How did Barry Greenstein get tangled in a FullTilt web? Image from KickAssPoker.com
The public-opinion wars over the breakup of Full Tilt continue to accelerate, with today’s news enamating from PokerStrategy.com and a piece in which Groupe Bernard Tapie attorney Behn Dayanim shares with Poker Strategy and the world the news that several high-profile poker pros owe significant sums to the Full Tilt coffers, this in excess of the monthly dividends normally due the owners for their share of the business.
This latest piece is surely an effort to shame the six named pros into repaying their debts, which GBT’s Dayanim claims they’ve been more than reluctant to address. Five of the six are Full Tilt pros or friends of the site whose reputation within the poker world ranges from mediocre to scummy: Phil Ivey, David Benyamine, Layne Flack, Erick Lindgren and Mike Matusow. The sixth, though, is a bit of a surprise: PokerStars pro Barry Greenstein. No amounts were given for any of the six, though Ivey’s, Flack’s and Benyamine’s were characterized as being larger than the others, perhaps running into the millions.
Let’s deal with the Greenstein inclusion first. If Dayanim’s allegations are true, the Greenstein must have received some sort of loan from the Full Tilt coffers. Barry is widely liked and highly respected in Vegas circles, and it’s been rumored that he took a big hit when the real-estate bubble burst a couple of years back, leaving him with plenty of assets but short on liquidity. It is not at all unthinkable to imagine some of his poker friends helping him out with a loan of some sort if he was in the process of restructuring things. Greenstein hasn’t released a statement yet on the matter, but his inclusion, while curious, is not an impossibility. What would be odd the construct of having a loan on the books for a pro that was a sponsor for a major competing site — Barry is a prominent face for PokerStars — and there will no doubt be some hell to pay in that relationship if the PokerStrategy piece proves true. Knowing Barry a bit, it is hard to imagine him letting something like this escalate to a public shaming by GBT’s lawyers if he had any reasonable way to pay. So either the story is false or Barry really has some cash-flow problems.
The other five, the Full Tilters, can’t be treated as warmly. The millions of debt owed back to Full Tilt by Ivey and Benyamine have been confirmed or at least alleged elsewhere, with Ivey rolling through the craps table of life on a seemingly unending line of credit and Benyamime having been alleged in a Subject:Poker expose to committed huge shenanigans in getting his online bankroll topped off. Edog Lindgren’s a bit of a wild card, but that leaves Mike Matusow and Layne Flack, long recognized as two of poker’s most degenerate stake-grubbers. Loaning either of them money has to be considered a high-risk proposition. In short, the GBT lawyer’s tale seems believable, even if it’s clearly an extortionate ploy. The problem that this business lawyer hasn’t figured out is that for five of the six (excepting Greenstein), a public shaming probably won’t work anyway.
It’s become clear that the scouring of poker is at hand. There is a lot of crud that’s in the process of being scaled away from the core of the game, and as we’ve said before, it’s part of a very painful process that poker’s going to have to endure before it can re-emerge in the mainstream. 2012 should be a good year for poker, but some of the bad old crap will necessarily be swept up in the process.
