The shuttering of Full Tilt’s American market has made ripples in the UK. Today, a televised poker tournament scheduled to begin in Cardiff stopped filming, because Full Tilt was unable to produce promised money to fund the tournament. Full Tilt Poker, based in Dublin, Ireland, was the event sponsor, and had promised to pay a guaranteed prize pool.
Six professional players, sponsored by Full Tilt, were unable to buy-in for $20,000, the entry fee.
“The money hadn’t come through for some of the players, basically the Full Tilt ones,” said Megan Stuart, director. “We would have been staging the tournament under false pretences had we carried on.”
The collapse of the event, and the sponsored, yet cashless, professional players speaks volumes of Full Tilt’s financial status. Due to the FBI’s legal actions against Full Tilt, the company is apparently cash strapped, without the ability to reimburse its sponsored players.
Last week, the FBI restored Full Tilt’s domain name, for the purpose of releasing funds to US customers requesting withdrawals. As expected, players rushed to withdraw money, while Full Tilt offered the following uneasy explanation: “Significant practical and legal impediments to returning funds to players in the immediate future. Full Tilt Poker has no accounting of the millions of dollars of player funds that were seized by the government.”
Preet Bharara, the attorney who originally filed against the four largest poker sites in the world, said, “No individual player accounts were ever frozen or restrained, and each implicated poker company has at all times been free to reimburse any player’s deposited funds.”
An apparent closedown of Full Tilt sponsorship does not speak well of the company’s current status, but with most of the cards still left in the deck, there are still no sure bets on any company’s future.