PokerStars Announces $100 Million Returned to USA Players

PokerStars announced Friday that it had returned over $100 million to USA poker players, who have been allowed to receive their account balances after the events of Black Friday. While PokerStars is continuing to process refunds to American players, it is unclear how much money remains in USA accounts on the site.

The returned cash is a result of an agreement brokered between PokerStars and the United States Department of Justice on April 20. Within days, PokerStars began processing payments back to US players. It has taken PokerStars about three weeks to reach the $100 million milestone.

The figure of $100 million is significant, if only in terms of figuring out how much total money was temporarily frozen after the Black Friday indictments shut down the three largest poker sites in the United States. Several estimates have been made about the amount of money that was tied up in these accounts, with the most widely quoted being that of PPA executive director John Pappas. He pegged the figure at anywhere between $100 million and $500 million, saying it was difficult to be sure where in that range the total might lie.

It now appears that the answer is likely to be in the upper end of that range. With $100 million already processed at PokerStars, there’s still likely to be significant outstanding funds there. In addition, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker accounts are yet to be accounted for; the combination of accounts balances from those two sites should equal or exceed those from PokerStars.

As of yet, neither Full Tilt Poker nor Absolute Poker have begun to refund account balances to their USA players. Full Tilt Poker – which made an agreement with the Department of Justice at the same time as PokerStars - has vowed to update players by Sunday, while Absolute Poker just made a similar agreement this week.

As part of these agreements, all three sites have been granted the use of their domain names in the United States in order to make refunds to their players. In addition, the agreements expressly allow all three sites to continue operations outside of the USA, easing concerns over whether the sites would be entirely shut down as a result of the indictments.