Vinay B, a Bangalore based architect has pursued his poker dream parallel to his day-job and has fetched some impressive records at the online as well as live felt. One of the regular tournament players from Bangalore, Vinay has been a semi-professional player for past few year. He entered the OPN Challengers Series as one of the early contenders and will be blogging about his progress on this page.
19th February 2016
“You are one of the selected few challengers for WSOP ME ticket OPN challenge, would you be interested?” This is what I heard when I got a call from Mukesh from the OPN team and I almost couldn’t believe my luck that day. WSOP series in the Vegas city is a dream for every aspiring poker player to take part in at some point in life. We keep saying to your friends in the community after few years I will surely participate in it, and is the most amazing feeling if you could do it much earlier than you had actually planned it for much later and Adda52 and OPN gave us this chance to win this ticket.
OPN Challenger Series is a great format where the live tournament scores (have to be IN THE MONEY) will be recorded from the DPT and IPC and also the online tournaments on Adda52.com like the Adda52 Millions, IOPT, PMT, Wed prime scores will be computed together with the number of hands won on cash tables on the site.
It kicked off well for me; we were given a bankroll of 25k on the 7th January and straight away started putting volumes on Adda52.com, the most premier Indian poker sites today. Key here is was to win more number of hands on 25/50 blinds and above and to be to do that the simplest thing was to put in volumes. I even played few tournaments on the site but didn’t do much initially and then finally played the 10k satellite on 10th January for the 100k seat for the DPT Series ME to be played on 23rd January and was one of the 3 winners. Was all excited to pretty much freeroll the event and play with no pressure of a big buy-in event, booked my flight and unfortunately on the day I had to fly something came up urgently in the family for which I had to cancel my trip. I did eventually reach Goa for the 25k deep stack event and the 15k bounty event.
I busted pretty early in the 25k Deepstack event to a larger stack who had accumulated chips very quickly. I hit my set of 9’s on the flop of Ad,4d,9s, flatted his pre and flop standard size bets from small blind and re-raised him on the turn which was a 3c, he tanked and flatted my re-raise and eventually snapped my river shove which was a 5.he had 6 7 of diamonds. Next day was the 15k bounty event , I was geared up to make some score in this one, did well throughout the tourney ,always managed to have a stack of more than average, but lost a crucial hand when there were 25 odd people left (12 places paid) against Dhaval’s KK who raised pre and I defended on the bb with 3h 4h, flop was QhQc5h , called the flop bet and turn was a 3d.he checked the turn behind me and I bet on river which he snapped. Lost another hand with 88 in hand I raised from cutoff and bb re-raised giving a flop of 7 high, he was a tight player who bet again on the flop which I called and finally folded his turn bet, he showed 77. I Finally finished 14th When I shoved with AhQh with 9bb and got called by KK and not coming in cash nor accumulating points for the OPN challenge which was very disappointing.
Subsequently after the GOA trip , did well online in the tourney in the IOPT series , finished 5th in the 1 lac GTD event and 13th in the 2lac GTD event. This should help me score some points and manage a decent lead in the OPN Challenger Series. After seeing the results at end of January I was happy to see the progress I made overall but there is easily a possibility of being complacent and also other players will make harder efforts to come up in the overall tally. We are in total 12 players who are competing against each other for this prestigious ticket. Happy with the good start to but need to maintain the momentum till end of April. Looking forward to play few events in IPC and doing well there.
I would like to thank Adda52.com and the OPN team especially Mukesh who has really done a great job in organizing this whole challenge and coordinating with all the players which surely is not the easiest jobs to do. See you in Vegas folks.