written or otherwise worked for full tilt or their largest competitors over the past few years, either remaining more or less silent while one of the biggest heists in online poker history was playing out its first act, or outright coming out in blind support of full tilt with obviously no actual reason to do so, it sent a terrible message to the founders of the site, one that I think has stuck with those people right up to now, as we near the seeming bitter end for what was once everyone's favorite site to play at. Of course nobody out there will own up to having done that now, but that's exactly what mostly everyone out there in the poker media in fact did, and I'm telling you, that collective pass and the rush to trust for everything full tilt was doing for 4-6 weeks after Black Friday contributed to where we're at today.

Just imagine if all the same people who have, say, devoted countless hours, day and weeks of their lives to investigating, reporting on, and just generally telling the world the truth about the UltimateBet / Absolute scandal, had spent the first three or four weeks after Black Friday working just as hard to look into the financial situation at full tilt and to make the truth known to the world, with the same fervor and devotion that they accorded to the UB cheating matter. Or, remember when a couple chips went missing during the WSOP Main Event a few years back? We had two or three professional poker bloggers and writers out there covering almost nothing but that story for days and days on end. And you know what? The shit works! If enough people jump on an issue or a story early enough, if they dig deep enough, and if they stay at it long enough, we've seen cold, hard proof that they can really make a difference. Not just in uncovering the truth when they do, but in actually helping to frame the issues and ultimately contributing in some way to the eventual resolution of the problem.

With full tilt, the poker media in general dropped the ball in my view. Not to blame the media in any way for what ultimately is 100% full tilt's own doing here, but the poker media has done a better job in the past on other issues, and should have followed the lead of the very few such as myself who publicly never thought full tilt's story smelled exactly kosher, and done a similar job here right from the getgo in digging to the bottom of the issues and starting to suggest ways to influence full tilt management to do the right thing. Instead, while all your favorite bloggers publicly came to full tilt's defense and told you over and over again for several weeks that of course full tilt will return everyone's funds, attacking all the while those few voices out there suggesting that maybe all was not roses for the former second-largest U.S. online poker site, management at full tilt saw an opportunity to do things clearly against the U.S. players' interests like turning down Phil Ivey's "White Knight" deal and a few other deals that were offered that would have secured the return of player funds in exchange for giving up control of the full tilt asset, and they jumped on that opportunity with the understanding that the poker media was simply not out for bear from them like they clearly have been for AP/UB, the WSOP and others when other similar controversies have arisen in the past. And I can't help but notice the correlation between that unbelievable (to me) level of trust right off the bat for full tilt, and the fact that now it appears more and more almost daily that full tilt could have gotten us back our own money, but now they probably cannot.

This is one story where I can honestly say, it hurts to have been right all along.

Woe Woe Woe is Full Tilt

For anyone who hasn't heard yet, Phil Ivey released a statement via facebook yesterday that is now right on his homepage for all to read, about the current situation going on at full tilt, a company in which Ivey is an investor. Without bothering to summarize everything (you can read the whole thing it at the link above, it is pretty short), suffice it to say that Ivey is disappointed and embarrassed that -- due to the "inactivity and indecision of others" -- full tilt has not yet paid out its U.S. players, which Ivey calls unacceptable and something for which he has filed suit against tiltware, the maker of the full tilt software, and that Ivey is not going to play the WSOP this year when others cannot due to failure of full tilt to return their funds. The most interesting part of the release to me is the last paragraph, where Ivey says, "I sincerely hope this statement will ignite those capable of resolving the problems into immediate action and would like to clarify that until a solution is reached that cements the security of all players, both US and International, I will, as I have for the last six weeks, dedicate the entirety of my time and efforts to finding a solution for those who have been wronged by the painfully slow process of repayment. It certainly sounds to me like Ivey is of the opinion that it is somehow someone's decision who is involved with the management of full tilt not to pay out the players. While I doubt that that is expressly true just as I wrote it there, something tells me that Ivey -- a clear insider with mostly everyone involved with full tilt management among the professional players' circuit -- knows a lot more than he is leading on here, and that he is directly and deliberately trying to send a strong message to one or more of his poker "friends" via this public announcement, since his private urgings do not seem to be working.

But the thing that has me much more pissed is the stone cold confirmation -- unfortunate though it is -- of literally every single thing I've said here about full tilt over the past month or so since it became obvious that player cashouts were not forthcoming from the U.S.'s formerly second-largest online poker site, coming out of ftpdoug on the 2+2 boards. For those who don't know (and I am no kind of 2+2 hound, but I've spent enough time there to know doug from various full tilt issues in the past, he is confirmed legit), ftpdoug works for full tilt and has appeared countless times in the forums -- and I think even here at my blog way back in the day after I ranted about full tilt intentionally pulling the plug on the servers on a night when they were going to have to pay out massive overlay across the board in their nighttime mtts -- to explain full tilt's position, give updates on status of corrections and problems, and just to generally disseminate information from full tilt to the masses.

Well, ftpdoug posted the following the other day on the 2+2 forums, and I'll just repost the whole thing here for those who have not yet seen it:

To our customers:

We acknowledge that our lack of communication reflects poorly on us, and rightfully so. We have been too optimistic in estimating how long it would take to sort through the issues we have faced since Black Friday. And as frustrating as the delays have been for us, we recognize that it cannot compare to the frustration you have been feeling.

We further recognize that our lack of communication has led to much speculation and many unsubstantiated rumors, which have often been contradictory. With this message, we hope to clear up as much confusion as we can, while at the same time keeping in mind the constraints imposed on us as a result of the cases brought in the Southern District of New York.

The most pressing questions:

1. When will the US players be paid?

We still do not have a specific timeframe for this. There has been, and remains, no bigger priority than getting US players paid as soon as possible, and we have been working around the clock to get this done.

2. Is FTP bankrupt?

No. FTP's worldwide business is healthy and, although we've had some short-term challenges, it is operating as normal.

From: http://www.gamblingcontrol.org/userf...2020110516.pdf

"The AGCC’s investigation into the affairs of it licensee Vantage Limited, trading as Full Tilt.com, is ongoing; initial investigations indicate no reason to believe that player fund transactions are fundamentally threatened by any consequence of the US authorities' actions. Delays caused by these actions are in the process of resolution, with normal service now being restored for non-US players. We understand that progress in respect of US player fund repatriation is anticipated and will be the subject of a separate statement from Full Tilt in due course. The Commission will remain engaged in this process."

3. What is the company doing to speed up payouts to the US players?

We are raising capital to ensure that the US players are paid out in full as quickly as possible.

It is important to remember that Full Tilt Poker has always paid out our players, even in the face of previous legal obstacles or factors not in our control, such as payment processor defaults and prior actions by the US government which resulted in US player funds being seized.

In all of these previous instances, Full Tilt Poker has covered these losses and intends to do the same again.

4. Why are the Full Tilt Pros remaining silent?

It is not their choice. But they are constrained by the pending legal actions.

As a final note, we understand -- and have always understood -- the effect that our brief statements have had not only on our customers, but also on our reputation. It has not been easy to stay silent and watch the damage being done to our company brand and personal reputations, but we need to be mindful of the complicated and serious legal issues raised in the pending cases.

The emphasis in blue is mine, not ftpdoug's, but it is those two highlighted portions which just smack me in the face most. So, for starters, for anyone who actually doubted that full tilt did not have the cash on hand to pay out the U.S. players, ftpdoug has now confirmed it. They have to raise capital in order to pay out the U.S. players. That's it, plain and simple. If you don't know, "raise capital" is a fancy way for saying "get money from someone". Period. They don't have sufficient funds on hand to pay out their U.S. fan base. I've said it for weeks, people have commented that I am overreacting, etc. Well, now you can't say that anymore.

And by the way, let's be clear about one thing. "We're raising capital" is exactly what Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld said over and over and over for the month or two immediately prior to Lehman's declaration of bankruptcy. "We're raising capital" unfortunately means the same thing in this case as "We're hoping to raise capital", because full tilt does not yet have a deal in place, and again it is obvious at this point that they will not have the funds to pay out the U.S. players unless they do in fact raise that capital, by some accounts (admittedly this is pure rumor I believe) estimated to be as much as $150 million. Dick Fuld just needed 4 or 5 billion invested and said for weeks that he had several options to choose from. But then his U.S. competitors turned him down. Then Citi and Bank of America said no thanks. Eventually it was down to the Korean Investment Bank, who was apparently very close to agreeing to a deal but walked away at the 11th hour over issues over who would have control over the company after the investment. It's amazing, really, how quickly "We're raising capital" can become "We couldn't raise the necessary capital", especially when your underlying business model may be suspect to a lot of potential investors out there.

Will someone invest $150 million in full tilt, to give them enough money to pay their U.S. players, on the hopes that they can survive and provide a good return on that $150 million investment with the site's flagging presence outside the United States, and dim prospects of ever re-entering the lucrative U.S. market? Would you invest $150 million in that business? Maybe. They do have Rush Poker as others have pointed out, they do seem to have the majority of the biggest worldwide poker pros as sponsors (for now), and they have those multi-entry tournaments that no one else seems to have yet. So there is probably some intellectual property assets there worth a pretty penny. But if you think I think that them "raising capital" sufficient enough to pay out their U.S. players is a done deal, then you crazy.

And moreover, the way I see it, full tilt doesn't really think it's a done deal either, despite a lot of the rhetoric you see from the company to the contrary. I can't help but think that ftpdoug's use of the word "intend" where I highlighted it above instead of saying instead something like "and full tilt will do so in this case as well" I think says it all. Even in writing his comments, ftpdoug in my mind has some inside knowledge that the capital-raising talks are far from any actual commitments of funds, and to me his use of the word "intend" there stands out like a sore thumb. And I should mention as well that the company's recent response to Ivey -- essentially positioning Ivey as the reason why full tilt may be unable to secure new financing -- sounds exactly like what the beginning of the end would sound like to me, if that proves to be what this is.

I'm taking a stand here guys: I have officially flipped from the side of believing we would eventually get paid out by full tilt -- where I've been ever since the moment I read about the indictments and arrests of Black Friday -- and now I think it is probably slightly more likely than not that we do not get full payouts from the company. I referred to this a couple of weeks back, but something about a bunch of professional poker players being in charge of the company ultimately does not at all give me the sense that my best financial interests will be in the forefront at all times. Sure, Lederer's house may be for sale for $30 million right now, but like I said last week here, I guarantee you he wont' go through with it if (1) it's not enough to pay the U.S. players and save the company anyways, and (2) he's the only poker pro putting up his own money like that. And I'm not hearing anything else out of anyone affiliated with the site, or any poker pro for that matter, or now ftpdoug or the full tilt press releases, that lead me to believe they are any closer than I am right now to raising $150 million of fresh cash for their business.

Woe is Full Tilt

What the fruck is going on with Full Tilt and cashouts to U.S. players? And why aren't more people making more of a stink about it? Among our group anyways, it seems like it's basically TBA, a little bit of Josie, and then about a hundred quivering blobs of protoplasm too afraid (of something) to speak out against the site that has given us poker bloggers so much opportunity over the years to beef up our prize pools, let our group play rake-free, and even the (largely untaken) opportunity to play in the WSOP (yeah right).

Do any of you people really think that giving away a bunch of stuff to us over the years -- stuff which, believe you me, full tilt thought they were getting fair value for when they "gave it away" to us to begin with -- gives an online poker site the right to, or in any way absolves them from, commingle our U.S. player funds with the site's own funds, and now the consequent problems in giving us back our money? Can anyone really think that way? I've seen a few bloggers out there voicing that opinion, but as this cashout saga draws on and on and more and more details emerge about what is and is not happening at full tilt, is it possible that people really continue to just throw up their arms and give this site a pass?

Here's all I know: Pokerstars took what, ten days to get us our money? Less, even? They saw that they could no longer offer real-money play to U.S. players, and they basically immediately entered into a deal that would ensure the return in full of all U.S. players' funds, in conjunction with the U.S. government. This could only be done because pokerstars looked at their accounts and knew right away that they had segregated somewhere all the money they needed to cover all U.S. players' deposits somewhere in their coffers.

Now UB / Absolute, we like to think they are a different story. They're probably never returning any U.S. players' funds, and ultimately I think anyone who played at that site who expects them to do different now, simply is not in tune with the history of fraud and abuse at this company. Those funds are probably gone, and hopefully those of you who did play there anyways (like me) hedged against that risk by never leaving anything more than a few hundy on that site at any time. But guess what, guys? Full Tilt might be in that same boat as UB when it comes to returning your funds.

Yeah, I said it. And how much "free" stuff they "gave away" to bloggers over the past several years has precisely zero to do with it. What would that possibly have to do with whether or not full tilt is going to give players back their money? It doesn't. In fact, why should all the blogger "giveaways" over the years mean that we even give full tilt the benefit of the doubt at this point? Pokerstars got it done right away, because obviously they did not have player funds commingled with pokerstars funds. Full tilt, on the other hand, obviously did. And can anyone really feel secure when a bunch of professional poker players control an online poker site, and those players have just had the incredible cash cow that online poker is for most of their rolls, totally revoked, possibly forever but at least for a decently long, undetermined time to come, and when it turns out that that site now also had its own funds commingled with U.S. players' funds? Throw in what, tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars that now needs to be returned and cashed out to U.S. players, and someone thinks I should give these funds-commingling scumbags the benefit of the doubt?

I have news for you rose-colored glass, all humanity is good, etc. people out there. Commingling our funds with the company's own funds -- that is, not actually having our cash separated on hand to pay us each back if and when we ever requested a cashout -- that already is the crime, as far as I'm concerned. Whether U.S. players end up getting all or most of their money back eventually, is almost secondary in my mind. The fact is that it turns out that the people who run full tilt have been running a kind of a modified ponzi scheme -- as long as people keep depositing, there are enough funds to go around for everyone to do what they want to do, but when they have to cash out all U.S. players in one fell swoop, guess what? They can't find the money for it all. And of course this is why the communications from full tilt have been so horrible (and so scarce) over the past couple of weeks, because they don't know how to explain this situation without admitting obvious guilt / fraud / etc. Think about it -- Pokerstars had the money, they knew they were going to be ok as a continuing business offering online poker only outside of the U.S., and they got their U.S. players their money back as quickly as humanly possible, and were very clear in their communications with respect to the situation. Full tilt, on the other hand, does not necessarily have the money to return to their U.S. players, and the long-term viability of their business is much more in doubt as full tilt was primarily focused on the U.S. market, and thus far it is just lie after lie, story after story, and excuse after excuse.

For any institution with access to individuals' finances to commingle its participants' funds with its own funds is punishable in almost any context and almost every circumstance. So no matter how this story ends up, Full tilt is already guilty in my mind. I am still proceeding on the assumption that I will one day see my $265 and change left on the site at the time of Black Friday, but I'm sure as hell not counting on it at this point. And with every passing day, the odds that we ever see that money dwindle further and further IMO.

Begone with the Double Guarantees

Well, Double Guarantee week has mercifully come and gone on full tilt, and I for one will be looking forward to getting back to the regular number of donkeys running in the nightly mtts instead of everything featuring hugely inflated fields with many players running up to four different entries at once in each tournament. I mean, don't get me wrong -- I loved the chance to play for hundreds of thousands of dollar prize pools any night of the week for not a crazy amount of buyin, and I took full advantage, playing tournaments like the nightly 75k -- 8pm ET with a $165 buyin -- that I do not usually participate in due to my bankroll restraints just to get a few shots at what was a 300k+ prize pool basically every night of the week.

But, given my analysis before the week began and the nice work of CK and some other bloggers who ran across the multi-entry mtt feature in their travels last week, I stuck to my guns and never bought in more than twice to any of the multi-entry double-guarantee events over the last week. In fact, I actually never multi-entried them at any time, as I only used the multi-entry feature (when I did use it at all) as a rebuy option instead, on two or three occasions buying back in to a tournament after an early elimination. As a result, I did not fall victim to what probably a great number of players in these events did, as their ROI plummeted due to the multiple buyins, turning their couple of min-cashes from net profits to net losses in the tournament as a result. This is one of the most insidiously deleterious effects pointed out about multi-entry tournaments in general, although I would argue that in the hands of the right player -- say, a Shaun Deeb for example -- having the ability to run four entries in a single mtt is over the long haul a profitable as opposed to a losing proposition. But for the vast majority of mtt participants on full tilt out there, multi entries will just equate to multiple buyins lost when you are not one of the lucky ones to make it to the final two or three tables out of the 2000+ and 3000+ person fields commonly out there all this past week on full tilt.

That said, by playing only one entry at a time in these vast-field multi-entry events, without a doubt I put myself at a huge disadvantage in terms of being able to make deep runs. Not only was much of the competition in these tournaments playing four times as many entries as I was, but even in comparing individual entries, you can "play them off of each other" when you have more than one simultaneous entry in much the same way you can play two adjacent blackjack hands off each other to derive an extra benefit on each merely from the fact that you are playing two hands against the same dealer and the same dealer's cards at the exact same time -- if one entry has already amassed a big stack, you can play faster and looser with the other(s), and vice versa. And my insistence on playing at this level of a disadvantage -- not wanting to hack away at any chance at a net profit by ponying up three or four buyins just to sit at a table in a 3000+ person mtt -- really showed in my results, and in general in the results of those people that I follow who play full tilt mtts with any regularity. Twoblackaces had a nice four-digit score in a $2 multi-entry Rush poker tournament early in the week, but other than that, I don't know anyone I pay any real attention to who exactly killed it this week, or really had any big cashes at all. Personally, I posted mediocre cashes in the 40k/80k twice over Double Guarantees week, once in the 75k/150k, and once in the 35k/70k, but none of them were deep enough to make it worth my while, or ultimately even to get all that exciting to be honest. Even though none of these were min-cashes and I managed to get through roughly a third or a half of the field of ITM players in each instance, in the end I was barely picking up a full buyin of net profit on the deal, making it nothing worth noting as far as actual tournament success goes. I was very, very close to making a nice run to a cash in the 150k two other times this week -- running QQ into AA and JJ into KK both near the cash bubble in this big tournament that featured around a 350k prize pool all week long -- and I also survived about 85% of the field in Sunday's 1.5M guaranteed multi-entry tournament, before slamming headfirst with AK into AA on a predictably Ace-high board in a heads-up pot. But that is exactly the kind of thing that makes surviving these massive donkeyfields to get into the final few tables so difficult in the first place. With that many people to outlast and outplay, it is just that much harder to avoid running into that inevitable pocket Aces, or to get donked by some poo-flinger, in particular by one of his poo-flinging entries that he is purposefully playing fast and loose with because he's already amassed a top-25 stack with one of his other entries in that same tournament.

I enjoyed Double Guarantees week on full tilt. But a week was more than enough exposure for me to Multiple Entry Land. I am confident that my ROI will be better with single-entries for most of these tournaments, and now I'm just left hoping the site doesn't read a mandate into the extreme popularity of their tournaments last week basically from start to finish, and start making some of my favorite nightly mtts multi-entry for good.

Massive Prizes in Multi-Entry Double Guarantees Week on Full Tilt

Holy shipe! What's the opposite of overlay? Underlay? Whatever it is, that's the one word to best describe what happened on Monday night on full tilt, for the start of the site's Double Guarantees Week. As part of the introduction of the new multi-entry tournaments I wrote about last week, full tilt is running a promotion all this week in which every one of the nightly guaranteed prize pool mtts on the site is, for this week only, a multi-entry event, and the guaranteed prize pool is doubled from what it usually is to reflect the larger number of expected entrants into these tournaments as a result of the whole multi-entry thang.

And it looks like full tilt might have slightly underestimated the interest in checking out what the multi-entries are all about. Check out just the tournaments I regularly look into playing on a nightly basis these days on full tilt during the early evening hours east coast time:

6pm ET: The $26 buyin, 32k guaranteed is this week a 64k guaranteed. This tournament usually features around 1700, 1800 runners. On Monday night, with multi-entries in effect? 3,747 runners (entries). Total prize pool: $89,928. But this was just the beginning of the effect, as us east coasters weren't quite home from work enough yet to really start jumping in and fluffing up the prize pools.

7pm ET: This is where it starts to get good. The $75 buyin 40k guaranteed is this week an 80k guaranteed. This tournament usually features between 600 and 700 runners. On Monday night, it got 2,101 runners (entries), for a total prize pool of 144,969! $75 buyin, and a shot at a 145k prize pool. I would say you can't beat that in terms of value, but look at some of the other tournaments below and you might beg to differ. I was in this tournament, and actually ran pretty deep, surviving over 90% of the field despite being dealt zero pocket pairs, and having to fold JJ and TT preflop each once during the night, before I ran into Aces -- my specialty lately -- and busted in 96th place. It was a crazy tournament, far fuller than I've ever seen it even come close to before, with nearly three times the normal number of entries, which really showed in how this thing played out. It was a pushfest from about the second hour on, and I was lucky to last as long as I did.

8pm ET: Here was another incredible value. The $150 buyin 8pm ET tournament is usually a 75k guarantee, and this week is a 150k. Instead of the usual 500 or so runners that this tournament brings in, Monday night saw it attract 2,302 entrants with multi-entries in effect, for a total prize pool of $345,300! Again, if you're looking to play for a shot at a massive prize pool -- first prize in this thing was something like 80 grand -- for a relatively small buyin, this was as good a value as you almost ever see in online poker outside of the massive annual or quarterly tournament series.

Also at 8pm ET is the $26 buyin, 35k guaranteed that is this week a 70k guaranteed. Normally this tournament ends up with somewhere around 2000 runners, but on Monday night, it had 4,333 runners. This made for an awesome prize pool of $103,992, all for a $26 buyin. Again, if you don't like to play too big but love the thought of making a run at a 20k+ first prize, this was your chance.

Now, if you do like to play big, Monday night also featured one of the most amazing values I've ever seen in a regular nightly event. The 9pm ET Monday 1k ($1000 buyin) mtt, which usually features a 300k guarantee these days was bumped up to a 600k guarantee with multi-entries in effect. While attracting around 300-400 runners on a normal night, Monday night saw this behemoth tournament lure in 1,454 entries, for a whopping prize pool of $1,454,000! I'm not generally into buying in to one of the toughest tournaments available anywhere, for a grand a pop at that, but if I were such a person, my lord a 1.5M prize pool on a normal Monday night? This is like what the FTOPS ME used to be just a few years ago, and now it's the regular Monday night 1k tournament's prize pool? Simply incredible.

Lastly, I will mention the 50-50, which is a $50 buyin tournament that runs at 9:30pm ET on full tilt, and typically attracts somewhere around 1100 or so runners a pop. On Monday night, it swelled to 2,045 entries with the multi-entries in effect. This made for a lofty prize pool of $147,500! Again, a nearly 150k tournament for a $50 buyin? That's really awesome value if you're looking to make a nice bang for your buck.

And these were just the guarantee tournaments on display during the regular times when I am normally looking to play online poker in the evenings nyc time. I imagine it was much of the same throughout the day and night on the site, as everyone and their mother seemed to be flocking to full tilt to see what all the multi-entry hubbub was about. Now, don't get me wrong -- these prize pools were huge, but you were playing against a bunch of guys with up to four entries into each tournament, so if like me you only played the usual one entry for one buyin, you were at a massive disadvantage in terms of running deep. And also, the play in these things was looser than usual, in particular in the earlygoing, as players played them -- predictably -- much like monkey hour in the standard online rebuy events, and while loose play early might sound good to someone like me in terms of making it easier than usual to double up (which I did), it also makes it far more likely than usual that some poo-flinger will pick you off early (I did that too). Please don't read this post as me taking back any of what I said in my post on Friday about this new multi-entry phenomenon -- I'm not a fan, and I hope they don't make the multi-entry feature a widespread thing on full tilt going forward, because it doubtlessly bastardizes the game and turns these tournaments into more of a poker gimmick than they already are as a rule. But damn, if you're looking for some excellent bang for your tournament buyin buck, a week of these things here may be right up your alley. You're certainly not going to find much better value than these anywhere on the planet in terms of low-buyin, high prize pool tournaments.

I am hoping to play some actual multiple entries myself in these one or two nights this week just to see how that all plays out -- that 8pm ET with a $96 buyin for four entries, giving four shots at winning a piece of a 100k+ prize pool looks particularly compelling to me -- but for now I will probably continue taking my one shot in a few of these while I play some more of the UBOC events on the side as well. But double guarantees week on full tilt will certainly spice up the excitement a bit, and if nothing else it keeps me off of pokerstars for the week. Suddenly a $27.50 buyin with a "mere" 30k guarantee on pokerstars just doesn't seem all that exciting at 8pm ET, even if I have taken more than 10 grand out of that mtt just this month so far.

Multi-Entry Tournaments at Full Tilt

I really can't believe these new "Multi-Entry Tournaments" at full tilt poker. I suppose my opinion could change after I have some time to see these things in action, but I am really, really surprised at some of the decisions involved in enabling such a feature on the site.

For starters, it looks like each multi-entry mtt will have its own limit on the number of multi-entries you can have in the event, but in the example they show on their FAQ page for this new feature, the drop-down menu goes to what looks like 30. Now, they are clear that you can never have more entries than there are tables remaining in a tournament -- for obvious reasons, since it is unfathomable that the same person can sit at the same table as themself -- but otherwise, is there really a need to allow people to buy into the same tournament 25 or 30 times? What is that accomplishing, really, other than of course dramatically increasing full tilt's rake from these tournaments? Yeah, they can tell themselves that it "gives people a second chance" if they bust early for some reason, but any seasoned tournament guy -- in particular one who often plays rebuys -- can tell you with confidence what's going to happen here: it's going to change the way these people play. When a guy knows he's got two entries, let alone four -- and I don't even want to think about when he's got 16 or 20 entries -- they're going to play these tournaments like aggrodonkeys.

These tournaments are going to play at least as bad as a standard rebuy, only probably worse, since multiple-entrants can be playing 15 or 20 entries simultaneously, instead of just knowing they will have to start over with a fresh buyin stack if they lose. Think about it -- once one of these clowns amasses one top-25 stack with one of his 20 entries early in some 2000-person field, he's going to play like an absolute maniac with his other 19 entries for the most part. There's definitely an incentive to, anyways. Whereas, in a rebuy if you're lucky enough to amass that big stack early, the better strategy is going to be to play it smart and try to make that stack last through monkey hour. Much like my feelings about Rush poker, I just can't see this as being anything but a negative development for the players in the games overall, and it will surely make me not want to play them just as much as you won't find me often in a Rush poker tournament unless I feel like donking around. I mean, would it have been so hard for full tilt to limit multiple-entry tournaments to, say, two or three entries per person? Did they have to go and let people play 20 different seats in one event?

The other aspect of the multi-entry tournaments that I read about on full tilt's FAQ page that I just can't quite accept is what they do when a player is left with more entries remaining in a tournament than there are tables remaining in that tournament. Since nobody can sit at the same table as themself for obvious reasons, full tilt's patent-pending program will automatically merge two of your entries in such a situation. But in so merging, they will literally "combine" the entry from the table being broken with the smallest stack you have remaining in your other entries in the tournament. And in so "combining" the stacks, they will actually add the chips from the two entries together for the new, merged entry! While it's smart I suppose to combine with the smallest remaining stack, I can see this creating a number of scenarios that could be really frustrating and just generally unfair (in my opinion), or more accurately, just wrong the way I see it. It's wrong in much the same way that I think stalling the final table of the WSOP ME for four months before resuming after seven solid days of hardcore playing in the summer to reach that point -- it's just not natural, and it's not right to someone who really understands what winning large-field mtt's is all about.

Think about this scenario. You've been sitting at the same table for the last 2 1/2 hours of a big-field online tournament. You're well into the money positions now, say there are four tables left with 9 players at each table, out of 2200 who started some 6 or 7 hours ago. You've waited patiently while the guy to your immediate right has slowly but surely whittled his stack away, you've reraised him a few times when he's been going for a steal, and otherwise you've literally sat next to him and waited for the right hand to take his stack when he inevitably pushed allin due to his short stack. You've got say 50,000 chips and he is now down to 9k, his lowest in hours, with blinds of 800-1600. Clearly, he is finally down to push and pray mode, and you are set to benefit from your patience these last couple of hours as you know he basically has to push allin any time the action folds around to him before the flop, with basically any two cards. It's a great situation for you.

Then, just before his big blind, something strange happens. All of a sudden the word "MERGE" appears over his name, and the next thing you know, his 9k stack -- the one that you have patiently waited out and made some thoughtful folds to over the past 200 hands or so next to him -- suddenly becomes 109k. Why? All because on some other table where he had a 100k stack has just broken, and this 9k stack is his smallest stack of the entries he has remaining in the event. Suddenly all of your patience has been for nought, and why? I mean, sure this happens all the time in poker tournaments, someone new moves to your table, or you get moved to a new table, and while you were a pretty big stack at the old table, suddenly you are stuck sitting with a bunch of huge stacks. But the difference there is that it's not the same exact guy at the table, who was not eliminated. There's just something unnatural about it, something wrong, and I'm willing to guess that most seasoned mtt players who are accustomed to making deep runs would agree with me, just like I'm sure they do about the whole WSOP Main Event delay thing.

Ultimately, other than promotional weeks like next week's upcoming "double guarantees" week when full tilt is going to turn every single one of its weekly guarantees into a multi-entry tournament to see just how high they can make the prize pools, this won't really affect me much. Why? Because you won't find me playing these sorry excuses for "poker tournaments". But it just bothers me that every time full tilt invents a new and original structure for online poker -- and markets it as such to us players -- what it really seems to come down to over and over again is just another greedy money grab.

But it's all about the rake, baby. It's not about poker, and it's certainly not about the customer. It's all about the rake.

Brilliant Poker Semi-Fiction

Not sure what made me click over to Morning Thunder's blog today -- where I read from time to time but generally not every day -- but when I did I was treated to one of the most laugh-out-loud funniest posts I've read in some time. Go and enjoy it for yourself, as I imagine that behind the flowery images and wonderfully descriptive prose is a story that each one of us has considered at some point over the last several years of our lives.

BBT, Can It Be?

Did I hear correctly this weekend that all three people who won the WSOP Main Event prize package in the BBT5 this past spring all took the $T on full tilt instead of playing in the Main Event?

Do people even want there to be more BBTs and more free stuff for us?

I mean, can this even be possible?

The best part about this is that people blew their effing tops for days on end when Al first announced earlier this year that the BBT Invitational was going to be just that -- an invitational -- extended only to those people that full tilt felt were a good gamble to actually use the money they graciously hand out to ungrateful bloggers every year to actually play in the actual World Series of Poker. Full tilt wanted the invitational because in the past people just would not use full tilt's funds to play in poker tournaments. They also wouldn't blog about the tournaments, even the few times when past BBT winners did actually play in the events they won prize packages to in the BBT.

One of the things I always try to teach my kids and the others around me is ownership of your decisions. If I decide to take a big risk and willingly don't use my seat belt whenever I drive 5 miles or less from my house, then you won't hear me complaining that my car was unsafe when I do get into an accident close to home and suffer worse injuries than I would have if I had chosen to wear the belt. If I decide I'm going to make a bunch of flagrantly racist or homophobic remarks in front of mixed company, then you won't hear me getting mad at someone who gives me legitimate crap for what I said being hateful and bigoted. And it's just as true in a poker context by the way -- if I decide I'm going to try to get it allin preflop automatically any time I find a pocket pair 66 or higher, and I do just that by pushing in 100 big blinds early in a big tournament and I lose a race to AK or AQ, you won't hear me complaining. I make a decision, and then I own that decision, for better or worse. This notion of personal responsibility is one of my defining qualities and something I focus on regularly, be it at the poker table or the table of life.

All of you people who gave Al endless, interminable shit for what was originally I think only around 50-60 players in the first BBT5 Invitational, you as a group need to learn to own your own decisions. It's gone on for years at this point, and I personally cannot believe it. We're bloggers for crying out loud, and the only reason full tilt ever came to us with prizes the first time around was for the marketing possibilities of paying for bloggers to play in and write about the biggest poker tournaments in the world. Instead, we as a group have repeatedly, consistently -- for several years now, amazingly -- given a huge, fat middle finger to full tilt and made them sorrier and sorrier each year about the money they have largely wasted on the BBT winners. Shit, bloggers have even won the money from full tilt in the BBT, and gone to Vegas and played with that money, and they still don't blog about it, not one whit! And don't get me wrong, I'm not judging anyone for any decisions they have made with respect to money won from full tilt or any online poker site -- but you're damn right I am judging those people for not using the money they won, and then for complaining to Al that they were not included in the Invitational the next time the BBT comes around.

Own. Your. Decisions.

If there is ever another BBT tournament series, full tilt should definitely, obviously, undeniably use an invitational format, at least for a big part of the determination of who wins the WSOP prize packages. And most of the hypocritical whining we'll inevitably see about it don't even deserve the time of day. Dickheads will post on their blog about not being included in the Invitiational like it's their job, but damn when they actually win the money, they and their blogs just vanish like a fart in the wind.

Without a doubt this is one of the most pathetic aspects of poker bloggers today.

FTOPStupid

It's really amazing what full tilt has done with the FTOPS. I know ultimately this post is going to read an awful lot like at least one or two other posts I have done here either 3 months, 6 months, 9 months or exactly a year ago, but what can I say. Full tilt keeps making the same mistake, and I keep suffering as a result, so you read about it here.

Go back just about a week right here and you can read all about how I was looking forward to sitting down to play some FTOPS tournaments for the first time in at least a year. I haven't been playing hardly any mtt's recently and the upcoming FTOPS seemed like as good a chance as any I would have to get back into the thick of things and to play for some real money. I was amazed in that post because I literally hadn't been looking forward to the FTOPS this much in a long, long time, maybe a few years even, and at the time if you had asked me how many events would I play in the series, I would have probably guessed somewhere around 7 or 8 tournaments total.

Instead, here we are on Friday, nearing the end of the entire tournament series, and how many events have I played in total? Just one. How pathetic is that? And it's not pathetic of me -- it's pathetic of full tilt, as usual. I mean, it's not like I ran out of money or "broke even" one too many times. And it's not like I've been too busy, or just haven't been interested in playing poker after all on these days. Much the opposite -- I've sat at my pc probably all but one or two of the last nine nights since FTOPS XVII began and played in poker tournaments. Some of them with buyins as large or larger than the corresponding FTOPS event that night! The FTOPS tournaments, on an almost nightly basis, just do not stack up to what else is available out there for the mtt player to partake in.

It's almost like full tilt is going out of their way to make the nighttime events bad, and/or to put the good events at times when Americans with day jobs cannot make the games. I mean, the very first event of FTOPS XVII was the standard series-opening $216 nlh event, which I played that same night as my FTOPS post referred to above. I lasted not more than 90 minutes or so, at which point I managed to run 15 outs into top set that turned into a boat before I knew what hit me. It was a fine time, I enjoyed playing for some big money, and although I did not at all appreciate the setup hand I took it in stride and moved on to bigger and better things that night.

But since then? Look at the events at night so far after FTOPS Event #1:

There was Event #4 on Thursday night, the $535 HORSE event hosted by Svetlana Gromenkova, truly one of the top five worst HORSE players I have ever bumped into on my travels in online poker. I mean, you can't get it in behind more frequently and make poorer poker decisions than this biatch seems to do all the time, be it in sitngos, FTOPS or anywhere else I happen to run into her. Anyways, I tried one quick satellite to this event -- Gromenoka sucked me out like the horse that she is on the bubble -- but I've had my blood boiling several times previously in this event over the regoddamdiculous play even for $535, so I did not make much of an effort as the combination of the donkey game with the large buyin just makes this not all that attractive for a guy with my game to play.

Then Event #7 on Friday night? Stud-8. Again, I've been playing hi-lo longer than any other poker game out there, but the thought of chipping in $216 to a pool for a bunch of chasedonkeys to go nutso when they only have a decent draw at a decent hand for one-half the pot, and then counterfeit me and win, it's enough to make my eyes bulge out of their sockets. And let's not forget, host Aaron Bartley is perhaps the only numbskull on full tilt that even gives the lovely Svetlana a run for her money in terms of cluelessness. So that one was a no-go.

As usual, the geniuses at ftp did not run any events on Saturday or Sunday night -- far and away the prime time to play for anyone in the United States -- even though they have increased their FTOPS schedule to include not one, not two but three FTOPS events on each weekend day. And yet still nothing later than 6pm ET. Sheer brilliance. That's strikes through five days and 13 events of FTOPS, with only one tournament I actually attended to show for it -- me, a guy who has the money and the desire to play, was actually looking forward and anticipating FTOPS this time around, and who has played and won in every single poker game FTOPS spreads. It's unreal.

Then on to this week, where Monday started with the 1k buyin nlh event, a format which I again attempted exactly one time to satellite in to, but which otherwise is just not worth the buyin for a guy like me to play against some of the best competition on the site. Plus, I knew there would always be Tuesday night this week, which was? A $535 shootout tournament. 3-way shootout in fact. Something that only a true and total moron would ever pony up his hard earned money for. If I won $160 million in the lottery I wouldn't bother playing a 729-runner shootout at $535 a clip. No way no how, that's got to be the worst nighttime tournament in a whole schedule chock full of horrific events.

Finally this past Wednesday night saw FTOPS Event #22, which I had already seen was holdem and thus I figured finally I would get to play another event. Or not. Turns out it was a $322 rebuy. I mean, come on guys!! I'm the best rebuy tournament player I know bar none, and I would not even consider ponying up what it would likely cost to buy a fair chance in that event. Of course I logged in Thursday night as well, and of course it was $216 stud hi. One of the donkiest, most cards-driven games there is, a game where I know for a fact any fuckhole with any two pairs will call down through the river regardless of what any other board is showing or the action from the other players. Not even considering it, sorry.

And here we are. Before I am home tonight, FTOPS Event #27 will be underway. 27 events in to the FTOPS, again an FTOPS that I was anticipating highly and looking forward to participating in. And boooom, one event I've played, way back in Event #1. And on tap for tonight at 9pm ET? Razz. $322 a pop. What a fuckajoke.

And for all you smartasses out there who want to critique my willingness to play such a broad smattering of games, let's be clear about one thing: I would play a regular nlh tournament at almost any buyin below the 1k. I would play a 6-max nlh event at the same levels. I would play any pot-limit Omaha format of any kind -- hi-low or PLO -- at almost any buyin. I would play any rush version of nl or omaha in the formats I mentioned above. I would play any heads-up event in almost any game at almost any buyin level. I would play a knockout event of any of these games at almost any buyin below 1k. I would even play that shorthanded limit holdem event they've run several times as part of FTOPS in the recent past. Basically, there's only 7 or 8 types of tournaments I wouldn't participate in as part of the FTOPS, and they've managed to screw us Americans so badly that those 7 or 8 events are basically the nightly FTOPS schedule over the past week and a half. It's just unreal.

It's no wonder really that everyone on the planet already agrees that full tilt has utterly butchered their FTOPS brand. The powers that be with the FTOPS are Just Plain Clueless.

Woe is the FTOPS

What the hell did full tilt do to the FTOPS this time around? I mean, I guess it's inevitable that they would screw something up after running 850 of these series over the past couple of years, but damn sometimes I just cannot understand why people insist on fixing things that ain't broke.

Now, I'm too lazy to go back and look up the last several FTOPS schedules. But here's what I do know about FTOPS 1,000,000,000,000,000 that is currently running right now: there's barely anything for the good, hard-working American poker lovers to play. And that has most definitely never happened before.

Again without bothering to go and look up the details, I know I have played in upwards of 6 or 7 events in the FTOPS in prior runs of the tournament series. I specifically recall one of the FTOPS runs probably a good two years ago or so where I received four FTOPS baseball caps for cashing in four separate events. And I definitely recall other FTOPS series where I was debating playing in that night's event almost every single night, be it the $240 PLO knockout, $216 PLO8 freezeout, or even stud hi-lo on occasion as I recall.

And yet, somehow, this time around, I am going to play in a grand total of one FTOPS tournament. That's it. Granted, I missed Event #1 this time around due to fatigue, and that was my own choice and not something of course that I could ever blame on full tilt. But otherwise, how is it that I am playing online poker almost every night during the entire FTOPS series, but cannot for the life of me find a single event to play other than Tuesday night's $216 turbo mtt? Event #1 was last Wednesday night, the standard FTOPS-opening $216 nlh mtt, which as I mentioned I missed. But then Thursday night was a $500 shootout. $500 shootout? That's the best you can come up with over at full tilt, guys? Because -- and I don't care if you're a poker blogger, if you're me, or if you're Phil fuggin Ivey -- large mtt shootouts are not profitable poker. Period. Sure, somebody wins it every time you play it. But, unlike a general mtt where you can make some decent coin for finishing in, say, the top 50 or 100 spots in the field, in a shootout, you need to absolutely straight-out win your entire table, and then you have to sit at a new table comprised solely of people who were good enough to have just won their entire tables, and you have to win that table as well, just to make it to the final table where the real money begins, where you then get to face a full table of people who were good enough to win not only their starting table, but then their second table full of all people who also won their own starting tables. To the inexperienced winning three consecutive one-table sitngos may seem a lot easier than navigating your way through a field of 3000 donkeys in a regular nlh mtt. But take it from me, it's harder. Much, much harder. Even given all of the above, I still might've given it a shot, if the buyin wasn't $500. A $500 shootout for FTOPS Event #3? Major error.

Then they followed this up with last Friday night's limit holdem tournament. Just what I'm looking for -- a chasefest. And don't get me wrong, I understand that they have other events in the afternoons on those days, but for us working stiffs in the U.S. those are of course not doable, and ultimately in the past I always played the FTOPS on at least one if not both of those second and third nights of the series. This time around, I wouldn't consider it. And I know that $500 shootout is a new event for the FTOPS, a big mistake in my view. I didn't play over the weekend as I never do, and of course as usual FTOPS misses out on an opportunity to get the "family men" active on the weekend nights when they probably have the best opportunity of all for big fields. Why not just run a regular $100 or $200 nlh event? What about a $100 rebuy or something? Can I get anything on the weekend nights?

Then here starts Week 2 of the FTOPS, and I don't even remember what Monday night's event was, but I do recall that it blew. Tuesday night was the usual $216 turbo mtt, which I played but busted early from when my pocket 9s of course ran into pocket Queens from a guy who had raised at least 17 of the previous 5 hands before the flop. And then before logging off, I went ahead and looked with anticipation to see which other FTOPS events I would be playing this week. And you know what? It's none of them None! Wednesday night is the $322 rebuy, which at that buyin level just plain sucks for 99% of full tilt's user base. Thursday is I think Stud Hi. What a joke -- no "chase to two pairs" for me. Friday is the usual Razz event, which full tilt for some reason insists on carrying an increased buyin of $322 instead of the standard $216. And since I'm not a masochist chasemonkey peabrain who tires of getting dealt rolled up Kings in the only situation where I want nothing to do with them, you won't find me razzing it up either. And then that's it, just like that, FTOPS is over.

What the hell happened to the $216 O8 event that was in the evening early in the second week for the past umpteen hundred FTOPS series? Why is there not a $100 or even a $200 rebuy tournament, instead of this insistence on making that a $322 buyin? Why is there no knockout tournament anywhere in the evenings during the entire series?

I know that pokerstars has completely given the middle finger to Americans with their WCOOP, making every single event start in the middle of the afternoon New York time, which effectively shuts out the working-guy Americans entirely and unfortunately for pokerstars simply means that what they're really running is the WCOEP since the whole thing is primarily played by Euros. But in the past full tilt has distinguished itself among all other online poker sites by offering up a very attractive mix of games available in the weekday evenings four times a year, at buyin levels and at times that are actually accessible to the average, day job-having Americans who make up a big slice of their user base. This time around, full tilt seriously dropped the ball.

Now, in addition to offering far and away the best nightly tournament structures available anywhere in online poker, thanks to full tilt we can now look to UltimateBet as the site that also offers the best regular online poker series for normal red-blooded Americans with their UBOC. And if I'm full tilt, that is the saddest part of the whole debacle known as FTOPS MCMXLVIII.

Full Tilt Double Guarantees Week in Review

Well, double-guarantees week has come and gone on full tilt, and I am left to give my impressions of the whole experience.

In a word, it sucked. For me, anyways.

Perhaps I should re-phrase that. The promotion was, I am sure, a raging success for full tilt, as I regularly saw between 100,000 and 125,000 players logged on to the poker site all week long in the evenings. This, after usually averaging around 80k or so prior to this week. So in absolute traffic terms, doubling the guarantees was an absolute bonanza for business.

And it should be mentioned here again that I played a lot of mtt's during double guarantees week. And I mean a lot of em. And yet, I never even one time saw a single tournament that had any overlay at all, despite full tilt doubling the guarantee and never that I can almost ever recall attracting enough players to any mtt previously that it ended up doubling the stated guarantee. But whatever full tilt did to get the word out about the 2x Guarantees promotion, it worked, because the tournodonks came out of the woodwork. They flocked to full tilt mtt's this week like it was their job. That, and holding the late registration open for these tournaments for nearly a full hour after their stated start times, much like pokerstars has been doing for some time. I imagine that at least part of this promotion last week has a market-research bent to it, and that the full tilt marketing gurus will now spend some time huddling over the results, boiling things down to what they learned about their traffic by the conclusion of the promotion, and I would not be at all surprised to see full tilt soon announce that late registration will be kept open longer for all tournaments for the foreseeable future, mostly because I don't see why they wouldn't do that as long as there are people still willing to pay full price to enter these events even having missed as much as 10 or 15% of the total time in play in the tournament before they joined in. But anyways, one way or another the upshot here is that full tilt managed to increase their overall sit traffic tremendously -- I would venture to guess by 20-33% overall during the entirety of double guarantees week -- and they did so without even having to pay one red cent of tournament overlay, at least in what I saw along the way.

It also does not fail to escape me that double-guarantees week happened to come at the exact same time as Rush Poker debuted on full tilt. Give the new Rush games a couple of days to work out any kinks, and then right away bring in all the tournament donks and overlay chasers to the site with the double-guarantees promotion, prominently featuring promos for the All-New Rush Poker all over the site of course, and then let the two play off of each other. Get some of these tournodonks to start playing regular cash at full tilt on the Rush tables, and full tilt can literally completely transform the rake structure they can expect to earn from the site forever. Plain and simple. So this is another way in which I am sure the double-guarantee idea was a very successful one site-wide for full tilt.

So given all of the above, why did double guarantees week suck so bad? Because it literally attracted every tournament monkey who has ever watched a single episode of poker on ESPN or the Travel Channel to come out and try to nab some of the large coin available. And that is just so not my bread and butter when it comes to mtt play, and I was unable to successfully adjust during the short time of just one week of inflated tournament prize pools to benefit from this influx of donks.

I cannot tell you how many times I got essentially eliminated from a tournament this week by somebody who had absolutely no business whatsoever even being involved in the hand in question. I mean, guys calling preflop raises from me in early position, when holding a veritable monster like 53o and then flopping trips against my pocket Aces on a completely non-threatening J55 board. Or the inevitable monkey-caller with AK unimproved on the all-rags flop against my middle pair, then hitting one of his six outs after the money gets in. Or, there's always the Harringbot who feels so desperate with his chipstack that he calls my allin with Q7o preflop against my pocket Jacks and then (of course) flops the Queen that he obviously knew was coming all along. And, in addition to the plays like this, you've also invariably got to add in the suckouts that always go down in crowds like this as well, just mathematically speaking. I mean, when you are getting all the money in ahead 10 to 15 times a night at an average clip of maybe a 70% favorite -- this builds in all the times its my AK against the other guy's AQ or A9s, all the times I am allin preflop with Aces or Kings versus a lower pocket pair, and all the times my AK gets called by QJ or T9s as well -- the math dictates that you're going to take a lot of suckouts, many of which are going to be painful just given the nature of poker tournaments. Even if all stays to form and I win 70% of those chances, that means I am taking 4 or 5 potentially very stinging suckouts every night -- many of which when I am 80% or better to win -- and then multiply that by seven since it happened every single night of the past week, and the end result is that I am about as burned out on online mtt's right now as I ever get. The unique dynamic of getting all these largely inexperienced tournament monkeys together to play all night last week meant that, at least for me, it was exceedingly easy to exploit someone into a double up -- I must have amassed top-20 stacks in 8 or 9 different tournaments over the entirety of the past week -- but also very, very difficult to avoid getting donked hard by one of those same monkeys somewhere along the way.

So at the moment I am feeling a kind of mtt burnout that is normally only usually reserved with me for just after some very long, deep run in an mtt that had me playing the same game for many many hours over multiple days in a row. And in a way, I guess that's exactly what I did last week, with unfortunately nothing other than a few minimal cashes on full tilt to show for it. I don't think you'll be seeing me tonight in any true multi-table tournaments as I am going to need some time away from that structure after the past week. I may still donk around in some sngs, cash or maybe some turbo satellites -- as I recall the ultra-juicy FTOPS satellites had just started up again for FTOPS MMMMMMMMMDCMDCMDXMCDXMDCXMCDXMCDXMXDCIII coming -- but my mtt play is going to need a little breather here in order for me to recharge and to get the mtt hunger back that I know is so crucial for anyone who expects to make a deep run through a large field of players in a no-limit tournament.