After playing there for 2 years I self excluded myself and erased my account with them. Here is why I did it:
1) the rakeback system IMO makes people keep coming and playing there. The
full tilt rake at the micro limits is more than rake on
poker stars or
titan poker or any other site I have played on , but full tilt has this rakeback deal.
truth about full tilt rakeback #1 : if you deduce the rakeback from the rake paid , it is still greater than at the other sites ! for a 1$ hu sit&go for example you pay 10 cents -27%rakeback = 7,3 cents on full tilt and only 5 cents on titan poker for example
truth about full tilt rakeback #2 : some random guy makes a deposit , plays and withdraws/loses it. When friday comes he gets rakeback so he opens the full tilt client and starts playing some more. In this way he is hoked to play some more.
Why is full tilt offering a 10% rake and 27% or this as rakeback , when it could just offer 7,3% rake from the beginning ?
2) the
iron man promotion is a joke.
Example: to qualify for iron man bronze you must make 50 iron man points (it means 5$ paid as rake) for 20 days a month meaning you pay them 73$ (I deduced the rakeback).
for this 73$ you get 25 iron man medals. with 125 iron man medals you can buy 5000 ftp so you pay 73$ to get 1000 ftp.
since 2 ftp = 1 cent (60 ftp for satelite to daily $ = 30 cents for satelite to daily $) it means you pay 73$ and get back 5$. 73$ for 5$ - Not so awesome promotion.
3) It takes a long time to make a withdrawal. When you deposit the money gets there in seconds , but when you withdrawal you have to wait for at least a working day (best case scenario) till your withdrawal is approved. If you withdraw on tuesday you withdrawal will only be approved monday (since friday it is still pending for approval and saturday and sunday they simply do not work).
The downside of this is that in every second while your $ withdrawal is waiting to be approved you can decide to cancel it and play some more. Bad news for the guy proned to tilting.
Why does a multi billion $ company does not have more staff to work on the withdrawals ? Why do they do not work on weekends when most players play poker ?
4) You never get to learn play and chat with the pros , I mean you can talk a bit but to play them and learn from them enough to improve your game to be a decent player - that is impossible unless you can afford to play the highest stakes buy ins regularly.
Every time you open a tv and see a full tilt comercial they say you can learn from the pros. I am pretty sure that for a guy new to poker , the idea of learning to play from the full tilt pros, and to make $ and crush whatever stake with what he learned while chating with the pros is just a wet dream.
Yet it is what they say in all the comercials. Why do they say that and let people imagine things that are not real ?
5) Full tilt has no linux client. Yes , you cannot play on full tilt if you have linux operating system on your computer.
Now , for a multi billion $ company who probably already has a lot of programmers , to spend a couple more thousand $ to make a linux client is not actually an effort. So they spend $ on tv comercials but no linux client.
United States of America read article Dutta: Bodog in European Drive.
