The process is still far away from making payments

American players which had funds on Full Tilt Poker when it got shut down will have to wait at least one more year before they will be given back their money. This news comes from an unnamed supervisor at the Garden City Group, which is in charge of processing the claims. In some previous cases, the GCG took more than two years to complete the process.

Full Tilt Poker banned and re-launched

Full Tilt Poker was one of the leading online poker rooms in the United States when the poker boom first started in 2006. As the industry continued to grow, Full Tilt and PokerStars were the top two choices and while other poker rooms left the market due to online gambling regulations, some sites stayed behind and got even bigger. However, the US Department of Justice came cracking down in 2011, on a day known in the poker world as “Black Friday”. PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker were accused of money laundry and fraud and were finned and banned by the government. PokerStars paid its dues and left the market while the other two sites were forced to shut down.

One year later, PokerStars bought some Full Tilt Poker assets and re-launched the online poker room in non-US countries, giving players access to their blocked funds. As part of the deal, all funds owned by US customers on Full Tilt Poker were paid to the Department of Justice, which has the obligation to give them back to the players.

Slow process for former Full Tilt customers

It has been over eight months since Full Tilt re-opened its real money doors and US customers have still not seen a penny of the $184 million they are entitled to. The Depart of Justice hired the Garden City Group in order to take care of this but it hasn’t been able to get past the first step yet. Going through the massive amount of player data and organizing everything seems to take a lot longer than expected and the entire process will most likely take longer than a year.

It is estimated that around 1.3 million former Full Tilt players have money blocked in this deal. Things get even more complicated if we consider the fact that two Federal agencies are involved with the GCG in order to monitor for money laundry and asset forfeiture.

The big question remains just how much money will the players get when the process is complete. After all the data is processed and every player is listed with the account balance, the GCG will introduce a formula to calculate the amount of money that will be received. Known as the “estimated recovery”, the formula will help determine exactly how much money every customer will get. It is important to point out that players from outside the US got 100% of their funds back through PokerStars.

As of now, there is no information released by the GCG on how the formula will work and this is a big concern for players expecting to get their money back, especially those with large amounts. The basic idea is that the approximately $184 million have to be distributed to all the people on the list from the provided data. It will still take a lot of time to determine the amounts for each and every player.

Customers will also have to register on a specific website to claim their respective amounts and will be contacted by the GCG later in the process. Once the first steps are completed and the amounts are determined, a court order must be passed in order to actually start distributing the money. Only then players will be able to get access to their blocked funds. How long that will actually take remains unknown.