FullTiltPoker, the 5th largest poker site in the world, has recently overhauled its domain name. Professional Rakeback explores why, how, and what to expect.
Full Tilt Poker company has changed the domain names and URLs of its brands. A recent re-branding of FullTiltPoker.com and FullTiltPoker.eu occurred on July 15th, 2014. The domain names of FullTiltPoker.com and FullTiltPoker.eu were each changed to FullTilt.com and FullTilt.eu respectively.
Full Tilt Poker has a checkered past. Once it was one of the most beloved online-poker-sites available to not only USA poker players, but poker-professionals world wide! Then it was discovered, thanks to the United States department of justice, that the company was woefully under capitalized. During this period after "Black Friday" FTP closed its operations while a settlement was worked out. Eventually PokerStars purchased the beleaguered company and made USA and ROW poker players whole by paying all of the debts FTP had accumulated. This tarnished the name of FTP greatly, something needed to be done to remedy this, yet first, a strategy had to be implemented.
A year later, FullTiltPoker.com was reopened, managed by the Rational Group who owns and operates Poker Stars. Pokerstars begins to use FTP, which is approximately 1/8th the size of its larger sister site, as a sort of testing grounds for its new poker games. Suddenly FTP also began offering a variety of online casino games, something that PokerStars does not do. It appears to be an attempt to diversify the product line offered as well as a method of recouping the massive $750 million dollar settlement PokerStars had to pay in order to settle the debts of PS and FTP with the US DOJ.
Other poker news outlets have speculated, and Professional Rakeback agrees, that this change in the URLs and domain names may be leading up to a change in the name of the site as well. It only makes sense that now that FTP is offering online-casino games along with its core onlinepoker product, that the company name of "FullTiltPoker" might need to be changed. A likely change would be to re-brand the organization from Full Tilt Poker to that of Full Tilt Gaming. PROFRB wonders what will happen to FTP's Twitter and Facebook pages which still make use of the full name, @FullTiltPoker..? It wouldn't be a huge surprise to see the word "gaming" replace "poker" as the Amaya group, who recently purchased Rational Group, has hinted at offering games outside of poker on FTP. Amaya, a publicly traded company, while announcing the pending acquisition of Rational Group, a private parent corporation housing Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars, CEO David Baazo proclaimed, "We intend to support the company growth in real-money online casino, sports betting, and social gaming."
The timing surrounding the name-changing of the domain names seems reasonable given this desire of new management and ownership to open up their portfolio of offerings at Full Tilt. It seems every other week there are new online-casino games added to FTP's (we should probably stop calling them FTP and use FT now!) repertoire of offerings. How long until we see a FT branded sportsbook where players can place wagers on football, basketball, baseball and more with the knowledge of having the multi-billion dollar pockets of Amaya Gaming backing the book? We predict it will happen in less than a year from the creation of this article.
Please Read Professional Rakeback's FullTilt Review where we take an in-depth look at a variety of things including game selection, game offerings, cashier information and cashout | payout times and the history of FTP. Professional Rakeback also informs players what jurisdictions, countries, states, provinces, etc are not allowed to participate in the poker games on FullTilt. Lastly we look at the VIP program, its equivalent rake-back or cash-back percentages, and more.