Full Tilt Poker will not be honoring payments to affiliates or tracking players to them when the site goes back online in November. The long awaited decision on affiliate money came in an e-mail from the Rational Group (the parent company of new FTP owner PokerStars).
So why did affiliates get left out of the half billion dollar FTP settlement? According to the e-mail, it’s because Rational group simply didn’t assume that liability.
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 with affiliates were excluded. As such, The Rational Group is not liable and will not pay for any affiliate earnings which may have been due to you under your agreement with any former Full Tilt Poker company.
Not surprisingly, the move does not sit well with the affiliates who were, largely, responsible for FTP’s long-squandered success.
While many forum posters would like FTP, and PokerStars, to be branded rogue others saw the efforts as tilting at windmills. Here’s how a CAP poster called CardPlayerLifestyle put things:
Unfortunately part of the problem is PokerStars is so big, everyone’s got accounts there, etc. that they simply don’t NEED affiliates to be successful anymore. Even “rouge-ing” them won’t really have too negative of an effect on them anymore.
There’s no word on exactly how much money are losing out on but anecdotal evidence suggests that it’s pretty substantial. That could have a big impact on the site’s new affiliate program, which is set to launch some time in 2013.
After all, not very many affiliate partners are interested in getting burned twice, or putting in work converting players they feel should have carried over.
Are you losing out on this deal? Share your experiences in the CAP Forums.