FTP players contacted by French magazine

Eric Bianchi
October 25, 2011
2 Comments

Full Tilt PokerA website linked to Full Tilt Poker’s latest chance at a knight in shining armor has been surveying players ahead of the site ever coming back on the radar. A poster on 2+2 from Poker-Red.com, who broke the story, has confirmed that a co-worker was contacted by French magazine LivePoker. During the phone call the worker, who has some “serious money in FTP”, was asked a number of random questions including:

• What poker room are you playing right now in?
• How much money do you have stuck in FTP?
• Would you play in FTP again?
• What were your usual cashout-deposit habits?

Then it got interesting.

Changing direction, the questions then focused on “a spreading rumor” that FTP would reopen in several weeks, and three options were given. These were:

1. Investing part of their funds in company shares. Afterwards, players would be able to sell their shares back to FTP and therefore get all their funds back.
2. Cashout all their account balance with a PENALTY, which would mean a percentage of the whole balance. There is no information on how much this percentage would be.
3. Small cashouts that would unlock throughout time. FTP wouldn’t charge anything for a player to recover their funds but it would take around a year.

Rik Klein Entink also tweeted that as well as Spanish, Dutch players have been contacted and rumors point to them contacting the players with the biggest bank-rolls. It suggests they have access to some kind of FTP database of players and it’s not much of a surprise that LivePoker has links to Groupe Bernard Tapie. The magazine owner, George Djen, founded FullFun Company who recently partnerned with the French knight to set up the International Stadium Poker Tour.

If the rumors that players are being contacted are true, it would insinuate the claims made by FTP that an acquisition agreement was signed with Tapie’s group could well be true. Out of the three possible player outcomes, the third one is likely to be the best way to get money back and we’d expect a large proportion of players to jump on this one. We can only assume that Tapie doesn’t have a true figure on how much money players have in the company as choosing the number three would end up costing him a lot of money within the next year and he’s be in deep, deep merde.

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