I have a policy against too much sympathy for multi-millionaires. He would sit out lucky streaks by opponents by relying on the belief that over time his brainy, measured tactics would prevail. He had deeply embraced game theory, somewhat before it became fashionable among card players, and appeared to care only about the math of poker and the means of winning at it. I stood in front of a casino with him one night waiting for his car, and when the valet pulled up in an old Jeep I was surprised when Ferguson stepped forward. Real-estate agents courted him with photographs of houses-the houses had cathedral ceilings and theatres and pools looking out on the desert-but he didn’t seem in any hurry to buy one. He had a room with a computer where he spent a lot of time going through poker hands and trying to commit to memory the likelihood of their appearing. The house was new and small, in a neighborhood of similar houses some distance from the strip. Ferguson has at least fourteen days to frame a response, according to the Department of Justice, and hasn’t said anything yet.įerguson, when I wrote about him, already appeared to be wealthy from Full Tilt-it did nearly a billion dollars of business a year-but he lived in his girlfriend’s house in Las Vegas. “Full Tilt insiders lined their own pockets with funds picked from the pockets of their most loyal customers while blithely lying to both players and the public alike about the safety and security of the money deposited with the company,” Bharara says.

The prosecutor, Preet Bharara, described the case as a Ponzi scheme. Another owner, Howard Lederer, who was known as the Professor for his math skills, is said to have been given forty-two million. If the accusation is accurate, Ferguson had possession of twenty-five million dollars of this money and had been promised sixty million more. As of March, the company owed three hundred and ninety million dollars to players around the world who thought their money was safely in accounts under their names. Chris Ferguson, the star poker player and gifted programmer who devised the means and structure for Full Tilt Poker and was one of its principal owners, and whom I wrote about for The New Yorker two years ago, has been charged, along with others, with appropriating, between 20, some four hundred and forty million dollars that poker players had been using to gamble on Full Tilt.

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