While that is certainly unfortunate considering that the wait has already lasted longer than two years, the good news is that player funds will eventually be returned. Patience is indeed a virtue and is found in abundance among the world's best poker players.

The long delay has prompted a number of posters to take to online poker forums and gripe about the snail's pace in which the U.S. DoJ operates. That is understandable to most because some players have a significant amount of money tied up in cyberspace. Considering that rest-of-world Full Tilt players were reimbursed with their frozen funds upon the site's relaunch more than six months ago, the excessive wait for U.S. players seems to some a bit unfair.

However, a certain percentage of online players don't find the slowness of payment to be unfair at all and would gladly trade places with Full Tilt's former U.S. players. Those players are the ones who frequented UltimateBet and Absolute Poker and whose prospects of ever being reunited with their long-lost funds look extremely dim.

Of the three poker rooms or networks that were targeted on Black Friday, only the Cereus Network consisting of AP and UB looks to be the one in which players won't be made whole. Recent reports concerning either of the Cereus poker rooms continue to unearth new revelations regarding the superuser cheating scandal from years ago. But nary a mention concerning payouts to former players with account balances remaining on the sites.

Pros such as Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke with past affiliations to UB have made statements attempting to distance themselves from the improprieties that are known to have ocurred. In the case of AP, news of a new book written by Ben Mezrich that apparently blurs fact and fiction in telling of the site's rise and fall will hit the book shelves this week.

While these news reports are certainly interesting and newsworthy to some, what concerns former AP and UB players most is the fact that they have millions of dollars tied up on the poker rooms. Money that will likely never be seen again in light of the list of creditors already lined up who have staked a claim in whatever dollars can be squeezed from the possible remaining assets.

While former U.S. Full Tilt players continue to gripe and whine about the lengthy delay in reimbursement proceedings, just remember that things could have been worse. They could have been former AP and UB players without any such remission process in place and the likelihood of ever again seeing their funds virtually non-existent. AP and UB players would gladly trade places with ex-U.S. Full Tilt players in a heartbeat.