The Garden City Group – the independent financial administration company selected by the US Department of Justice to dish out legitimate Full Tilt Poker payments – has announced that the first tranche of pay-outs will involve $82 million dollars and will go to 30,000 former Full Tilt players who have no dispute with the amount in their FTP accounts as assessed by the administrator.
The payments are expected to go out at the end of this (February) month, and will be financed from the hundreds of millions of dollars paid to the DoJ by Pokerstars in settlement of its Black Friday shutdown three years ago and its subsequent acquisition of Full Tilt Poker (see previous reports).
Unconfirmed reports suggest that as much as $300 million may have been involved in the official seizure and shutdown of Full Tilt Poker in April 2011.
The following year, Pokerstars inked a deal with the DoJ, agreeing to repay FTP’s international players and hand over another $547 million for the DoJ to disburse to owed FTP players in the USA, clearing the way for its takeover of Full Tilt Poker.
Although Pokerstars complied with its undertaking to pay the international players, doling out another $184 million, the DoJ spent an inordinate amount of time finding the right administrator and putting an assessment and payment system in place.
In the next phase, GCG will deal with players who dispute the amounts it claims they are owed, along with the cases of affiliate marketers with FTP accounts and professional players engaged by the old management.