FTP just went down... Hard.

[andy-akb]

I guess this is where we differ. I've never understood why people feel it's a realistic scenario that an investor will swoop in and contribute funds to pay debts that were effectively borrowed in order to burn. What would this individual be buying? Certainly not a brand; it was seriously tarnished even before this. Not a player pool...a not-insignificant percentage of FTP players are just interested in getting their cash and moving it somewhere else or getting out of poker altogether until rosier times. There are no other assets to speak of.

The software, the Rush Poker patent.

Yea, a lot of the regs want to cash out, but they cant. I guarantee that if an investor came in and allowed things to go back to normal [i.e. fast cashouts] and provided new management, then more people would stick around. Further, even if all regs leave, that will still leave a huge player base and the games will be incredibly soft. At that point, if regs feel like their money is safe, which it likely would be under new management and with a significant investment, then many would return to play this super fishy player pool. Even after all this stuff has gone down, FT was still almost 3x larger than party poker. To say that they dont have a player base to invest in is foolish. They have a huge player pool even if thousands of regs leave, and that is worth a lot of money under the right management and as Boost said, they have valuable patents that are also worth money to other site operators.

There are definitely investors out there that will buy the company, they just need the right terms and FT has been unwilling to accept those terms, but this very well could be what was needed to get them to accept a new majority stakeholder in the company.