Late last month, about 100 players turned out for the latest running of the PocketFives Open, our main community-building event. We had an SISMIX live event package on the line for the winner courtesy of Winamax, which hosted the Open, and when the smoke cleared, Romania’s zuzuada (pictured) was the champion, earning a permanent badge in her PocketFives profile.

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“I saw your email about the tournament and was happy to try it out since it was going to have a huge overlay,” the latest PocketFives Open winner told us. We had added prizes for 26 finishers in the event, or one-quarter of the field, including PocketFives Training, PocketFives gear, and plenty of Winamax tickets courtesy of the EU-facing site.

zuzuada said, when she talked to us, that she wasn’t sure if she’d accept the SISMIX trip to Marrakesh or instead try to parlay her victory into Winamax tickets, but either way has been playing for four years now. She added that the field wasn’t terribly difficult to navigate through, although PocketFives stoked the fire with several high-profile bounties, including three players in the top 25 worldwide in our Poker Rankings.

She has mainly focused on mastering No Limit Texas Hold’em and Pot Limit Omaha and plays poker full-time. Prior to poker, she was in university and said, “My boyfriend is a good poker player and had lots of big wins, so I learned from him.”

We believe zuzuada is the second female to win a PocketFives Open, joining ECUgirl (pictured), who won it on Hogwild Poker in mid-2012. She said that while she’s a woman in a sport that’s predominantly male, “In general, other players are not very focused on me because of my user name, which is pretty generic in terms of gender.”

We have had 35 players win the PocketFives Open and will add more to that list later this year, as we run the Open quarterly. “I am happy because I won and hope you guys have many tournaments like that in the future,” zuzuada closed by saying. Don’t worry, we will.

If you don’t have a Winamax account, sign up through the links on PocketFives to get a 100% first-time deposit bonus up to €500 and one free month of PocketFives Training when you make a deposit. Click here to get started.

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