With less than a month to go before the scheduled relaunch of Full Tilt Poker, the new owners of the site, longtime FTP rival PokerStars, has ramped-up their marketing efforts in an effort to get people excited about the return of the online poker giant after over a year of being offline. Last week Full Tilt Poker signed their first “Ambassador” former Team Full Tilt Poker pro and owner Gus Hansen; this week Full Tilt has announced the return of its popular tournament series, the Full Tilt Online Poker Series.

The Full Tilt Online Poker Series (FTOPS) was a bi-annual to quarterly tournament series at the site, and was among the most hyped and prestigious series among online poker players. The FTOPS XXI is scheduled to take place in early December according to Shyam Markus who heads the current public relations department for Full Tilt Poker. Markus announced the return of the FTOPS on the 2+2 poker forum, although very few details were given.

According to the post, the tournament series will take place from December 2-16, 2012, giving Full Tilt Poker a chance to run the usual satellites into FTOPS events.

Remarkably, the winner of the last FTOPS Main Event, Blair Hinkle is still waiting for his winnings from that event (over $1 million) and with the way the US Department of Justice has been dragging its feet with regards to the repayment of US players, it’s quite likely that the winner of the December FTOPS Main Event will have access to their funds sooner than Hinkle!

It’s unclear if Full Tilt Poker will be online in several European countries by the time the FTOPS gets underway, as the site is still seeking the return of its licenses in France and Italy, as well as the new regulated European markets of Spain, Belgium, and Estonia. This will also be the first FTOPS played without US players, and with it occurring so close to the relaunch date it’s unclear what type of turnout can be expected for these tournaments, or how Full Tilt Poker will set the guarantees.

When visitors head to the fulltiltpoker.eu website they are now greeted with a message with information on their account as well as the takeover of Full Tilt poker by PokerStars. In the upper right corner a “Countdown to Relaunch” calendar has been added with the number of days until Full Tilt poker comes back online, scheduled for November 6th, which is fittingly election day in the United States.

Here is the post from the 2+2 poker forum: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showpost.php?p=35183250&postcount=1349

Tags: Department Of Justice, European Countries, European Markets, Former Team, Full tilt Poker, Gus, Gus Hansen, Hinkle, main event, Marketing Efforts, Online Poker, Poker Forum, Poker Online, poker players, Poker Pro, Poker Run, PokerStars, Prestigious Series, Shyam, Us Department Of Justice

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2012 at 8:42 am and is filed under Poker 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.