It would appear that people may have jumped the gun in saying that the Heartland Poker Tour’s original ownership, All-In Productions, got the short-end of the stick after selling their prized possession to the Epic Poker League’s parent company Federated Sports + Gaming, which later went belly-up, owing All-In Productions most of the initial sale price. But on Tuesday, May 8th, All-In Productions turned the tables on Federated Sports + Gaming, submitting a bid to reacquire the Heartland Poker Tour as well as some of the assets of the Federated Sports + Gaming!

According to WickedChopsPoker.com, All-In Productions submitted a bid of $1.5 million to the United States Bankruptcy Court in Maryland. With FS+G owing roughly $1.9 million, the bid would “excuse the debt” and see ownership of the Heartland Poker Tour revert back to All-In Productions (which has been running the tour even after the FS+G takeover).

Interestingly, the bid also sets aside $100,000 to purchase the “good” assets of FS+G, including the Global Poker Index, Domain Names, and other solvent assets and contracts. Should the bid be approved, the Heartland Poker Tour would basically own the remnants of the Epic Poker League and FS+G, the entity that purchased them not even a year ago!

FS+G is currently in Chapter 7 reorganization, which basically means that the company is asking for extra time to pay its debts while it streamlines and reorganizes its product. But with millions of debt and only a few thousand dollars in their coffers it seems only a matter of time before the bankruptcy “reorganization” turns into bankruptcy “liquidation”. Once FS+G enters liquidation ownership of the Heartland Poker Tour would revert back to All-In Production anyway, so the move would seem to be a power grab by the company to not only reclaim their property as soon as possible, but to also pick up a few other goodies like the GPI on the cheap.

While FS+G continues to claim that they will be relaunching, and intends to keep the promises made from the outset (including a fourth and final tournament on Season with a $400,000 overlay and a million dollar free-roll to ends the season) most people in the poker world have already written off the project as a failure (an EPIC fail) and it’s highly unlikely that the EPL could reclaim any confidence from the poker world, especially after the plethora of details that have come to light regarding six-figure salaries for both Annie Duke and Jeffrey Pollack, while the league was racking-up somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 million-$7 million in debt in less than a year.

We’ll have to wait and see if the bid by All-In Productions is accepted by the bankruptcy court, which has 30-days to act on the filing according to a lawyer who spoke to WickedChopsPoker.com.

Tags: 5 Million, Bankruptcy Reorganization, Chapter 7, Coffers, Domain Names, Extra Time, Federated, Gpi, Heartland, Liquidation, Matter Of Time, Parent Company, Power Grab, Remnants, Short End Of The Stick, Sports Gaming, States Bankruptcy Court, Takeover, Thousand Dollars, United States Bankruptcy Court

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2012 at 10:38 am and is filed under Poker Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.