Step 1 – Download & Install the Full Tilt Poker Software. Click on Download Now to go to the Full Tilt Poker download page and follow the instructions below. 1.1 – Hit the “Play Now” button and then Click on the “Run” button to start the download process. 1.2 – Select your Language. Online Poker Download Featuring exclusive promotions and tournament types you won't find anywhere else, we are the home of authentic poker players worldwide. Joining the tens of thousands of players who play with us every day is a quick and easy process that can be completed in two short steps. RIP Full Tilt Poker, ceases operation this week - Full Tilt Poker is nevermore. The brand, owned by PokerStars, will cease operations this week on February 25. Full Tilt Poker began in 2004 and the online poker site was co-founded by Ray Bitar, Jesus Ferguson, and Howard Lederer. It was shut down on Black Friday in 2011 by the feds and acquired by PokerStars and relaunched in 2012.

It’s not like PokerStars didn’t give it a chance.

When the Stars Group bailed out Full Tilt Poker poker players after Black Friday and took over the brand, they put it on the PokerStars platform. But they kept some of the signature Full Tilt promotions like the Deal. They kept the logo but altered it slightly. The Stars Group didn’t erase the name or its players.

Nearly a decade later, however, PokerStars – now under the Flutter Entertainment umbrella – decided to retire the brand. Player accounts and balances will move to PokerStars, and the company will shut down the desktop and mobile applications associated with Full Tilt.

Most players said goodbye to Full Tilt Poker many years ago. The rest of them must do so this week.

A Long Goodbye

The Full Tilt Poker story started in the summer of 2004. Owned by TiltWare, the site began accumulating players on July 10, 2004. Names like Chris Ferguson and Howard Lederer got together to create the company, along with Rafe Furst and Ray Bitar.

The poker site quickly grew to become one of the most popular. Its Team Full Tilt boasted of some of the biggest names on the poker scene with Phil Ivey, Jennifer Harman, Andy Bloch, Phil Gordon, Erik Seidel, and Erick Lindgren. Others joined through the years, including Patrik Antonius, Gus Hansen, Mike Matusow, Allen Cunningham, John Juanda, Viktor Blom, Clonie Gowan, and Tom Dwan.

Farewell #FullTiltPoker. End of an era. pic.twitter.com/ueu8RBOaRi

— Jennifer Tilly (@JenniferTilly) February 21, 2021

While the big names remained on Team Full Tilt, the site grew a roster of “red pros” and “friends of Full Tilt” that exceeded 150 members at one point. Full Tilt Poker quickly became one of the largest sites in the world for online poker, often battling PokerStars for the top spot.

As the poker boom began to settle, rumors swirled that United States attorneys were investigating Full Tilt for violating gambling laws.

That all came to fruition on April 15, 2011, when the US Department of Justice revealed indictments against the top executives at Full Tilt Poker, including Bitar, as well as those at PokerStars, UltimateBet, and Absolute Poker.

While PokerStars immediately began working with the US government to pay its players, Absolute Poker and UltimateBet disappeared from the landscape altogether. Full Tilt Poker began to collapse into itself, its structure crumbling and unable to pay players. By September 20, 2011, the DOJ determined that Full Tilt may have purposely operated as somewhat of a Ponzi scheme. Whether due to intentional fraud or simple mismanagement, Full Tilt became insolvent.

PokerStars continued to work with the US government to make things right, first by handling its own player remissions and then offering to do the same for Full Tilt players. The DOJ agreed that PokerStars could do so in exchange for taking control of the Full Tilt brand, software, and other remaining assets.

Full Tilt Poker ultimately became a skin of PokerStars in early 2016.

PokerStars moved forward in facilitating the payment of Absolute Poker and UltimateBet players from the fines it paid to the US government. Meanwhile, the company worked its way back into the US market through New Jersey and then Pennsylvania. The company just launched its latest online products in Michigan at the beginning of 2021. Prior to that, however, in 2020, Flutter Entertainment finalized its acquisition of PokerStars and the Stars Group for $6 billion.

Not long after the blending into Flutter, PokerStars quietly decided to begin the shutdown of Full Tilt Poker. According to Pokerfuse and its sources, PokerStars began shutting down the European Full Tilt platform last year and now confirms it will officially close Full Tilt for good.

2004 – Full Tilt Launched
2007 – Becomes Second-Largest Online Poker Room
2009 – Introduces Rush Poker
2011 – Black Friday
2012 – Full Tilt Returns
2015 – Makes Dramatic Changes to its Game Offerings
2016 – Migrates to PokerStars
2021 – Full Tilt Brand to Shut Down

RIP 2004-2021 https://t.co/9JGm7Cd4uA

— Anuj Arora (@anuj2212) February 19, 2021

The Final Shutdown

The PokerStars and Full Tilt websites now state that Full Tilt’s desktop and mobile applications will shut down on February 25, 2021.

“Our commitment to improving PokerStars software and the PokerStars customer experience in recent years has limited the amount of focus and resources we could apply to the evolution of Full Tilt. We feel it is time to consolidate brands so that everyone has access to the newest features and most innovative games which are available exclusively on PokerStars.”

The process of accounts transferring to PokerStars should be seamless, since Full Tilt accounts already link to PokerStars. The same username and password will work at PokerStars. And balances are already available on PokerStars, along with the ability to withdraw funds if desired.

Even when Full Tilt is offline as of February 25, players can access all of their information and funds via desktop or mobile PokerStars.

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It’s about time

For the last several years, Full Tilt Poker has been like Dr. Malcolm Crow in The Sixth Sense, an online poker room that didn’t know it was really dead. On Thursday, finally, the once-great poker site will stop wandering aimlessly, a ghost with no home, and accept that it passed away years ago. PokerStars has announced that Full Tilt will be no more.

As Full Tilt has been part of the PokerStars network since 2016, not much will change for the few people who still played on Full Tilt, aside from the cosmetic look of the site. Their accounts will be automatically transferred to PokerStars, including account balances and preferences. In fact, Full Tilt Poker players already had the ability to login to PokerStars using their Full Tilt credentials if they so desired. They will just be forced to do so started February 25 and that Full Tilt login info will officially be PokerStars login info.

Explaining why it is doing this, PokerStars explained in a FAQ on its website:

Our commitment to improving PokerStars software and the PokerStars customer experience in recent years has limited the amount of focus and resources we could apply to the evolution of Full Tilt. We feel it is time to consolidate brands so that everyone has access to the newest features and most innovative games which are available exclusively on PokerStars.

Full Tilt Poker Europe Free

This was a long time coming, but it makes sense. In fact, it is surprising it didn’t happen earlier. The Full Tilt Poker name can’t have much value anymore and not only was it just a skin of PokerStars, it was operated by the company, so it’s not like an affiliate or other operator provided any benefit or marketing dollars.

Full Tilt used to be the belle of the ball

As readers of this site likely very well know, Full Tilt Poker, founded in 2004, was once one of the behemoths of the industry. It was unique when it launched, as it had fast software with bright, cartoony avatars, and was founded by well-known poker pros. It’s slogan, “Learn, Chat and Play with the Pros,” was quite true – the first time I played on the site, I played in a micro-stakes game with Perry Friedman, who was very nice to all of us noobs.

Full Tilt Poker European

The site developed into the place to watch pros play and became famous for the nose bleed stakes cash games. When multitudes of poker rooms left the US market after the passage of the UIGEA in late 2006, Full Tilt jumped in stature even more, as it stayed in the market, along with PokerStars, UltimateBet, and Absolute Poker.

Full Tilt never got as large as its arch rival PokerStars, but it in its heyday, it was a very strong second.

A site that will live in infamy

But then Black Friday came along on April 15, 2011, when indictments were unsealed against principals from the aforementioned poker rooms, charging them with money laundering, fraud, and other violations related to the UIGEA. UltimateBet and Absolute Poker disappeared completely, making off with players’ money.

Full Tilt, though, was weird. When the feds froze the site’s accounts, it was discovered that Full Tilt did not have enough money to give players their deposits. There were two main problems. First, because Full Tilt was skirting the law, it was using a network of payment processors to avoid having its payments to customers detected. Millions upon millions of dollars ended up frozen/seized in between Full Tilt and the payment processors and the payment processors and customers. Second, and this is what really did in Full Tilt Poker and making it a shameful example of what can happen with no regulation, it was found out that executives, including Chris Ferguson and Howard Lederer, took millions in payments from the company, using player funds. Thus, when the money flow stopped, Full Tilt was underwater and couldn’t pay players back.

Fortunately, PokerStars came to the rescue. In its whopping three-quarters of a billion dollar settlement with the US Department of Justice, PokerStars agreed to acquire Full Tilt’s assets and make its customers whole. The process took years, but most players did get paid back.

PokerStars operated Full Tilt as a separate poker site at first, but players had little desire to return, so it made Full Tilt a PokerStars skin in the spring of 2016. Since then, most poker players didn’t even know Full Tilt still existed.