Justin Bonomo

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Like several of his fellow professionals, including Bryn Kenney, Justin Bonomo graduated to poker from ‘Magic: The Gathering’ at any early age. He frequently played poker online in his teenage years, but first came to worldwide attention when, in 2005, age the age of 19 – that is, still not of legal age to play live poker tournaments in the United States – he finished fourth in the European Poker Tour (EPT) French Open in Deauville, making him the youngest player to make the final table in a televised poker tournament.

Bonomo won his first of his three World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelets in 2014, but his second and third in 2018, a year in which he won nine tournaments and over $25 million in prize money. Highlights of his ‘annus mirabilis’ included a Super High Roller Bowl China event at the Babylon Casino in Macau, worth HK$37.8 million, or $4.8 million, to the winner and, of course, the WSOP Big One for One Drop event at the Rio Casino in Las Vegas, worth a staggering $10 million. Bonomo has definitely benefited from the rapid increase in the number of ‘high roller’ poker tournaments in the last decade but, even so, his unprecedented winning streak in 2018 took him to the top of the all-time money list, ahead of Daniel Negreanu, with just over $45 million in live earnings alone.

Formerly a frequent and successful online poker player, under the moniker ‘ZeeJustin’, Bonomo has courted his fair share of controversy over the years and was, in fact, banned by PartyPoker for operating multiple accounts at the same time. However, in recent years Virginia-born Bonomo, 33, has focussed solely on live poker tournaments and, if 2018 and the early part of 2019 are anything to go by, appears to have made a wise decision.

 

Frozen Gems Slot by Play n Go

frozen-gems-300x169Introduction

For Let It Snow from Hacksaw Gaming, players will need cold-weather gear instead of board shorts and flip-flops. In a cold, snowy mountain covered with pines, a wardrobe change is prompted by the change of environment from the tropical island to the cold mountain.

Metrics

We’re looking at a variance rating between medium and high. This slot can turn grinding sessions into blockbuster payouts in an instant. 96.36 % is the RTP and 10,000x is the top payout.

Playing cards from 10 to Ace represent the low-value symbols here. A premium icon is a gemstone in a green, red, purple or orange colour.

W is also the Wild, which can substitute for all symbols to form a winning combination. Also, if five lines are selected, the wager will be multiplied by 2.5 times. For the free spins round to be activated, there must be Scatters on the reels.

Features

You’ll need free spins, expanding reels, and multipliers if you want to get close to that top 10,000x payout. The Cascading Reels feature is activated after every winning spin, so winning icons are removed from the reels, and new symbols fill in the blanks. Each successive win in the Cascading Wins feature increases the multiplier by 1x.

There are 2x and 3x Splitting Scatters, which split the symbols on the reels beneath, and the frozen horizontal Bonus Wheel Symbols, which represent Bonus Wilds. In splitting reels, more symbols appear on the reels, so there are more paylines. Three winning symbols or scatter symbols must land on the reels below to activate the Bonus Wheel modifiers.

Three Scatter symbols must appear simultaneously on the reels for the Frozen Spins feature, 9 free spins are awarded here, along with a 5x bet win. Free spins are awarded for every additional Scatter that lands during the feature.

In the Frozen Spins feature, any multipliers active on the spin are carried over. Each winning spin increases the win multiplier by 1x during free spins.

 

 

Fedor Holz

Fedor_Holz-683x1024Still only in his late twenties, Saarbrücken-born Fedor Holz has already enjoyed an extraordinary poker career. So far, he has won just one World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet, in the High Roller for One Drop event in 2016, but collected $5 million for his trouble and enjoyed his biggest payout yet, $6 million, when finishing runner-up to Justin Bonomo in the WSOP Big One for One Drop event in 2018. In his short, but highly lucrative, career, Holz, who specialises in high roller tournaments, has pocketed seven-figure earnings on five other occasions. Currently ranked sixth on the all-time money list, with $32.6 million in live earnings alone, he is, unquestionably, one of the most talented and, arguably, luckiest tournament poker players of his generation.

Holz started playing poker, informally, as a 17-year-old student, before turning to online poker once of legal age. Subsequently, under the auspices of a prominent multi-table tournament (MTT) player, he received the instruction, and stake, required to progress his career as a professional poker player, both online and live. Holz won his first cash prize, €15,320 , or $19,288, for finishing runner-up in the GPT II Deepstack Series Main Event at the King’s Resort Live in Rozvadov in the Czech Republic in 2012. He became a full-time professional poker in 2013, settled in Vienna, Austria – where he still resides – in 2014 and, later the same year, under the moniker ‘CrownUpGuy’, saw off 2,141 other players to claim the $1.3 million first prize at the World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) Main Event.

Poker vs Blackjack: Which of these casino games is the one for you!

poker-682332_640-300x239Poker and Blackjack can perhaps be considered the kings of casino, iconic in their own way with casino and non casino players alike. Blackjack can certainly be seen to be a less involved game, less complex than poker and well suited to ‘newbies’, but when it comes to the potential for making money if you dedicate yourself to it, there’s nothing quite like poker. Just looking to the titans of the profession alone will tell you that. But again, it takes more time, dedication, and hard work to learn to become a confident and skilled Poker player.

Poker vs. Blackjack – Key Differences

Both are unique games that lure in large crowd of players and come to mind when you think of a casino settings. However, Blackjack is easier to get into than Poker, more in technology language ‘plug and play’. Outside of behaviour such as card counting Blackjack mostly requires luck to win and suffer less at the hands of the house egde. Poker has a lot more elements to it, requiring skill, psychology, and to a degree deception to win in the longrun. As such poker is highly competitive when compared to Blackjack. There are several strategies and elements used to win in Poker, while that’s not really true of Blackjack, which I personally see as a more fun based casino game.

In Blackjack, players can choose the extent of interaction with other players, as it’s mostly the dealer and their cards thats the point of focus. However, Poker can’t be played well if you lack social skills as you’re at a disadvantage if can’t read people to some extent. Put simply, in Blackjack, the player plays against the casino, and in poker, the player plays against other players. Thus it also creates a potentially more pressurised situation in poker… but with that comes opportunity if you can keep a cool head.

With blackjack it’s essentially all about minimising the house edge via deducing when to stick or twist and so on, and with poker the higher the stakes skill comes far more into play. Poker is both about understanding the odds and also player psychology all rolled into one. There’s are no fixed odds of winning as such, and you cannot know which hands others will play or fold.

Which One Is Easier to Learn – Poker or Blackjack?

If you are a person who wants to enter the world of the casino while having an easy learning process, Blackjack is your game! The playing strategy is pretty specific, and there is not much to master unlike Poker, which is harder to learn and even harder to master, but with potentially large rewardings if you’re a cut above the rest!