With Full Tilt Poker receiving new legs to stand on courtesy of PokerStars, poker pro Barry Greenstein has come out and said that he has every intention of paying back the $400,000 he owes to the online poker company from a few years ago.
In a thread that was posted at TwoPlusTwo.com last week, the Team Pokerstars pro went on record saying that he always had intentions of paying back the money in full but has shied away from doing so because of the situation the online poker site was embroiled in since the hammer of Black Friday turned the online poker world upside its head.
But now that PokerStars has acquired the assets of Full Tilt, Greenstein is coming forward to make his intentions known. “I was always going to have to pay whoever owned Full Tilt,” he said in the aforementioned TwoPlusTwo.com thread.
“Clearly, PokerStars will own Full Tilt in a few days or a little longer, and finally I will know who to pay. I’m curious if they will try to collect from anyone else.”
Ah, yes. Intentional or not, that last line from Greenstein may have been some sort of response to questions by a lot of players on whether high-stakes players with alleged debts to FTP will repay their loans now that Full Tilt is on the mend.
A number of Full Tilt pros are said to also have loans from the company, which Groupe Bernard Tapie attorney Behnam Dayanim said back in February amounted to a figure “between $10 and $20 million”. While no official list has been released – we doubt that there will be – Dayanim singled out Greenstein, Phil Ivey, Layne Flack, David Benyamine, and Erick Lindgren as players with outstanding debts to the company.
At that time, the GBT attorney said that these pros have “not yet expressed a willingness to pay their debts”. But now that Greenstein has come out and said that he’s forking over the dough, it would be interesting to see if other pros follow his lead and clear the books on whatever debts they may or may not have on the company.
