Full Tilt Payments to US Players to be 'soon'

Good news for former Full Tilt players from the US as a Justice Department claims administrator has said that players will start receiving their money soon. There's around $150 million owed to players based in the States and the whole affair has of course been going on since problems began back in April 2011 as Tile left the US market. A well documented settlement with the government and a buyout by PokerStars means that the company continues to do business however as bank accounts and assets were froze, problems paying US players arose. The garden City Group was handed the task of organizing the repayment of player balances and it appears that we are about to see the first payments made. A statement on the website says, "The claims process will begin shortly. Once the process begins, GCG will email instructions on how to complete an online claim to all potentially eligible claimants identified by GCG utilizing data supplied by FTP. GCG ... has completed the review of data provided by Full Tilt Poker. It has been determined that the calculation formula to be used … for the remission process will be based on players' final balances with FTP as of April 15, 2011."

This will be of some consolation to former Tilt players, however the indefinite date will not help matters. There are also questions by many players over the way that this has all been handled, and many are asking that why, if the DoJ had the money to pay back Tilt players (which it did courtesy of Stars) then did they appoint the Garden City Group in the first place. Why not simply open up the Full Tilt site for a few weeks and allow players to make a regular withdrawal request and nothing more? There are of course many theories as to why things have been done this way and it's not for us to speculate but it does seem the long way to go about things, whichever way you look at it.