Barcelona here we come!

WITH the disappointing cancellation of the Full Tilt Series España last weekend, which was going to be held at Casino Torrequebrada, an excellent effort was made to fill the calendar with a substitute game for a €550 buy-in, run by the casino itself, and 110 players gladly stumped up the “bees and honey”.

The problem is that Full Tilt, the second largest online poker room in the world has been shut indefinitely, and we are yet to find out all the dirty deeds that have gone on in the form of fraud and money laundering.

The company was closed on ‘Black Friday’ about four months ago, but there is still $150 million in unpaid players account funds yet to be released.

Where is the money? As yet nobody can be sure but there are some very unhappy players around with thousands of Dollars locked up and I am sure if Full Tilt had turned up at the weekend it would have got very messy.

The same cannot be said of Pokerstars though. They too were also shut on ‘Black Friday’ but within a week had managed to do a deal with the American Department of Justice to release all frozen bank accounts.

They were therefore able to refund all player account monies, which they duly did and therefore kept a level of integrity with regards to the players and were able to carry on trading online, except for in the USA, and continue running the fantastic EPT series, which just happens to be dropping into Barcelona this week.

We have quite a few friends going up to participate including the very charismatic ‘Author’, ‘Gourmet Critic’ and very successful ‘Trader’ of Gold bullion, rare coins and other precious metals ‘Sir Nigel Goldman’. Buena suerte amigo!!