Wednesday, October 26, 2011 : A STRANGE ONLINE POKER SURVEY
Is Full Tilt’s buyer already moving in on the players?
Attracting wide attention on the popular twoplustwo poker information portal this week was the strange case of the Spanish survey.
A Spanish language portal titled Poker-Red alerted the twoplustwo posters to an approach being made to Spanish players by a French magazine, LivePoker… which happens to be operated by George Djen, a founder partner of a company titled FullFun in which Groupe Bernard Tapie’s ISPT partner, Prosper Masquelier, is involved.
FullFun is also believed to be involved in the French-licensed online poker site PokerExtrem.fr.
It is now generally well-known that Groupe Bernard Tapie is the prospective buyer of troubled online poker giant Full Tilt Poker.
Having established that rather lengthy background, on with the story…
LivePoker has been telephoning Spanish punters – usually those with medium to large amounts of money held up in the Black Friday debacle – telling them that it is conducting a survey on FTP and asking them questions.
These revolve around their reactions to the FTP closure, and where they are playing now, but more importantly their opinions on three pay-out scenarios should FTP resume operations “soon.”
The three scenarios suggested for the players’ choice are:
1. Investing part of their funds in company shares. After successful resption of FTP business, players would be able to sell their shares back to FTP and retrieve their money.
2. Cashout all their account balance with a penalty, which would mean a percentage of the whole balance. There is no information on how much this percentage would be.
3. Small cashouts that would unlock over time. There would be no FTP charges for a player to recover funds, but it would take around a year.
The “researcher” appeared to favour the third option, suggesting to players that this was the course other players had selected.
Poker-Red rightly surmises that to have this sort of contact information, the magazine must have been provided with details from the FTP player base, raising legitimate questions of privacy and how much information has been shared with a prospective buyer and its associates.
Some players have apparently raised this concern with the callers, but have not received any satisfactory answer as the callers quickly move on with their “survey”.
http://www.poker-red.com/noticias/revista-relacionada-tapie-sondea-telefonicamente-a-jugadores-full-tilt-poker
http://www.poker-red.com/noticias/re…ull-tilt-poker