We have got to be near the end of this saga, don’t we?
The Garden City Group (GCG), the firm appointed by the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) to serve as the Claims Administrator for frozen/seized Full Tilt Poker funds, announced Monday that professional players on Full Tilt are now eligible for reimbursement. This should signal the one of the last, if not the last, round of payments in the Full Tilt adventure that is now more than three years old.
In an update on its site, FullTiltPokerClaims.com, the GCG wrote:
It has been determined that players designated by Full Tilt Poker (“FTP”) as “professionals”, other than Team Full Tilt Players, will be able to submit Petitions for Remission to recover the portion of their account balance that is not attributable to compensation provided by FTP or Affiliate revenue. If you are a professional player, you will be able to submit a Petition for the portion of your account balance that relates to poker transactions, as long as you meet the eligibility criteria.
Members of Team Full Tilt are still ineligible.
E-mails were sent on Monday to former Full Tilt players in the U.S. who meet the criteria; they have until September 3rd to submit a Petition for Remission on the website. GCG is requiring professional players to submit documentation to show how much of their balance came from professional transactions. Documentation could include “emails or other online messages, written correspondence, screen shots, player account histories and bank statements.”
This latest update is slightly different than another professional player update issued back on November 15th, 2013. That update also said that professional players were determined to be eligible for reimbursement, but those “players who were playing with funds from FTP or who were compensated by FTP to play on the FTP site” were not. Basically, if you were playing poker for a living, that was fine, but if you got money from Full Tilt Poker as part of your professional playing (sponsored “Red Pros,” in particular, would have fallen into this category), you were out of luck. With this latest update, all pros, aside from Team Full Tilt members, are eligible, though they still cannot claim any money that was paid to them by Full Tilt Poker. They can only get back money that came from their own deposits or regular poker play.
The most recent round of payments was sent out in June. In that round, approximately 3,500 payments were made totaling around $15 million. Many of those payments went to another group of Full Tilt customers who, like pros, had their eligibility status up in the air for a while. Affiliates were not originally deemed eligible to receive reimbursement, but the Poker Players Alliance (PPA) went to bat for them and eventually the GCG agreed that affiliates could be paid. Like the pro players, the GCG would only pay back money earned from poker play, not money made as the result of an affiliate business. A problem resulted, though, when reimbursements were calculated. Because Full Tilt’s records did not differentiate between affiliate payments received as a player on rakeback plan and payments received from Full Tilt as an affiliate business, most affiliates found that the numbers GCG was reporting were too low.
The PPA talked to the GCG again and it was determined that affiliates could receive their rakeback payments, but not money derived from their affiliate business.
