Full Tilt Set For Court Battle

Full Tilt Poker are the latest poker room to make the headlines for the wrong reasons. Lary Kennedy and Greg Omotoy opened a Full Tilt account and managed to win $80,000. There accounts were then closed and they were informed by Full Tilt that they believed they were using “bots” or programs to play poker automatically in order to accumulate the winnings. As this was deemed to have cheated other players out of money their winnings were withheld. Kennedy and Omotoy decided to go to court and have counter sued Full Tilt saying that the site uses bots of their own to help weaker players remain in the game ensuring it remains a game of luck rather than skill.

It has been speculated that these players were hoping that a lawsuit would prompt Full Tilt to settle out of court in order for them not to have to publicly reveal anything about their company and have their name dragged through the mud in a damaging court case. The poker room released a statement recently which suggested strongly that they would fight this lawsuit in court. I expected this if I am honest, they would not want to be seen as a soft touch settling out of court on multiple occasions as everyone would start to sue them for silly things.

Full Tilt mention in their statement that “(Full Tilt) hass been made aware of the recent filing of a baseless lawsuit by former Full Tilt Poker customers — Ms. Lary Kennedy and Mr. Greg Omotoy “. They go on to say that “…with respect to alleged use of prohibited automated systems, the claimants’ false assertions will be revealed as such in due course.” That is very emotive language to use in a statement and it gets better. They are clearly making a stand and even go as far as threatening to claim damages from the claimants by saying “Full Tilt Poker expects that these claimants will be obliged to compensate the aggrieved defendants for any harm that may arise out of their false allegations, and for the wrongful institution of these bad faith legal proceedings.”

Unfortunately for Full Tilt it is highly unlikely that the claimants will be forced to pay damages to the company when they will not be able to prove catagorically that this bad press has caused them any loss of business. If Ultimate Bet can steal $22 million plus of customers money and still get 900+ in their flagship tournament last week then it shows that poker players take these complaints very much in context and are quite forgiving when it comes to where they play online poker.

If the claimants were using a bot then they were very irresponsible, breaching the terms of conditions of the poker room. Full Tilt say in their statement that “Full Tilt Poker has never knowingly allowed “bots” to play on its site.” I know of a website that I could download a trial bot for free and it works on the Full Tilt website with little or no disguising mechanism. This is a fact. I even tested it on the play money tables and it does work in terms of playing the actions. Looking at the parameters of game style it looked to be a fairly solid bot for tournament poker. Considering the public forum of this bot website has over 1000 members and the recommended room is Full Tilt then it seems that ignorance is bliss for Full Tilt Poker. I avoid playing in the low stakes games on that site because I know how easy it is to be playing a competant bot there. I prefer to stick to sites like bwinpoker.com, which is not on the bots list of recommended rooms.

I look forward to following the updates on this interesting court case and will keep you up to date with any developments that are released.

By Malcolm Clarke

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Tags: full tilt court case, online poker, poker, poker law, poker legal battle