
It took 495 days, but fulltiltpoker is now open. The disclaimer to that statement is that US residents (and those from Spain, France, Belgium, Italy and Denmark) cannot access the site for real money. Even worse for US players is that you’re still waiting to recover your balance with no clear end in site. If you are a US resident we’re sorry to inform that there’s no good news for you, but you can read on and see all the great things that other players around the world have access to now.
The big question for many, was after being offline for such a long period and ‘holding’ players balance for over a year how would players react and would they come back? On day one the answer was a resounding, ‘we forgive you’. According to pokerscout, Full Tilt is back to their spot as the world’s number two poker site, only trailing their long time rival (and now owner) PokerStars.
Full Tilt has always been regarded as having one of the best poker software and catered to the professional players with the highest stakes games you could find anywhere. After the indictment by the US DOJ, and in the following months we learned how poorly Full Tilt was managed with them essentially being broke. This created much ill will with players, however it looks like Poker Stars strong brand name and reputation has made players forget everything that happened.
What can players expect
Your Money
Probably the biggest part of FullTilt reopening is that players can now access their real money. For the most part, players simply need to log into their account and it should all be there. For a few countries like France where regulations are different (and FTP doesn’t have a license) there are different steps you might have to take, but you can access your cash. It doesn’t look like there will be a run on the bank either as Full Tilt sits comfortably as the second largest poker room only behind Poker Stars.
Big Promotions
To kick off the relaunch of Full Tilt, they announced their “Deal me in” promotion which includes many goodies for players. This includes $250K in freerolls for the first 6 days (until May 11th), Happy Hours around the clock that offer 2x the points as well as large cash bonuses for all existing and new players. On May 11th, they are also hosting ten separate free roll tournaments each with $10K in prizes.
Full Tilt is serious about the large cash bonus too, it’s their biggest bonus package ever that includes a $200 minimum and free rush poker ring game tickets for all players who had a real money account.
FTOPS
The extremely popular quarterly tournament is set for May with satellites starting later this month. Full details of the tournament have yet to be released and cannot be found on the site, however Full Tilt Poker’s poker room manager, Shyam Markus, has stated that it will be returning in May. No information on events, prize pools, etc. has been made available as of yet.
On top of everything else, there’s nearly $170 million dollars being put into the “poker economy” this week. It appears that much of that will stay on Full Tilt, but we expect that all rooms should see a lift in actions as players get their hands on their long awaited funds.