Daily Majors: Narwal, Sood, Sharma, Gupta & Gujral Rake in the Massive Paydays on Diwali Eve

It’s a century-old tradition in India to play card games during Diwali. After the setbacks to the usual live get-togethers this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the only viable option left to indulge in this age-old Diwali celebration is to enjoy the game online.

While the Diwali celebrations are relatively low key this year, there has clearly not been any let-up in action on the virtual felts given the massive guaranteed tourneys running across the various poker platforms. Here`s a complete recap of all the headline tourneys from Friday.

Spartan Poker

Even as Spartan Poker has been earnestly preparing to host the massive ₹8 Crores GTD IPC Final Table Series from November 16, its usual weekly flagships have been running at full steam.

Friday brought back the site`s ₹35 Lakhs GTD The Elite, where a turnout of 297 entries resulted in a glaring ₹5.30 Lakhs overlay shortfall. The Spartan Poker regular ‘Paperboi’ made the most of this generous Diwali contribution by the site as he lapped up the title and the ₹7.75 Lakhs cash prize that came with it. Aditya ‘Nairrrr09’ Nair finished runner-up for ₹5.23 Lakhs.

The other FT finishers included Young Gun Anuj ‘tittooTauji’ Yadav (3^rd for ₹3.60 Lakhs), PokerGuru Ambassador Vivek ‘KasolHieghts’ Singh (4^th for ₹2.93 Lakhs), and Sahil ‘ImHighIshove’ Mahboobani (9^th for ₹78,400).

Friday`s at Spartan Poker can never be complete without the TGIF. The ₹1650 entry buy-in logged in 687 contenders last night, overlaying ₹69,500 on its ₹11 Lakhs prize pool guarantee. It took a little over eight and a half hours of play for veteran poker pro Raman ‘tathagat’ Gujral to come out on top to win ₹2.13 Lakhs, beating ‘WuZetian’ (runner-up for ₹1.35 Lakhs) in heads-up play. This is the second time that Gujral has won the TGIF title this year, and last night’s win has pushed his online record to ₹2.66 Crores.

PokerGuru Ambassadors Mithun ‘Intuitionnn’ Mahesh (3^rd for ₹97,790) and Naresh ‘FreeFlow’ Veeravalli (4^th for ₹79,090) alongside Adwait ‘AdwaitPol’ Pol (9^th for ₹21,010) FT-ed the tourney!

PokerStars India

The festive celebrations clearly kept many tourney regs out from the Friday night flagships as even the ₹12 Lakhs GTD Highroller filled in a ₹2.48 Lakhs shortfall as only 136 challengers came in to play the ₹7,700 entry buy-in tourney. It took almost six hours to find a winner, with ‘yash1805’ clinching the title for ₹2.35 Lakhs after striking a heads-up deal with Akshay ‘powershell42’ Asawa (runner-up for ₹2.03 Lakhs).

Chandan ‘RunBarryRun’ Arora (4^th for ₹1.07 Lakhs), Sagar ‘sagarpupull’ Choudhury (5^th for ₹81,005), Rubin ‘kornkid4’ Labroo (6^th for ₹61,116), Amar ‘PsykoEko’ B Iyer (7^th for ₹46,111), “Star of the Month” – October, Shailesh ‘ArithemeticMean’ Patel. (8^th for ₹34,790), and Shashank ‘Goldfish097’ Shekhar (9^th for ₹29,596) FT-ed the tourney!

The other marquee tourney on PokerStars India, the ₹5 Lakhs GTD Battle Royale, also played down to a heads-up deal with Pulkit ‘pulkitgoyal53’ Goyal coming out on top for ₹1.06 Lakhs. Adwait ‘Adwait Pol’ Pol finished runner-up for ₹60,762.

Dhinesh ‘you3betl4bet’ Kumar (4^th for ₹32,686), Umesh ‘dhondu.chilll’ Sharma (6^th for ₹24,910), and Sreeharsha ‘DonkeyCommitted’ Boneni (9^th for ₹10,742) booked FT finishes.

Adda52

Friday turned out to be another action-packed day for the WPT Online India (WPTOI) series running on Adda52.

The ₹25 Lakhs GTD WPT India Mini ME got done with the third of its seven starting with Day 1C recording 395 entries (234 unique and 161 re-entries). At the end of the 29 stipulated levels of play, only 42 runners were able to bag stacks for Day 2. Rajesh ‘phanthom’ Singh (391,498) bagged the most massive stack of the day, while ‘pokerbrat032’ (369,354). ‘AACES71’ (349,019). Chirag ‘mahikk’ Bhardwaj (239,930) and Bhavit ‘Tyrogambit’ Jain (221,652) carried forward above-average stacks.

The WPT Trophy event of the day, the ₹20 Lakhs GTD WPT Friday Feature, crushed its prize pool guarantee as 439 participants helped generate a profitable ₹26.34 Lakhs prize pool. After almost nine hours of uninterrupted action, Young Gun Ujjwal ‘fourteenk’ Narwal claimed the title for ₹6.45 Lakhs after defeating another Young Gun Kanchan ‘thandicoke’ Sharma (runner-up for ₹3.81 Lakhs).

PokerGuru Ambassador Ashish ‘rocky3705’ Ahuja (3^rd for ₹2.63 Lakhs) and Chandan ‘darkfish15’ Arora (6^th for ₹92,190) were the other prominent FT finishers.

The other Friday headliner, the ₹10 Lakhs GTD WPT Mini PLO, suffered an overlay of ₹47,850 after registering 139 entries. Racing past the field was ‘vishal_jain,’ who won their best-recorded score on Adda52 worth ₹2.21 Lakhs after a heads-up chop with ‘John7549’ (runner-up for ₹2.19 Lakhs).

Sumit ‘hammer_head’ Sapra (3^rd for ₹1.25 Lakhs) and Gagandeep ‘gaganhyd’ Singh (4^th for ₹95,000) were the other top finishers in the tourney.

The daily featured tourney, the ₹5 Lakhs GTD WPT Classic, clocked in 312 runners to escape with an overlay deficit of ₹74,120, and the top 34 places got paid. The mystery user ‘bulletsbaby’ walked away with the ₹1.17 Lakhs first-place cash prize and the WPT Online title just as ‘pizzakhanahai’ collected ₹83,340 for their runner-up finish.

PokerBaazi

PokerBaazi’s Friday signature tourney, the ₹15 Lakhs GTD The Weekly Highroller, commenced proceedings at 8 PM. The ₹11,000 entry buy-in event dragged in a reg-laded field of 135 entries (85 unique and 50 re-entries), booking an overlay loss of ₹1.50 Lakhs. And championing this competitive field was none other than Young Gun Gaurav Sood. The undisputed #1 ranked player of the year for 27 consecutive weeks looks like he is in a hurry to cross the ₹4 Crore-barrier in winnings for the year as he added a whopping ₹4,02,000 to his tally last night.

Sood had to run through three PokerGuru Ambassador`s on his way to the top with Madhav Gupta (2nd for ₹2,82,000), Ashish Munot (3rd for ₹1,81,050) & Ankit Wadhawan (4th for ₹1,34,100) also booking FT finishes. Guruprasad Gupta (5th for ₹1,00,500) & Young Gun Devang Yadav (6th for ₹80,400) rounded out the 6-max FT.

The other Friday winners were:

On behalf of the entire team at PokerGuru, we wish all our readers a very prosperous Diwali!

NOTE: Since today is a festive holiday, we will not be publishing the complete Daily Major`s report.