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1. Full Tilt Poker 2018 Champion
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3. Full Tilt Poker 2018

• The full list of Team Full Tilt will be published before Full Tilt Poker re-launches on November 6, 2012. This means that Full Tilt Poker’s online poker gaming community can start playing with famous poker pros again, interacting with them and learning important poker tips, strategies, and tricks from them.
• Up To £30 Full Tilt Poker Android Tournaments In Free Bets - New UK & Ireland customers only. Min Deposit: £10. First deposit matched up to £30. 1 x wagering at odds of 1.75+ to unlock Free Bet. Credit Card, Debit Card & PayPal deposits only.
• Full Tilt Poker Special Offers 2018-2019 When it comes to special offers and deals Full Tilt Poker is quite impossible to beat. As the original creators of fast-folding poker, Full Tilt Poker were fully aware that other operators had caught up with them in this respect, during the hiatus they were forced to take.

Table Of Contents

One of the most iconic — and perhaps most infamous — brands in poker will become a thing of the past on Feb. 25.

That's the reported date on which PokerStars will shelve Full Tilt Poker, its former arch rival, for good. The news was first released by Pokerfuse and is confirmed by a FAQ page on PokerStars' website detailing some of the minutiae of the move for its remaining FTP players.

Those players will essentially just be migrating over to the main skin of the network, so there won't be much meaningful change in their playing experience.

'Our commitment to improving PokerStars software and the PokerStars customer experience in recent years has limited the amount of focus and resources we could apply to the evolution of Full Tilt,' the company stated. 'We feel it is time to consolidate brands so that everyone has access to the newest features and most innovative games which are available exclusively on PokerStars.'

A Rich History...

Full Tilt Poker was not one of the early sites to market, dealing its first virtual cards in 2004.

However, co-founder Ray Bitar teamed up with some of the biggest names in the industry. The likes of Phil Ivey, Howard Lederer, Chris Ferguson and Mike Matusow were behind the brand, and their celebrity, combined with an aggressive marketing push, led to huge success for the site.

'Learn, chat and play with the pros.'

That ubiquitous slogan, along with the trademark black and white commercials creatively utilizing the site's immense roster of sponsored pros, beckoned countless thousands of players to give Full Tilt a try. The brand became a world leader, trailing only PokerStars in a raw numbers.

But where PokerStars laid claim to the biggest quantity, Full Tilt could credibly claim to house the best quality of poker in the world.

The highest stakes games in the world usually ran there, including monstrous and legendary games as high as $500/$1,000 blinds on the famed Rail Heaven table. Patrik Antonius, Viktor Blom, Hac and Di Dang, Gus Hansen, Ivey and more made Rail Heaven their favored battleground, which in turn made it the greatest place for fans to watch six-figure pots trading hands on the regular.

Correspondingly large pot-limit Omaha tables eventually produced the biggest pots in online poker history.

The software, too, was almost as celebrated as the quality of the games. Colorful avatars and lively animations made for an entertaining experience for the casual player. A fun MTT schedule gave tournament grinders tons of options at every price point and let players aspire to one day earn a custom avatar by virtue of winning a Full Tilt Online Poker Series event.

Considered industry leaders in many respects, the FTP team birthed innovations like fast-fold poker — now a mainstay almost everywhere — and rolled out creative ideas like Irish poker that were later adapted in some fashion by PokerStars.

It all made for a high-quality and incredibly popular product. And it all came to a crashing halt in 2011.

...But a Marred One, Too

The machinations of Black Friday dealt harsh blows at many levels of the poker industry, with the ripple effects being felt to this day.

However, perhaps the most shocking development in the aftermath was the revelation that Full Tilt's accounts were more than $300 million underwater. The company had $60 million cash on hand but player balances amounted to $390 million, with $150 million of that owed to U.S. players.

After repeated assurances from company reps that players would be paid, the fact of the matter was the company simply didn't have the money to make good on that promise.

Luckily for everyone involved, PokerStars stepped in and acquired Full Tilt's assets, with part of the deal stipulating they'd make the players whole in the process.

Entire books could be written about the ordeal and the fallout thereafter, all of which is to say the whole thing is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say some former FTP brass paid millions in penalties, others became pariahs, friends became enemies and countless poker players everywhere were left with sour tastes in their mouths regarding a once beloved company.

Relaunch and Merger

Full Tilt Poker relaunched in November 2012, but it quickly became a shell of its former self. FTOPS returned, and high-stakes action even got rolling, but the site predictably failed to regain its former glory.

As the operator slid in the worldwide rankings, company brass attempted some moves that left many in the industry scratching their heads. Rake was bumped up in many spots, rewards were cut in others, table maxes were changed from six to five players in some games and many high-stakes offerings were removed from the client altogether.

The result?

A dive in traffic as unhappy players left the site. That was in August 2015.

Early the next year, decision-makers at parent company Amaya opted to pull the plug on Full Tilt being a standalone operator, migrating the players into the same pool with PokerStars. What would have once been monumental, industry-shaking news, barely registered as a blip on the poker radar, the surest sign of all that the glory days of Full Tilt were far in the past and never likely to rekindle.

Seemingly Little Chance of Return

After the merger, PokerNews spoke to industry expert Chris Grove to get his take on the functional end of the once-proud brand. He pointed to the decline of the international online poker market as a whole as a big reason for the decision to migrate the players to PokerStars.

'In a world where Full Tilt found a unique niche or footing, or in a world where online poker continued to expand, I think we certainly could have seen the two sites continue on separately,' he said. 'Only when it became clear that Full Tilt wasn't finding that footing did a merger start to seem like a matter of 'when' more than 'if.'

With online poker moving toward a regulated future in the U.S., that meant there could have been buyers interested in acquiring Full Tilt. They'd get to avoid the headache of constructing software from scratch, to say nothing of the brand's name recognition stateside. Grove estimated PokerStars could rake in between $10 million and $50 million with such a move.

Of course, that would require interest by the selling party as well, and that never seemed much of a possibility. Poker Industry PRO reported being told by a company rep the software wasn't for sale ($), and nothing that happened in the intervening years has made that appear to be mere lip service.

The most likely case going forward would appear to be Full Tilt Poker simply collects dust in a virtual PokerStars storage room. In one sense, having your once-chief rival neatly tucked away on some backup storage drive is the ultimate power move.

In another, though, it's the most sad, meek ending imaginable to a company that took the poker world by storm more than 15 years ago.

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Everybody remembers the story of Chris Moneymaker parlaying a $39 PokerStars satellite into World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event glory back in 2003.

That miraculous win in poker’s World Championship sparked the game’s famous “boom” era when grade schoolers and their grandparents alike dreamed of bluffing top pros and dragging monster pots.

Visit any college dorm or suburban living room back then, and chances are good you’d find folks huddled around the computer grinding out hands on their favorite online poker room.

But what if I told you that during the fateful poker boom days — which spanned 2003 through 2006 — most Americans hit the virtual felt at PokerStars’ chief rival, Full Tilt Poker?

Launched in 2004 by a cadre of accomplished card sharps, Full Tilt Poker immediately staked its name as the online poker room of choice.

Boasting colorful animated avatars, flashy onscreen graphics, and a powerful poker software engine created by Chris “Jesus” Ferguson — the 2000 WSOP Main Event champ with a Ph.D. in computer science — Full Tilt Poker had it all.

Almost overnight, the nascent website attracted a deep stable of sponsored pros, many of whom were brought in as pseudo-investors thanks to small-percentage equity stakes. Anyone who played poker back then will likely feel a funny sense of nostalgia looking at this iconic photograph, which features Team Full Tilt in all its glory.

Shot in black and white along Fremont Street in Downtown Las Vegas, the promo pic showcases a who’s who of poker talent at the peak of their powers. Ferguson and his signature black cowboy hat strides purposefully toward the camera, flanked by legendary figures like Phil Ivey, Howard Lederer, Erik Seidel, John Juanda, and Jennifer Harman.

Between them, Team Full Tilt owned dozens of WSOP gold bracelets, tens of millions of dollars in tournament earnings, and untold adulation from the rank and file of poker’s rapidly expanding fan base.

Full Tilt Poker Hits the Big Time

Before long, the crew could be found appearing regularly on hit TV shows like High Stakes Poker and Poker After Dark. In a typical scene shown here in this Poker After Dark highlight, members of Team Full Tilt usually found themselves enjoying the endgame of a heated match after dispatching pros representing rival sites.

For a long time, it appeared as though Full Tilt Poker and its world-famous representatives could do no wrong.

Young guns like Viktor Blom and Tom Dwan transformed the site’s high-stakes cash games into poker’s most prestigious arena, with “railbirds” logging on just to sweat the six-figure pots whizzing to and fro as pixels on the screen.

And thanks to tournament series like the Full Tilt Online Poker Series (FTOPS), the site gave rise to modern-day Moneymaker tales when satellite entrants like Jerry Yang and Peter Eastgate claimed the WSOP Main Event title.

The law made operating an online gambling business a federal crime, and almost immediately, rival site PartyPoker picked up stakes and withdrew from the American market altogether.

Full Tilt Poker’s gravy train was too rich to give up that easily, though, and like chief rival PokerStars, the company decided to test the feds by staying stateside and serving American players in spite of the law.

That decision seemed like a good idea for the next five years or so, as Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars established a dual monopoly over the American online poker marketplace. In the years to come, anybody in the US playing online poker likely had an account on one, if not both, of these opposing titans.

But the house of cards came crumbling down on April 15 of 2011, a date known today as “Black Friday” amongst poker people. On that day, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seized the domain names for Full Tilt Poker, Pokerstars, and Ultimate Bet, while issuing indictments for the sites’ corporate leaders.

The Long Arm of the Law Comes Calling

Just like that, the lights went out for America’s online poker industry, leaving thousands of players and hundreds of millions of dollars in the proverbial lurch.

You can read about the details behind Black Friday in an in-depth profile by PokerNews, but suffice it to say, April 15, 2011, marked the end of the road for Full Tilt Poker.

That might have been the end of the road for the site itself, but as it turned out, Full Tilt Poker had far more serious scandals to come.

While its main competitor PokerStars set to work paying back player accounts almost immediately and settling up with anybody who had a balance on the site when it was seized, Full Tilt Poker found itself unable to make good.

As it turned out, the site’s higher-ups — many of whom were the very same players proudly repping the site’s famous patch during the glory days – had made a disastrous gamble of their own.

Rather than segregating player funds in a separate bank account — thus ensuring every dollar deposited by players remained easily accessible for withdrawal purposes — Full Tilt Poker essentially used that money as a slush fund of sorts.

Top pros like Ferguson and Ivey received regular “dividend” payments topping seven figures for their sponsorship duties, but the dough came from player deposits instead of the site’s operating funds.

The feds declared Full Tilt Poker to be a Ponzi scheme, with executives using player deposits to line their pockets, all while knowing full well they couldn’t pay back every user if a “run on the bank” ever occurred.

What followed was one of the most disappointing and distasteful episodes in poker history, with players worldwide waiting several years to receive their hard-earned money via a lengthy restitution process.

That process was finally completed in 2016, thanks to intervention by PokerStars which saw the site purchase Full Tilt Poker’s assets and repay players.

From there, Full Tilt Poker has been consigned to history’s scrapheap, nothing more than a monument to the greed and hubris of a few avaricious pros.

Full Tilt Poker 2018 Champion

But while the site itself is no more, the men and women who once proudly proclaimed themselves to be Team Full Tilt live on today.

If you clicked buttons on the once-dominant poker platform back in the day, or you’re simply curious as to what happens when stars see their light dimmed, you might be wondering what happened to high-profile pros like Lederer, Ferguson, Ivey, and the rest.

Full Tilt Poker Net

As it turns out, the path from playing poker professionally to running a Ponzi scheme and getting caught up by the government takes many forms. The most infamous Team Full Tilt figures have led wildly different lives since the site’s dissolution, as you’ll learn in our “Where Are They Now?” biographical entries below.

Chris “Jesus” Ferguson

When the Full Tilt Poker craze was at its peak, a mild-mannered math whiz became the face of the franchise.

And for good reason.

After laying claim to the most prestigious title in all of poker — winning the WSOP Main Event in 2000 — the man they call “Jesus” went on to win four more gold bracelets over the next three summers.

As a side gig of sorts to his poker superstar persona, Ferguson also helped to build the software platform later dubbed “TiltWare” while founding Full Tilt Poker.

While his exact role with the company was deemed “Director,” Ferguson essentially oversaw the rapid rise of the site from fledgling online poker room to the most prominent place to play worldwide.

For that reason, when everything came crashing down and the Ponzi scheme was exposed, the majority of poker fans out there laid the blame at Ferguson’s feet. He immediately became persona non grata in the poker world, and after amassing hundreds of live tournament cashes between 1993 and 2010, Ferguson entered a self-imposed exile.

Just like that, a man who made himself a mainstay of the tournament circuit vanished into the ether.

Ferguson eventually reached a financial settlement with the DOJ, without admitting any wrongdoing, but he was basically a ghost between 2010 and 2016.

Howard Lederer, his counterpart on top of the Full Tilt Poker food chain, had previously issued a public apology (more on this below) for the player funds fiasco days before the WSOP began, so this development may have made Ferguson more comfortable.

In any event, the poker masses were none too pleased, especially after Ferguson declined to comment when asked about the situation by members of the poker media.

Instead, he offered a rote answer by repeating,

“I’m just here to play poker.”

And while he may not have cashed in that first $10,000 buy-in Stud event, Ferguson came to play in 2016. By summer’s end, he had compiled ten cashes across the spectrum of buy-ins and variants, including several deep runs and even a final table performance.

All the while, poker players subjected Ferguson to a steady stream of insults, nasty looks, and other signs of their displeasure.

This negativity prompted fellow six-time WSOP bracelet winner Layne Flack to tell PokerNews that Ferguson was getting a bum rap from the public lynch mob.

“Chris Ferguson has done a lot of great things for poker.

He’s a standup guy, and all the decisions made by Full Tilt Poker don’t fall on him. I firmly believe he didn’t take one dime from anybody.

It’s just not in his nature. It’s more in his nature to give everything to everybody, than take anything from anybody, and that’s a fact.”

A great debate ensued, with a small minority of the poker world insisting that Ferguson — never known for being greedy, or even especially interested in the corporate machinations of his company — was in the dark about all those millions in stolen player funds.

But the majority of folks out there demonized “Jesus,” blaming him for their loss of online poker income and years of uncertainty regarding their Full Tilt Poker bankrolls.

He even nabbed another gold bracelet in the € 1,650 Pot-Limit Omaha Hi-Lo 8 or Better at the WSOP-E.

The run was enough to take home WSOP Player of the Year honors that year, an award which obviously sparked another round of debates about Ferguson’s rightful place in poker.

Just before the 2018 WSOP kicked off, Ferguson finally did what Full Tilt Poker players everywhere desperately wanted, issuing a public apology for everything that went wrong with the site:

“I’d like to take this brief opportunity to address the poker community which I love and have been part of for a long time. I deeply regret not being able to prevent Black Friday from happening. After Black Friday, I worked relentlessly to ensure that all players got paid back, and I sincerely apologize that it took as long as it did.

I also realize it has taken me a long time to make any sort of public statement and I appreciate my fans and the poker community as a whole for the patience and support. One day, the Full Tilt Poker story will be told, and like many of you, I look forward to that day.

I hope to see you all at the World Series of Poker this summer. Thank you and good luck.”

Last year, Ferguson once again proved his poker mettle, cashing 18 times on the WSOP felt while making several final tables.

Howard Lederer

If Ferguson was the public face of Full Tilt Poker, “The Professor of Poker” was the man behind the curtain.

Lederer ran the shop, serving on the board of directors and devising the dividend payment scheme that ultimately doomed the site. Whether or not he knowingly defrauded players is another matter, but at the very least, Lederer played loose and fast with the finances while believing a “run on the bank” would never occur.

It did, of course, and like his fellow poker legend, Lederer disappeared from public life altogether. After scoring 106 live tournament cashes between 1987 and 2011 — including two WSOP gold bracelets — Lederer wasn’t seen at the poker table whatsoever until 2016.

In 2012, however, it was Lederer who broke the proverbial ice, coming out of hiding to give a now-infamous interview with PokerNews titled “The Lederer Files.” As you can see in this clip, a sweaty, nervous Lederer remained evasive and unrepentant, essentially blaming CEO Ray Bitar for any misdeeds that happened to occur.

The fallout from that disastrous interview was so severe that Lederer retreated back into exile, only reappearing in 2016 after PokerStars rescued Full Tilt Poker by purchasing the site and repaying players.

That summer, Lederer submitted a written apology to the poker world, absolving himself of responsibility nonetheless:

“I am writing to apologize to everyone in the poker community, especially to all the players who had money on Full Tilt Poker on April 15, 2011. When Full Tilt Poker closed in 2011, there was a shortfall in funds, a distressed sale to recover those funds, and a long delay in repaying players.

Throughout this period, there was little explanation for the delay, and no apology. Players felt lied to. They trusted the site, and they trusted me, and I didn’t live up to that trust.

I take full responsibility for Full Tilt’s failure to protect player deposits leading up to Black Friday. The shortfall in player deposits should never have happened. I should have provided better oversight or made sure that responsible others provided that oversight.”

Lederer then jumped into the $10,000 Deuce-to-Seven Single Draw World Championship event at the WSOP, all while 2012 Main Event winner Greg Merson used Twitter to urge fellow players to “slow-roll” their nemesis at every available turn.

Lederer failed to cash in that event, and despite sporadic appearances at the WSOP in intervening years, he has yet to register a live cash since Full Tilt Poker collapsed.

Annie Duke

As Lederer’s sister, Duke was officially signed to a sponsorship deal with Ultimate Bet, another online poker room which fell apart over a “Super User” cheating scandal.

But while she wasn’t an official employee of Full Tilt Poker, Duke played a significant role in legitimizing the site via interviews and public appearances.

Once thought of as the most accomplished woman in the game — thanks to a WSOP gold bracelet win in 2004 and a subsequent “Tournament of Champions” victory — Duke also withdrew from the tournament circuit in 2011.

But her exit from poker had its beginnings even before that, as Duke appeared on The Celebrity Apprentice in 2009. Competing against the likes of Dennis Rodman and Khloé Kardashian, Duke wound up finishing second to Joan Rivers in the reality show competition.

By 2012, with the Full Tilt Poker and Ultimate Bet scandals still lingering, Duke attempted to launch a live tournament series called the Epic Poker League (EPL).

Full Tilt Poker 2018

Serving as the commissioner, Duke oversaw the EPL’s operations, giving interviews and appearing at tournaments to drum up interest for the “pro’s only” league.

After only three EPL events, however, the league’s parent company was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Fittingly, Duke’s demise vis a vis the EPL involved wanton misuse of company funds, fraudulent claims to players about incentives and prizes, and rampant unpaid debts.

By 2013, with her reputation already in shambles, a series of leaked audiotapes appeared to show that Duke was one of the so-called “Super Users” who had access to opponents’ hole cards while playing on Ultimate Bet.

At the time, Duke issued public denial of those claims, contending that her access to other players’ hole cards was strictly a technical matter and not one she exploited for personal gain:

“The release of this audio has spurred accusations and I want to make it clear that I have never used a tool on a delay or otherwise that gave me or anyone else access to hole cards for use during real money play nor was I aware that such a tool existed until the scandal broke.”

Despite the denials, Duke was no longer welcome among the poker populace, so she made an abrupt career change by becoming a “life coach.”

Touring the public speaking circuit, Duke used her previous experience as a poker champion to offer members of the corporate class advice on reading people, making sound decisions, and managing risk.

Last year, Duke released a book entitled “Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts” (2018), which includes vapid pablum of the following sort:

“How that ended up turning out that one time shouldn’t actually have any effect on whether the decision is good or not. The decision is good in absence of whether it gets caught or whether it doesn’t

This is the problem of resulting: what happens is that now we take this bad outcome, we think it’s a signal for the decision quality, and then we’re going to actually change the way that we make decisions in the future, based on this one outcome.

There’s too much luck in life to do that.”

Conclusion

Whether you believe the men and women behind Full Tilt Poker were criminal masterminds bent on stealing from players or simply poker pros in over their head while running a global corporation is a matter of personal preference.

Obviously, the folks who had their hard-earned bankrolls frozen for several years based on financial malfeasance will lean toward the former.

But even if Ferguson, Lederer, and Duke had no idea what the accountants were doing with player funds, the buck stops with them as public ambassadors and founders of the company.

Knowing that both Lederer and Duke are essentially non-entities in the poker world circa 2019 should provide some comfort, but Ferguson’s return to the WSOP bracelet winner’s stage still stings.

Hopefully, one day, the full truth about who knew what, and when they knew it, will be exposed for the world to see.

Until that day comes, however, poker players everywhere are left to wonder exactly what happened behind the scenes at one of online poker’s signature sites.