Doyle Defends Some Full Tilt Management

February 21st, 2012 | 10:45 am

Doyle Brunson has written a blog in which he comes to the defense of a few of the Full Tilt Pros who had managerial roles at the company.

By Matt Kaufman, Rakeback.com Poker News Editor

With respect to the Full Tilt Poker situation, the vast majority of the poker world has been very critical of the individuals who were involved. The most frequent targets of verbal outrage have been CEO Ray Bitar as well as Full Tilt Pros Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson, each of whom played a managerial role in the company at some point.

Most poker pros who knew Lederer or Ferguson well, however, haven't been very outspoken. They have mostly decided to shut their mouths completely or to vocalize somewhat dull criticisms.

Earlier this week, Daniel Negreanu made himself an exception to this rule by viciously bashing the actions of everyone in Full Tilt management in a scathing video blog.

On Monday, Lederer and Ferguson received some support in a blog which took a contrary stance to Negreanu's. It was written by an enormously famous and well-respected figure in the poker world - two-time world champion Doyle Brunson.

Doyle's blog puts much of the blame for Full Tilt's accounting situation solely on Ray Bitar, and Doyle has decided that he believes Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson had no knowledge of the state the company was in prior to Black Friday.

Lederer has personally told Doyle that he had no knowledge of the issues, and the poker legend believes him:

"When someone I've known for years, trusted and respected looks me dead in the eye and says he didn't know about the financial problems, call me a big old Texas sucker because I will believe them."

With federal investigators going over the situation with a fine-toothed comb, the poker world may not have to wait too long to find out if Doyle is, in fact, a "big old Texas sucker."