Full Tilt Ponzi Poker

By Pauly
San Francisco, CA

PokerStars is looking a helluva lot like Wall Street giant JP Morgan, compared to Full Tilt Poker mirroring JT Marlin, the chop house investment firm in the film Boiler Room.

Unless you've been in a coma or trapped in a mine the last few weeks, the big news of the day -- the DOJ called out Full Tilt Poker as a global Ponzi Scheme. Man, I know something really bad happened in the poker realm when non-poker friends are emailing me Wall Street Journal articles, such as.... U.S. Alleges Full Tilt Poker Was Ponzi Scheme.

Ponzi scheme? Full Tilt Poker? Full Tilt Ponzi Poker.

Shouldn't the DOJ be knocking down doors of 200 West Street or 23 Wall Street and locking up the real career criminals responsible for the financial collapse of 2008 and bilking taxpayers for billions in bailouts?

While thousands of disgruntled Americans are protesting in the streets of the financial district in a movement called Occupy Wall Street, the DOJ is focusing their attention on Howard Lederer and Jesus Ferguson. It's not JP Morgan head vampire, Jamie Dimon, that the federales are after, but rather, public enemy number one, two, and three were a former computer geek and bookie who teamed up with a semi-successful day trader, Ray Bitar, to pull off the greatest incident of fraud in the poker realm with the inception of Full Tilt Ponzi Poker.

I knew Rush Poker was too good to be true.

Yeah, by now we know that some of the guys running Full Tilt Ponzi Poker were crooked greedheads from the get go, but then again many of us in the insulated online poker world thought we were untouchable and assumed manna was going to rain out of the heavens for the next decade. Maybe some of the management at Full Tilt wanted to clean shit up once regulation occurred, or maybe they never intended on cleaning things up and instead were hoping to dump the company for a sack of cash and gold bullion, then let the new owners worry about cleaning up the books?

Then again maybe, just maybe, the shysters at Full Tilt Ponzi Poker were over their heads and the Full Tilt Ponzi Scheme got too big, too fast, and they couldn't keep up with what was going on. The poker boom was a swift beast that swept through Las Vegas and sent shockwaves reverberating throughout the world. Even to this days, some places on the planet are experience aftershocks from the Moneymaker Effect -- over eight years later.

I've seen what excessive sums of money generated overnight does to people -- in Vegas, in Hollywood, on Wall Street -- it drives some people crazy, and makes others do horrible things. What exactly happened at Full Tilt Ponzi Poker? We'll never know. Maybe someday we'll find out, like the other mysteries of the world like who shot Kennedy and did aliens really build the Pyramids?

If you haven't read my initial thoughts on Black Friday, don't forget to take a peek at Black Friday, Vampire Squids, and 100 Masturbating Monkeys in Washington .

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By the way, I'm starting a hedge fund in San Francisco. Who wants in?