With the news earlier this week that Garden City Group, the administrators for the reimbursement of American players from the old Full Tilt Poker, will begin to accept applications for that payout, many U. S. players may be left wondering how to find out just how much they had on the site. Pokerfuse’s Michael Gentile presented a guide on how to go about that task and, as I had funds on the site, thought I would take you through the process as I did it myself.
First off, you don’t need to download the “new” Full Tilt Poker client if you are looking to find out your information. Although I hadn’t warmed up my old poker computer in quite some time, I was able to update the software through that old link and, after a few moments, was brought to the new welcome screen with the visages of Gus Hansen, Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan and Viktor ‘Isildur1’ Blom rather quickly. The next step was to remember all my pertinent log-in information (which I could) but, if you don’t remember such info, you can ask for an e-mail reminder of your log in info from Full Tilt Poker.
The next screen that I saw was one telling me that, due to the factor I was in the United States, I couldn’t play for real money on the site (not surprising). After closing that window, my next step was to head to the “Requests” tab at the top of the lobby page. Finding the “Account History (Web)” section, I was off to remind myself just how much money I had on the old Full Tilt Poker.
This is where it began to get a bit complicated, but I soldiered through it. Once the browser launched with the “Account History” window, I had to select all of the options available. Transactions, promotional payments, real money balance, tournament dollars and tickets…these were just a few of the tabs that were indicated. You also must put under the “Time Range” indicator on the window a start date and the end date of 4/15/11 (now infamously known as “Black Friday”).
Once the request has been submitted, you are informed that you will receive an e-mail that will have the required information that you have requested. It only took a couple of minutes for that e-mail to arrive and, once I had that information, I could move on to the next step in my informational recovery.
After closing the original “Account History” webpage, I once again had to go back to the Full Tilt Poker lobby and repeat the “Requests” step. After clicking on “Account History” under the “Requests” tab, I was once again whisked to the “Account History” webpage. This time, however, there was a new “Download” tab that provided the information I requested as a ZIP Excel .xls file. By tapping that tab, you get the ZIP file of the requested information regarding your Full Tilt Poker account.
For those that don’t use Excel, viewing the information can be done in a couple of different ways. Gentile suggests downloading a free viewer from Microsoft, but I found that I had another program on my old computer that would open up the file adequately. Once that was complete, I had the first step complete on my trek to receiving my money back from Garden City Group and Full Tilt Poker.
This process is important to complete soon because American players looking for a refund will only have a short window to proceed with the remittance process. Beginning on September 16, Garden City Group will only accept repayment petitions until November 15. Thus, having the accurate information (as well as having it in a physical form) is critical in not delaying payment for American players. It is not known at this time if players will be reimbursed in full or if they will receive anything for the miscellaneous items that they collected (tournament tickets, medals, etc.) while playing on Full Tilt Poker.
Overall, the process is pretty simple to find out what your balance was on Full Tilt Poker as of April 2011 and kudos to Gentile and the Pokerfuse crowd for explaining the process concisely. Now if the remittance process can only go as smoothly, then perhaps the online poker community can begin to put the dark cloud of “Black Friday” behind it somewhat.