This Week in Poker: July 29 – August 4

In the PokerGuru feature ‘This Week in Poker,’ we bring you the weekly roundup of the most significant online scores by Indian MTT players and the top stories from both the live and online poker circuit.

Here are this week’s top stories!

August kicked off with quite the aplomb with a flurry of activity on the virtual felts. With two major networks marred with technical difficulties, Spartan Poker steered the online MTT action with the launch of its Grand Poker Series (GPS). The weeklong series commenced on August 3, and the biggest-guaranteed tourney hosted in the series thus far was the ₹35 Lakhs GTD GPS Destiny. Drawing in 754 entrants, the event crowned a champion is Manoj ‘h4r5hv33r’ Singh, who pocketed a career-best ₹9.80 Lakhs! For his exceptional performance, Singh is our “PokerGuru Star of the Week!”

PokerGuru Ambassador Ratul ‘MuscariAs’ Steves, Srihari ‘bangbang99’ Bang, and Sathish ‘Jaqkten’ Ananth banked the next top scores this past week.

While the GPS has been keeping the mid-to-high stakes players busy, Pocket52 has rolled out its biggest-ever ‘Blue’ series, catering to the low-to-mid stakes players. This month-long series features over ₹4.5 Crores in guaranteed prizes, with buy-ins ranging from ₹11 to ₹4,400!

Coming up ahead is the PokerBaazi Premier League (PPL) that starts on August 7. Boasting a mammoth ₹7.3 Crores in prize pool guarantees, the series will run until August 16, and features 62 high-value tournaments, including the ₹1 Crore GTD The MoneyMaker!

Moving on to the international sphere, the WSOP.com leg of the 2020 World Series of Poker (WSOP) Online is now in the books. A total of 31 bracelets were awarded, with Nahrain ‘2Rivers’ Tamero claiming the final gold bracelet in Event #31: $1,000 NLH Championship for $310,832. The series will continue to play out on GGPoker and Natural8.

Even though a bracelet victory still eludes Team India, that is not to say that the team`s run at the series has been entirely uneventful with two Indian players posting final table finishes last week. This week, Aditya ‘inonhmeansfu’ Sushant placed 110th in Event #50: $2,100 Bounty Championship for ₹6.82 Lakhs.

A former IPC side event winner, Yesha’Iconic’ Punjabi from Australia, made quite a few heads turns this week when she final tabled Event #46: $500 Deepstack NLHE, placing ninth for ₹8.66 Lakhs!

Moving to the business news, Goa’s Corporation of City of Panaji (CCP) is on the verge of changing its previous decision of not renewing the trade licenses of offshore casinos. After three offshore casinos approached the CCP asking for the renewal of their trade licenses, Mayor Uday Madkaikar stated that their applications have been kept on hold and that a decision to renew their licenses would be taken later.

Following the banning of 59 Chinese apps last month, another 47 Chinese apps were added to the watch list by the Indian government, including the likes of TikTok Lite, a clone of the popular short video app, TikTok, Helo Lite, SHAREit Lite, VFY Lite, and BIGO LIVE Lite.

While we are on the topic of apps, Facebook researchers have developed a general AI framework called Recursive Belief-based Learning (ReBeL). The new AI is capable of achieving better-than-human performance in heads-up, No-Limit Texas Hold ’em poker while using less domain knowledge than any previous poker-playing AI.

Online Railbird Report

Technical glitches impacted the big-ticket tourneys on top sites like Adda52 and PokerBaazi this week. Though the action seemed to have dulled out after the high-octane run of the IOPC and the APF, there were several big winners.

Headlining them all is Manoj ‘h4r5hv33r’ Singh, who topped a 754-player field to capture Spartan Poker’s ₹30 Lakhs GTD Destiny for ₹9.80 Lakhs. Singh has also become the first player to book a seat into the Destiny 15.0 SnG Finale. Being the week’s top performer, Singh is also our “PokerGuru Star of the Week!”

PokerGuru Ambassador Ratul ‘MuscariAs’ Steves (PokerStars India’ The Hercules ₹50 Lakhs GTD for ₹8.67 Lakhs), Srihari ‘bangbang99’ Bang (Spartan Poker’s Sunday Superstack ₹50 Lakhs GTD for ₹8.33 Lakhs) and Sathish ‘Jaqkten’ Ananth (Spartan Poker’s The Elite ₹35 Lakhs GTD for ₹7.36 Lakhs) were the other top scorers this week.

The notable scores of the week include –

Spartan Poker’s GPS Edition 2 is Underway!

Spartan Poker has followed up its record-smashing IOPC with the second edition of the Grand Poker Series (GPS). The 36-event schedule promises over ₹5 Crores in guaranteed prizes and began proceedings on August 3.

Read the complete report here

Pocket52 Announces Its Biggest-Ever Series “Blue” For August

Hot on the heels of its month-long Grand Poker Sprint (GPS), Pocket52 has rolled out its biggest online series to-date – Blue! Also, a month-long affair, the series began on August 1 and has events ranging from buy-ins as low as ₹11 to ₹4,400. In all,more than ₹4.5 Crores will be given away in prize money, alongside ₹15 Lakhs in leaderboard prizes.

Read the complete report here

WSOP Online 2020

The ongoing 2020 World Series of Poker (WSOP) Online wrapped up its schedule of 31 bracelet events on WSOP.com this week. All the attention is now on GGPoker and Natural8,which is hosting the second leg of the series.

Close to a dozen more champions were crowned over the week, and headlining the show was the world’s top-ranked female pro Kristen Bicknell. The three-time female GPI POY winner outlasted an 892-player field to capture Event #44: $2,500 NLHE 6-Handed for $356,412, adding a third bracelet to her tally.

Read the complete report here

While Bicknell tops the week’s winners, Italy’s Enrico ‘GTOExploiter’ Camosci is hot on Bicknell’s heels and the series’ latest winner. Camosci topped 1,168 entries in Event #50: $21,00 Bounty Championship to win his career-first bracelet and $327,319.

Read the complete report here

Team India`s participation at the series has undoubtedly increased, and this week there were at least 18 confirmed scores raked in by Indians. One of the most prominent of them came from former bracelet champion Aditya ‘inonhmeansfu’ Sushant, who placed 110th in Event #50 for ₹6.82 Lakhs.

Topping the list of Indian scorers are ‘raavan’ (Event #41: COLOSSUS – 15^th for ₹15.39 Lakhs) and ‘machii’ (Event #41: COLOSSUS – 21st for $14,680 – ₹10.97 Lakhs).

Headlining the list of “desi” winners was a former IPC side event winner, Yesha ‘Iconic’ Punjabi from Australia,who placed 9^th in Event #46 $500 Deepstack NLHE ₹8.66 Lakhs. She picked up another score in Event #44: $2,500 NLHE 6-Handed, placing 59^th for ₹5.02 Lakhs.

Read the complete report here

With this, we conclude this week’s roundup of the latest news updates and developments from the world of poker. We will return again next week with our weekly report, stay tuned.