Howard Lederer, a man who bears tremendous personal responsibility for the Black Friday debacle, says he’s sorry. Lederer issued the apology late last week in the form of a statement on Daniel Negreanu’s Full Contact Poker journal.
In the statement, Lederer takes full responsibility for his role in bringing down the US-facing online poker industry and his own failures in making certain Full Tilt was being run in a proper manner saying:
I take full responsibility for Full Tilt’s failure to protect player deposits leading up to Black Friday. The shortfall in player deposits should never have happened. I should have provided better oversight or made sure that responsible others provided that oversight. I was a founder in the company that launched Full Tilt, and I became the face of the company’s management in the poker community. Many of our players played on the site because they trusted me.
The apology had a distinct sincerity that was lacking in previous Lederer apologies, which ran on Poker News in the form of series of videos that came to be known as the Lederer Files and were poorly received by the poker community. In those interviews, Lederer seemed to blame everyone but himself for the issues that led to Full Tilt’s downfall.
Lederer’s change of heart occurred, according to Lederer, when a friend confronted him at a wedding and told him that he had been all too happy to accept the glory that came with Full Tilt’s rise, but none of the responsibility.
Whether by coincidence or design, happened the same week that Full Tilt Poker formally merged with PokerStars, ending the legendary site’s notorious run.