For well over two years, former US Full Tilt Poker players have waited for their money. Some of these grinders are even owed $1 million or more! Now it finally looks as if players might finally get their money back.
The Garden City Group, which has been tasked with making the payouts, claims that they’re very close to returning funds. It’s unclear exactly what day this will happen, but Garden City says that payouts should start being delivered by the “end of the week.”
When PokerStars purchased Full Tilt for $731 million last year, this amount covered $184 million that was owed to Americans. This being said, many US players expected their money quickly. But people started getting worried when months passed by with no payouts being made. However, the wait looks to be over with Garden City Group ready to make transactions.
An estimated 1.3 million Americans are owed money from the old Full Tilt Poker. Noted pro Blair Hinkle is one of these people, and he’s still due over $1 million from an FTOPS Main Event victory. There are plenty of other pros who are owed fortunes as well.
As for Full Tilt, they were busted along with PokerStars, Absolute Poker and UB Poker by the US Department of Justice on April 15th, 2011 (Black Friday). Just two months after this, they lost their license when it was revealed that that they didn’t have enough funds to cover player deposits.
When Full Tilt went down, they owed players $330 million, over half of which included US player deposits. For a while, many people wondered if they’d ever see their funds again. Then PokerStars bought FTP from the US DOJ and quickly allowed international players to get their money back. Now it looks as if the US government will finally pay the rest of the players.