Haralabos Voulgaris is a real sharp in the basketball world. Made millions. He had a chance to buy 3% stake in Full Tilt Poker. He was already to invest and just trying to decide how much until he meet Bitar. Bitar is a Buffoon Around 2004 I came extremely close to buying a 2 or 3% share of Fulltilt Poker my main concern wasnât really IF I was going to buy a percentage of FTP, but how rather how much I was going to buy (I was offered up to 3 percent). I remember talking with Howard Lederer at length and while I was a bit reticent when I learned what others had paid for their shares, (not only wasnât I getting in on the discounted first tier rate, I was actually paying more than the secondary investors as well). In short I was getting in at the tail end of the FTP investment chain, and while this didnât really appeal to my sense of relative value, it was either a good investment at this price, or it wasnât. And with that I decided to press on. Howard even had talked to me about the possibility of me getting reduction in price if I actually did some work for FTP. At the time I had been consulting for an online gaming company for about 4-5 years, so I had a bit of experience in this field. I decided that it would be wise to meet with Chris Ferguson and the guy they were hiring as their CEO. So one night in 2004 I visited with Ray Bitar and Chris Ferguson. We had dinner and I chatted for I think around 3 hours and to say that I came away less than impressed with Ray would be under selling it. I remember having difficulty expressing this to Howard delicately. Howard remarked that while Ray might not have been as sharp as him or Chris, nobody was going to outwork Ray. To me Rayâs lack of sharpness wasnât really the issue. The issue was that I kind of felt he might have been actually been dumb. I even mentioned this to Howard but I am not sure if I used the term âdumbâ or some other derogatory dismissive term. In the end I decided that I wasnât really interested in doing any other non sports betting work at that time, and I was not going to pay a markup to invest in what was at best a grey area gaming company headed by a (hardworking) Buffoon.
Read the indictment. The guy is a tool and was likely put in charge to serve as a buffer for the other owners in case the operation ran afoul of the law. Looks like Ferguson and Lederer are also up shit creek. The feds should go after every owner who benefited from the distributions until all customers are repaid. Gee, how could something go wrong with entrusting gamblers with hundreds of millions of dollars of other people's money. LOL
So true, pokerstars never had any impropriety levy against them, in fact they bailed out FT. Sickening thing is Lederer keep the 40 million in distributions. Now he playing high stakes poker again.
Poker, craps, blackjack, roulette, horses, sports, trading are all games of chance, the participants are all gamblers. Some games can be beat , some can't. Trading and poker are both beatable games. However, poker is not the right game to use if looking for a game analogous to trading. Look instead to sports betting or horse racing as the games most analogous to trading.
" it´s not always what you're dealt, but how you play your cards..." This is the USA. Crooks are treated like heroes.