Howard Lederer Apologizes Via Negreanu's Poker Blog

Its been more than 5 years since ‘Black-Friday laid the Full Tilt fiasco bare for all to see, whilst leaving thousands of players cut-off from funds they would be fortunate to see for at least another three years. On May 17th of 2016, Amaya Inc subsequently officially retired the Full Tilt platform by merging the site with its main PokerStars brand, and against this backdrop Full Tilt co-founder, Howard Lederer, has also taken the opportunity to issue a statement taking full responsibility for failing to protect player funds pre-Black Friday.
Lederer has been a pariah of the poker community since the Full Tilt scandal broke, and in his apology issued via Daniel Negreanu’s Full Contact Poker blog the 51 year-old admits that he “should have provided better oversight or made sure that responsible others provided that oversight.”
Explaining why such an apology hadn’t been made earlier, Lederer says that he had missed “the bigger picture’ and had convinced himself that much of the criticism levelled against him had been unfair, and instead should have been directed towards others.” Lederer then ends his piece by saying that a friend helped him to see the error of his ways, and stated:
“An apology is not enough, but it is what I am able to offer to the poker community in the wake of a travesty that I should not have allowed to happen. I am sorry.”
Whether the poker community is prepared to accept Lederer’s statement remains to be seen, but Negreanu, one of Lederer’s most outspoken critics at the time, offered his own take on the matter. According to Negreanu, Lederer’s apology should have come 5 years earlier, but he at he least welcomed Lederer’s frank admission of responsibility for the scandal, and said that it was now up to the players to decide whether or not they “should be any less pissed at him for what happened?”
The timing of the apology has also led some to believe that the 2-times WSOP bracelet winner is intending to enter this year’s WSOP in Las Vegas, and is hoping that his statement may help diffuse some of the scorn and resentment felt towards him ahead of an apperance.