About Those "Down in 48 Hours" Statements..

Published on April 16th, 2011 12:04 pm EST

There has been a lot of talk about Pokerstars, Full Tilt Poker and AP/UB being "down within the next 48 hours".

Andrew Feldman of ESPN posted these two Tweets yesterday:

"According to @GamblingComp, all the indicted sites, around the world, will be down within 48 hours"

"For those that are asking, yes, I was told that the sites will be down even where the sites currently legal. Only the 3 though (AP/FTP/PS)"

Now, I don't want to speak for someone else, but I think what is meant here is that the actual domain names (Pokerstars.com, FullTiltPoker.com, etc) will be down in 48 hours. The DNS servers for these domain names have been updated with the FBI's information, but it can take up to 48 hours for these changes to propagate across the Internet. As mentioned, these changes can take up to 48 hours, which is what was meant in these two Tweets above (I think). This is why some people noticed the domain changes right away, while some people still saw the old sites.

As far as I know, the actual software clients will not be down within 48 hours. Pokerstars has switched over to Pokerstars.eu, and Full Tilt Poker has switched over to FullTiltPoker.co.uk. From everything that is being said, PS and FTP plan on continuing to service non-US players. This is their plan anyways - both of these companies surely had plans in place to deal with an event such as what happened yesterday. In short, neither company was truly caught off-guard by this news.

There will be quite a bit of craziness over the next few days and weeks (I know that people outside of the US are having poker client and cashout issues with both sites at this moment), but as far as I know, both Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker plan on remaining open to the non-US markets. That's the word from both companies anyways..


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Filed Under: Poker Legal Issues