On Sunday at Noon ET, the 2011 National Heads-Up Poker Championship will continue airing on NBC. The series, which is sponsored by GoDaddy and features Craig Hummer andAli Nejad on the call, continued to feature PokerStars ads during commercial breaks last week despite the indictment of the site’s founder Isai Scheinberg on April 15th.

Last week’s one-hour episode featured action from the round of 64 in the hearts bracket, with one of the highlights being PokerStars pro David Williams facing off against the NFL’s all-time rushing leader, Emmitt Smith. The former running back told National Heads-Up Poker Championship floor reporter Leeann Tweeden, “I’m just here trying to compete.”

On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice came to an agreement with PokerStars andFull Tilt Poker to facilitate player cashouts by returning their dot-com domain names for that purpose. When the checks will start rolling out remains to be seen, as a press release issued by Full Tilt cautioned, “There exists no authorized U.S. payment channel through which to make refunds.”

Full Tilt elaborated why its current predicament with the Department of Justice makes it difficult to return player finances, even with the government’s blessing: “Full Tilt Poker has no accounting of the millions of dollars of player funds that were seized by the government and the government has not agreed to permit any of the seized player funds to be returned to the players. Finally, there are numerous legal and jurisdictional issues that must be considered before poker winnings can be paid out to players throughout the United States.”

On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a deal with PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker to begin the process of paying out players affected by last week’s indictments. Although a significant number of questions are still left unanswered, the process of paying out money owed to U.S. customers on PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker appears to have begun.

A Department of Justice press release read in part, “This office expects the companies to return the money that U.S. players entrusted to them, and we will work with the poker companies to facilitate the return of funds to players, as today’s agreements with PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker demonstrate.”

As the fallout from online poker’s Black Friday continues, there is at least one thin ray of sunshine that has made it through the clouds.we can confirm that GSN‘s “High Stakes Poker” will continue airing. However, it’ll be shown at 11:00pm ET and PT on Saturdays. This past weekend, PokerStars.net commercials were shown during the broadcast; to anyone unaware of everything that happened on Friday, nothing looked any different.

This weekend, “High Stakes Poker” will shed its PokerStars branding including on-screen graphics and verbal mentions. A GSN official told us on Wednesday, “As a result of the indictments and by mutual agreement, PokerStars.net and Full Tilt Poker.net have withdrawn their presenting sponsorships, brand integrations, and ads from GSN’s poker programming.  Beginning this weekend, our poker schedule will incorporate those and other changes, and we will evaluate additional adjustments to our schedule as warranted.”