Full Tilt Poker can’t win for losing, it seems. First one of its leading spokesmen and biggest draws, Phil Ivey, soured to the site, quitting its team of pros and suing the site’s parent company, Tiltware, for $150 million. Now one of its former leading spokeswomen, Clonie Gowen, has revived a formerly defunct lawsuit she had previously brought against the site.
So we know what Phil’s beef with them is. He says he’s upset because the site hasn’t yet managed to give US players the money back from their FullTilt accounts that they are no longer allowed to use or access. So what’s Clonie’s beef with the site?
She says they promised her a 1% ownership stake in the company that they failed to make good on. Had they done as they promised, Clonie asserts, she would have been paid around $40 million that she never ended up seeing. In February 2010 a US district judge dismissed her case, saying it lacked merit. He even gave her lawyer three chances to rewrite the complaint to provide sufficient detail to prompt the judge to change his mind but failed to be convinced by any of the attempts. A recently successful appeal, however, has revived that lawsuit, allowing Clonie to proceed with her case.
Between Ivey’s $150 million claim and Gowen’s approximately $40 million claim, it seems doubtful, were they to both be successful, that Full Tilt players (and former players in the US) would be the ones to suffer right alongside Full Tilt Poker itself, which lacks enough available funds to pay out its own players as it is.