HOLD GAMING
HOLD TIGHT
Hold Gaming is ploughing its own furrow in the world of iGaming. Founder and CEO Phillip Runyan talks to GIO about the company and its mission.
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My experience in social media has given me a little bit of an edge here on how to find the right players
t’s not that common to find a company in a field of one, but Hold Gaming might be exactly that. Blackjack Fire is their first offering, and CEO Phillip Runyan believes his background with DoubleDown Interactive in the social gaming space has put him in the ideal position to create something genuinely new and exciting. Phillip spoke with GIO about the company…
GIO: What is Hold Gaming? Phillip Runyan: Fundamentally we are the DraftKings of iGaming, to put it in its most basic form. What we are doing is creating iGaming content, amending the play style so that it meets the stringent requirements of being a skill-based game, then distributing that content on our platform in upwards of 40 US states and Australia.
We are a skill-based gaming company; casino e-sports is a term we have coined because we are a competitive casino gaming company. There has been a long history of trying to make games fit iGaming, to make them fit within the realm of legislation that works in the US or internationally. To try and duck some rules and regulations, create grey spaces – that’s not really what we are trying to do here. We want people to play games that they know and love.
GIO: And you happen to have such games? PR: In the first instance that might be Blackjack Fire. The core construct of the game is how you would play blackjack but instead of playing the house you play a timed round where you and your competitor have the exact same starting balance, same minimum and maximum at the table which you can wager; each hand won gives you points on the leaderboard, both players have three minutes to play, and both players have identical decks. That means that if you and I both have the same bankroll management strategy we can both count cards the exact same way! But it really means that our fundamental understanding of the rules of blackjack, the ability to process math and probability faster than the other person becomes the true identifying skill leveraged here. If I can get through my deck 1% faster than you, I can create 1% more opportunities, more cards, from that deck, so more chances to put points on the board and beat you.
GIO: Your background was with DoubleDown Interactive, wasn’t it? PR: Yes. We went from a live launch to acquisition by IGT in 18 months. My role there was to drive marketing and for a while I was a one-man team handling user acquisition, retention marketing, email,
16 FEBRUARY 2020 GIO
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