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It’s about time

For the last several years, Full Tilt Poker has been like Dr. Malcolm Crow in The Sixth Sense, an online poker room that didn’t know it was really dead. On Thursday, finally, the once-great poker site will stop wandering aimlessly, a ghost with no home, and accept that it passed away years ago. PokerStars has announced that Full Tilt will be no more.

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As Full Tilt has been part of the PokerStars network since 2016, not much will change for the few people who still played on Full Tilt, aside from the cosmetic look of the site. Their accounts will be automatically transferred to PokerStars, including account balances and preferences. In fact, Full Tilt Poker players already had the ability to login to PokerStars using their Full Tilt credentials if they so desired. They will just be forced to do so started February 25 and that Full Tilt login info will officially be PokerStars login info.

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Explaining why it is doing this, PokerStars explained in a FAQ on its website:

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. 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.

This was a long time coming, but it makes sense. In fact, it is surprising it didn’t happen earlier. The Full Tilt Poker name can’t have much value anymore and not only was it just a skin of PokerStars, it was operated by the company, so it’s not like an affiliate or other operator provided any benefit or marketing dollars.

Full Tilt used to be the belle of the ball

As readers of this site likely very well know, Full Tilt Poker, founded in 2004, was once one of the behemoths of the industry. It was unique when it launched, as it had fast software with bright, cartoony avatars, and was founded by well-known poker pros. It’s slogan, “Learn, Chat and Play with the Pros,” was quite true – the first time I played on the site, I played in a micro-stakes game with Perry Friedman, who was very nice to all of us noobs.

The site developed into the place to watch pros play and became famous for the nose bleed stakes cash games. When multitudes of poker rooms left the US market after the passage of the UIGEA in late 2006, Full Tilt jumped in stature even more, as it stayed in the market, along with PokerStars, UltimateBet, and Absolute Poker.

Full Tilt never got as large as its arch rival PokerStars, but it in its heyday, it was a very strong second.

A site that will live in infamy

But then Black Friday came along on April 15, 2011, when indictments were unsealed against principals from the aforementioned poker rooms, charging them with money laundering, fraud, and other violations related to the UIGEA. UltimateBet and Absolute Poker disappeared completely, making off with players’ money.

Full Tilt, though, was weird. When the feds froze the site’s accounts, it was discovered that Full Tilt did not have enough money to give players their deposits. There were two main problems. First, because Full Tilt was skirting the law, it was using a network of payment processors to avoid having its payments to customers detected. Millions upon millions of dollars ended up frozen/seized in between Full Tilt and the payment processors and the payment processors and customers. Second, and this is what really did in Full Tilt Poker and making it a shameful example of what can happen with no regulation, it was found out that executives, including Chris Ferguson and Howard Lederer, took millions in payments from the company, using player funds. Thus, when the money flow stopped, Full Tilt was underwater and couldn’t pay players back.

Fortunately, PokerStars came to the rescue. In its whopping three-quarters of a billion dollar settlement with the US Department of Justice, PokerStars agreed to acquire Full Tilt’s assets and make its customers whole. The process took years, but most players did get paid back.

PokerStars operated Full Tilt as a separate poker site at first, but players had little desire to return, so it made Full Tilt a PokerStars skin in the spring of 2016. Since then, most poker players didn’t even know Full Tilt still existed.

Our commitment to improving the 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 last remaining assets of the Full Tilt software are set to be taken offline on February 25. On that date players will no longer be able to access the iconic brand, pokerfuse has learned.

Since May 2016, Full Tilt had been operating as a skin on the PokerStars network under its own branding, sharing the same games and player pool, rewards program and account system.

The only differentiator was the cosmetic look and the retention of the Full Tilt assets including the classic cartoonish avatars and Full Tilt special table themes.

On Thursday next week, this will no longer be the case as the Full Tilt desktop and mobile application and its branding will be completely ceased and replaced with PokerStars, its original buyer.

Existing Full Tilt users can migrate to the PokerStars platform using the same Full Tilt username and password, the FAQ page for the migration process states. Players’ balances and bonuses will automatically be switched to the PokerStars platform.

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Full Tilt Shutdown Process Already Started in 2020

The decision to shut down Full Tilt did not come out of the blue. PokerStars began the process to close Full Tilt software for the dot-EU players in October last year.

In fact, this was speculated by our industry-focused sister site Poker Industry PROin early 2020 considering the cuts the operator had been making. Ten months later, the operator took its first step and switched the download link for Full Tilt.EU desktop and mobile platform with that of PokerStars.EU.

It also released a FAQ page that is now available on PokerStars’ .EU and .COM sites.

“Our commitment to improving the 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 FAQ page for the pending shutdown states.

It remains to be seen whether FullTilt.com website will remain available once the software is gone. PokerStars has yet to respond to our inquiry.

One and a Half Decades of Full Tilt Poker

Full Tilt Poker was launched in 2004, just three years after PokerStars’ inception. It was opened with the involvement of some of the biggest names in the industry: Raymond Bitar, Chris Ferguson, Howard Lederer, Mike Matusow, Jennifer Harman and others.

Post-UIEGA, it became the main competitor of PokerStars and the second largest online poker room worldwide. It also became home of nosebleed cash game action involving big pros such as Tom Dwan, Phil Ivey, Viktor “Isildur” Blom and Gus Hansen—who all became Full Tilt ambassadors.

The second-largest online poker room changed the landscape of online poker by introducing several unique features to its poker platform. It invented Rush Poker, a fast-fold poker variant that has been a wildly success innovation and is now ubiquitous.

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However, Black Friday happened in 2011 and this led to the brand’s downfall. It did return in late 2012 after it was bought by PokerStars with its own player pool and software and continued to operate for few more years, but its traffic was nowhere close to pre-Black Friday.

In 2015, the operator adopted a dramatic strategy to make the poker room more attractive to “recreational” players by removing table selection, heads-up games, nosebleed games and mixed games.

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It then revamped its reward program to please casual players, a pivotal moment for the industry in its approach to player loyalty.

No, Full Tilt Software Is Not Up for Sale

However, this was not well received by the players and its cash game traffic took an immediate hit.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 Ultimately, Full Tilt was migrated to the PokerStars platform in 2016.

Initially, the site retained the old Full Tilt branded games such as Jackpot Sit & Go’s instead of Spin & Go, and Rush Poker in place of Zoom. But the branding was gradually changed to match that of PokerStars.

At that time, a Full Tilt representative told PRO that the original software would not be put up for sale.

Over the past few years, PokerStars has made several changes to its platforms, including introducing a new game engine, Aurora, and a new Mobile NG platform for its mobile apps.

Keeping Full Tilt in sync with these upgrades was obviously an extra burden for the operator. Although it did eventually bring Aurora on Full Tilt, it had fallen out of step in many key areas such as lacking new games like Grand Tour, Tempest and even Spin & Go Max, which was launched many years ago.

Considering that the operator had been putting more focus on PokerStars brand, the shutdown of Full Tilt ultimately seemed inevitable.

“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,” the site states.