After an interlude of over three years, India Poker Championship (IPC) – one of India’s biggest live poker tournament series returned to Goa at the Big Daddy casino. The series got off to a flying start with its opening event – 10K Freezeout drawing a record-breaking field of 437 entries. Thursday saw the start of its 100K High Roller. As expected, the 2-day event went on to register a record-breaking field of 207 entries to easily crush its INR 1 Crore guarantee and create a whopping INR 2.03 crores in prizepool, which was eventually shared by the top 24 finishers with a min-cash of INR 1.88 Lac.
The largest share of the prizepool went to Pranay Chawla who outlasted a strong 207-entry field, including Nitish Gupta in heads-up to earn his first-ever live title for INR 51.66 lac, his best score till date.
Day 2 of the High Roller resumed yesterday with 70 players in contention of winning INR 51.66 lac. The action was fast and a lot of players were eliminated during the first three levels. The bubble was reached during level 17 and it was Gokul Raj who earned the unfortunate title of bubble boy. He faced an all-in from Jimmy George who had Ac Kc. Raj called with Qc Qd, which could not hold up on the Ah Kh 9s 4d 6s board and Raj exited in 25th place. The first ITM elimination was Anil Gulati who exited in 24th place for INR 1.88 Lac. Soon, start-of-day chip leader Praveeen Dwarkanath got busted in 19th place for INR 2.49 Lac after his AJ failed to improve against Pradeep Sharma’s AK.
Thereafter, eliminations continued and the final table was reached during level 23 after Jimmy George exited in 8th for INR 6.04 Lac. Jimmy was busted by the eventual champion Pranay Chawla who started FT as chip leader with 6,580,000 chips. Chawla went on to eliminate four players (Gaurav Kathuria (6th), Dhaval Mudgal (5th), Ankit Wadhawan (4th) and Vaibhav Sharma (3rd) from the FT to eventually reach heads-up where he had 19 Million against 12 Million chips of Nitish Gupta.
Gupta put up a good fight and was even able to close the gap. However, it was Chawla who took down the coveted title. The last hand of the tournament saw Gupta shoving all-in with As 10s and Chawla called with Kc 10h. The board ran K 3 6 K 10, giving Chawla a full house to win the title.
The tournament saw many notable players in action and some of them to finish deep were Raman Gujral (9th for INR 5.18 Lac), Pradeep Sharma (10th for INR 4.46 Lac), Nishant Sharma (13th for INR 3.77 lac), Jai Saha (14th for INR 3.77 lac),and Siddharth Karia (15th for INR 3.77 lac) to name a few.
A few big names who exited empty-handed in this high roller tournament included Sangeeth Mohan, Adda52 Team Pro and bracelet winner Nikita Luther, Madhav Gupta, Raghav Bansal, Jasven Saigal, Abhishek Jalan, Phanindra Akkina, Sahil Mahboobani and Deepak Bothra.
Final Table Payouts (INR)
- Pranay Chawla – INR 51,66,800
- Nitish Gupta – INR 35,24,500
- Vaibhav Sharma – INR 20,89,900
- Ankit Wadhawan – INR 12,71,300
- Dhaval Mudgal – INR 9,81,800
- Gaurav Kathuria – INR 8,13,500.
- Vikram Kumar – INR 6,93,200