Justin Bonomo leaves US

In the wake of Black Friday, Justin Bonomo has left the US to play poker in Malta

Yet another former online poker professional based in the United States has left the country in order to continue playing the online game. The latest player to up and leave is the poker sensation, Justin Bonomo. The 25 year old up and coming poker star has relocated to Malta in the Mediterranean in order to continue playing online. He joins a distinguished list of world famous players to leave the United States, including such legends as Phil Galfond, Olivier Busquet and Daniel Negreanu to name but a few. Most US players who leave the states in order to play online have opted to head North to Canada with others heading South towards Costa Rica and Central America.

Poker in the United States is going to be missing out on a lot of talented live players as they all move abroad and Bonomo is no exception to this. Bonomo, along with every other US poker pro, has seen his earnings drop massively in the wake of the crackdown on online poker by the US Department of Justice (DoJ). This loss of earnings is undoubtedly what prompted him to head for the small island in the middle of the Mediterranean. The young player has already earned close to $3 million from live tournament’s alone and is likely to once again take the online world by storm once he is up and running.
Amongst other things, Bonomo won an event at the 2009 World Series of Poker Circuit at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas is going to arrive in Malta in time to participate in the huge World Poker Tour (WPT) Malta event on September 20th which, like all WPT events, is likely to have a prize pool of a somewhere around the €1 million mark.

The trouble for online gamers began on April 15th when the DoJ came down on the three biggest online poker sites in the world in what has come to be called Black Friday. On this day it became almost impossible for US players to find an online game that they could register into. What was then the second largest online poker site in the world, Full Tilt Poker, never recovered from the problems they encountered then and has since ceased operating, at least temporarily.