Developing: PokerStars to Buy Full Tilt Poker?

I remember a little over a year ago pulling together a lengthy feature article for a poker magazine for which I spent several weeks researching and interviewing players and industry figures regarding the “cold war” between online poker’s then-superpowers PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker.

The article was primarily focused on poker television shows and how top players representing the two sites were unable to compete against one another because the sites wouldn’t allow it. Most of the players I talked to hated the fact that they couldn’t play against one another on the shows.

Seemed kind of a one-sided thing, actually, with Stars being perfectly willing to let the FTP guys onto their shows, but FTP being less interested in such desegregation. Meanwhile, the shows’ producers (with whom I also spoke) had no restrictions regarding players -- that is, they certainly “cast” the shows, but didn’t follow any guidelines about not picking players based on which site they represented.

The due date for the article was April 15, 2011. No shinola. I managed to submit it a few days early before heading down to Lima, Peru for the LAPT event. That’s where I’d be when Black Friday happened. I knew shortly after hearing the news that Friday afternoon that my article had instantly become anachronistic, something I wrote a little about here a couple of months afterward in a post titled “From the Annals of Bad Timing.”

I was reminded of all that this morning amid this rumor-slash-news regarding PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker. Let’s back up a couple of days first.

“Recently heard some very promising news regarding full tilt,” tweeted Dan “jungleman” Cates this past Sunday afternoon. “Can't share it because it's confidential, but things looking very good :)”

Cates, of course, has a particular interest in all things Full Tilt Poker, given how he reportedly had somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 million in his account when Black Friday struck a little over a year ago. Stories since then have suggested he may have sold a good portion of that balance, but obviously he’d still be one to take a sincere interest in the fate of FTP.

Then early this morning, before the sun rose here on the east coast, a brand-new poster at Two Plus Two named “PS<3FTP” provocatively started a thread in the News, Views, and Gossip forum titled “Big News: PokerStars Purchases FTP(?)”

The brief post declared that Stars “has reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to buy FTP.” Additional bullet points include players getting “refunded 100%” as well as “both sites back online.” (The latter seems an odd thing to say as only one of the two sites is currently offline.) “Expect more news today,” is the signoff.

Moderator NoahSD (formerly of Subject:Poker) correctly responded with cynicism, deleting the thread, but reinstated it after “a number of inside sources” told him there might be something to the report. So the thread remains, with posts being added at a clip of a couple hundred per hour -- none containing any additional news thus far, natch.

About four hours after the post appeared, Alex Dreyfus, CEO of ChiliPoker, tweeted an unambiguous declaration: “Pokerstars buys FullTilt for a consideration of $750m, including settlement with DOJ and full balances of players (330m). I'm impressed.” That got retweeted a lot, of course.

A few minutes later, iGamingFrance tweeted they had asked the Laurent Tapie group about the rumor and the response was they had no comment and would be sending out a press release later today.

Now PokerFuse has posted an article the title of which appears to confirm the story once and for all -- “PokerStars Reaches Agreement to Buy Full Tilt, Settles with DOJ” -- although they, too, are still seeking confirmation from the parties involved. However, the PokerFuse article does indicate that the Tapie group has apparently tapped out of the game, quoting a source at e-Gaming magazine confirming that “efforts to obtain final DoJ approval to acquire the assets of Full Tilt Poker have ended without success.”

The general tenor of the gradually building hysteria is that all are awaiting word from PokerStars and/or the DOJ in particular one way or the other regarding the possible deal. Meanwhile, a few have begun speculating about the reasons why Stars might possibly care to involve themselves in the FTP saga at all.

Indeed, our memories of the situation from just over one year ago remain fairly vivid, with the two sites standing side by side, towering over the rest of online poker as wholly separate entities with seemingly little interest in joining forces, even for a televised sit-n-go.

All of which makes this development -- actual or not -- all the more intriguing to envision. That is, an actual winner in that old “cold war” as a possible consequence of the U.S. government’s having used its own legalistic weaponry to drive both from American soil.

Will keep an ear to the ground here, and perhaps come back to update this post as we learn more. In other words, as the news sites say, developing...

EDIT (added 12:30 p.m.): Shortly after noon Eastern time, the GBT indeed announced “that after seven months of intensive work, our efforts to obtain final approval of the United States Department of Justice of the agreement to acquire the assets of Full Tilt Poker have ended without success.” The statement goes on to explain the deal failed primarily for two reasons -- an inability to settle on a plan with the DOJ to repay “ROW” (rest of world) players, and FTP’s U.S. legal morass which the GBT characterizes as “unresolvable.”

The statement additionally refers to “press reports that the DOJ may have entered into an agreement with PokerStars” regarding the acquisition of Full Tilt Poker. In other words, the GBT here is merely confirming that it has heard what the rest of us have. You can read the full GBT statement at iGaming Post.

EDIT (12:45 p.m.): Team PokerStars Pro Daniel Negreanu tells PokerListings he has no information regarding the story, adding that “the idea of PokerStars buying Full Tilt for $750 million seems impossible to me.”

EDIT (1:30 p.m.): Picking up on the “cold war” theme, Brian Balsbaugh, the founder of Poker Royalty (the agency representing a number of poker pros), sent a tweet a short while ago in which he imagined how the PS-buying-FTP scenario might appear from the perspective of the latter: “It's hard to explain the level of corporate hatred btw PS & FTP. PS w power/control over major FTP shareholders is their worst nightmare.”

EDIT (3:15 p.m.): Andrew Feldman of ESPN Poker spoke with PokerStars and tweeted just before 3 p.m. “there is no comment from them at this time.” A little after that, Team Full Tilter Andy Bloch cryptically tweeted “This might just be ‘Super Tuesday.’”

EDIT (4:00 p.m.): A statement from PokerStars finally came a little after 3:30 p.m. with a note from Eric Hollreiser, Head of Corporate Communications for PokerStars, explaining that the site couldn’t comment on either its ongoing settlement discussions with the DOJ or any of the other rumors swirling about. “As soon as we have information to share publicly we will do so,” said Hollreiser.

EDIT (5:30 p.m.): As the afternoon wore on, Shaun Deeb stirred the pot a bit by starting a new Two Plus Two thread suggesting he had some inside dope about the matter that “the deal is already done” along with some other semi-surreal-seeming stuff. Meanwhile, a Full Tilt Poker lawyer spoke with Diamond Flush about the failed GBT deal, noting that the site continued to hope that players were repaid. That statement ended with a reference to “settlement discussions with the US Department of Justice” and the need to be confidential, as well as an indication that “as soon as we have information to share publicly we will do so” -- i.e., language uncannily identical to Stars’ earlier statement.

On the “Girah” Saga; or, Online Poker Tied Up in a Knot

Spent a little time this morning rooting around over on Two Plus Two and elsewhere, getting somewhat caught up on this “Girah” saga that appears to involve just about every form of cheating one can imagine in online poker, including multi-accounting, collusion, chip-dumping, and hole-card viewing. The story also features a lot of other examples of ethically suspect behavior, most of which appearing to involve the fabrication of identities online (both for playing poker and for other forms of interaction, including forum posting).

For those with an interest in learning more about it all, the “Cliff notes” post over on 2+2 is a good place to start. There you’ll find a readable synopsis that also links out to many other sources for the sordid tale’s various characters and episodes. Might also dial up the most recent episode of the Two Plus Two Pokercast (episode 184), where they talk a lot about the story as well as interview both Ben “sauce123” Sulsky and “King” Dan Smith about it.

I had started to write a post attempting to cover all the various ins and outs, but after fussing with how best to present the tale’s complicated twists and turns I realized I only had a few substantive observations to add. So rather than clutter the air with another (necessarily incomplete) account of what appears to have been going on over the last seven months or so with this José “Girah” Macedo character (pictured above), I’ll just fire off three observations about it before moving along.

The first concerns one of those involved, Haseeb Qureshi (a.k.a., “DogIsHead” or “INTERNETPOKERS”), loser of that crazy running prop bet with Ashton Griffin earlier this year and recently let go by CardRunners as an instructor.

One “WTF” moment among the many that crop up in this story comes amid Haseeb Qureshi’s BLUFF interview, posted late yesterday. In the interview -- after Qureshi has admitted to multi-accounting, chip dumping, posting multiple times under a different name on Two Plus Two, and getting caught in a lie about being Macedo’s “agent” -- Qureshi is asked a question about Macedo’s original story, the one suggesting the 18-year-old had won more than $1.6 million in a remarkably short stretch even though those results were never corroborated anywhere.

Qureshi (and others, among them Dan “jungleman12” Cates) had maintained in the forums that Macedo’s results were legit, though now that seems likely not to have been the case. Qureshi is asked why he insisted Macedo’s results were genuine without there being any evidence to support that claim.

He “believed them,” Qureshi says, “because people faking results is such a ridiculously rare thing in the poker world. I would never suspect that someone would do anything like that unless they were a massive con artist, which I obviously didn’t imagine.”

Faking results in poker “ridiculously rare”? Probably more accurate to say it’s rare for players not to misrepresent their results. (That graph to the left is one that Macedo -- and/or Qureshi, actually, who says he helped Macedo with the post -- shared early on to show his results, a screenshot that omitted reference to screennames or sites.)

And, it goes without saying, Qureshi himself has many times over shown a readiness to misrepresent, lie, obfuscate, fake, what have you. How does Qureshi himself believe such a statement, let alone expect others to do so?

What is rare, I suppose, is for players to get away with faking results in their online play, particularly in the high-stakes games that are mostly (though not always) tracked by external sites. That leads to my second observation, which is simply to express amazement at how many appear to have been duped by the story of the “Portuguese poker prodigy.”

Lock Poker gave him a sponsorship. Brandon Adams tried to hire him as an instructor at his new Expert Insight website. And numerous other high-profile pros and posters -- not to mention all of the poker media reporting on his dazzling yet undocumented rise to the highest-stakes games -- readily bought in as well.

Sure, in some ways the story resembled that of Isildur1, Cates, and others. And all the various “vouching” going on by others with regard to Macedo played a significant role here as well. But without screen names or any confirmation of accounts played by Macedo, how does it happen that so many accepted his story as legitimate?

Interestingly, it seems as though the great majority of interactions with Macedo took place over Skype or via other online methods of communication -- i.e., there was little face-to-face contact with him by anyone involved, including his most vocal endorsers. Thus does this story demonstrate how the “virtual” world of online communication provides ready opportunities for the creation of personas as well as the potential to build elaborate fictions that are plausible enough to be regarded as fact.

My third observation is simply to reiterate a point already made by others with regard to the “Girah” saga. Without regulation, online poker will certainly continue to attract scammers and others looking to take advantage of a still highly vulnerable environment for financial transactions. Even with regulation, attempts by some to cheat and/or angle-shoot will (unfortunately) remain “part of the game,” although one would hope the chances of their getting away with such would be reduced.

The story made me wonder what exactly “girah” meant, and so I looked it up. Used to refer to a unit of measurement (in India and Pakistan), though with the metric system it is no longer used. Can also refer to a short passage that has been inserted into a song, often an allusion to another song (a kind of “sampling,” one could say).

But apparently the word also literally means “knot,” which I guess would be the most appropriate reference here. A lot of untangling yet to be done with regard to the “Girah” story.

Also a good way to refer to online poker, generally speaking, circa summer 2011. One big messy knot.