Recent reports behind the Full Tilt Poker Company suggest that their Black Friday roster of professional players are not going to be compensated with back pay after they newly relaunched their website. The company released this information to the players by sending out an e-mail, which went out to everyone within the casino.
Just before Black Friday, Full Tilt Poker was at its peak, and they were able to employ as many as 100 professional poker players. Many of these poker players were called Red Pros and were part of other leagues around the world. Full Tilt Poker is actually establishing their own poker league, they are known as The Professional, but they are a much smaller team than Red Pros.
Dustin Iannotti is Full Tilt’s Manager and the e-mail that he released read: “Other than the non-US player balances, The Rational Group did not assume any liabilities of the previous Full Tilt Poker companies and therefore previous contractual agreements that Full Tilt Poker may have had including with FTP Red Pros were excluded. As such, The Rational Group is not liable and will not pay for any amounts which may have been due to you under your agreement with any former Full Tilt Poker company.”
Of course, Full Tilt’s “The Professional” poker players certainly can’t be happy about not being compensated for what they rightfully deserved. However, the players are not the only ones that have missed out on this. In fact, affiliates of Full Tilt were also uncompensated for their referrals and website traffic that they delivered to the company.
That e-mail essentially states that any earnings, either as a player, or as an affiliate, will be unpaid by Full Tilt. They announced this after relaunching their website, specifying that any of the money you earned from their previous brands is no longer applicable as an agreement, since they have relaunched and are no longer the same company. A lot of the players and affiliates are very upset about this, because they work hard to deliver traffic and sales to the company, and then they’re just left empty-handed. Affiliates put in a lot of time and dedication into making their affiliate marketing campaign successful, so to have this money go unpaid could be devastating to their finances. Affiliate marketers are people just like you, they promote programs on the Internet so that they can make an income and work from home. A lot of them have families to support and when a company like this cuts ties, a lot of the money they were counting on will no longer come. For Full Tilt, they may never recover some of these affiliates that they will lose because of this settlement. Some of the poker players are even expected to leave the league because of this unfortunate news. Online casinos definitely have to be careful with the actions that they take, deciding to pocket the money instead of paying out the people that work hard and deserve it can be disheartening news to deliver.