It looks like the ink has even dried on the registration papers. The French company Groupe Bernard Tapie has officially acquired Full Tilt Poker, or as they seem to have registered it here and there – New Full Tilt Poker. Not to be confused with the old Full Tilt Poker that owes you money.

Which brings up the only question players have been asking for a year – will we get our money back?  And there’s been no real answer to the question except to say that Full Tilt was advertising for some contract support personnel in Ireland, so they except to be getting lots of calls on the subject.  I’m keeping up with the more international aspects of Full Tilt at http://news.google.ca/

Of course the question of money and paying out to players is one that needs to be addressed before Full Tilt’s license is reactivated and the poker room allowed to open for real money play again. I’m not sure if they could offer free rolls or other play to players before that point, but they’re going to need to have some sort of aggressive marketing strategy in place if they expect to win back the trust of players. Now, it’s true that Bernard Tapie weren’t involved in the mismanagement that caused the poker room to fail. So that may hold promise for the future. But still, there’s a bad taste in the mouth of a lot of players when it comes to Full Tilt.

The bad news for American players is that the company may be able to successfully claim that since the US authorities seized their domain name and assets, the responsibility for getting money back to US players, belongs to the authorizes in the US.  It may be that paying back the UK and EU players is all that is needed to get them up and running again. And if that happens, I doubt Tapie feels any responsibility for US players. Unless we could get legal online poker and tempt them with that. Because they’ll not make it back to the US market without paying what they owe.