A Diwali Destiny for Rajat Sharma at Spartan

The Festival of Lights has been a bit muted this year what with the Supreme Court’s restrictions announced less than ago. It may have been quieter on the streets outside, but inside one particular home in Delhi, there were definitely some fireworks going off. Rajat Sharma has been doing well in online tournaments across a number of Indian sites racking up titles and numerous deep money finishes. And last night, after a number of close finishes, Sharma finally knocked one out of the park claiming victory in The Spartan Poker’s weekly Destiny tournament.

The Destiny was one of Spartan early innovations in their tournament schedule. This tournament which takes place on Wednesday night’s promises a fantastic INR 20 Lakhs guaranteed prizepool to players who have to pony up a buy-in of INR 5,500 to take part. What lies on the other end of the finish line for the winner is not only the biggest share of the prizepool but also a free ticket worth INR 1 Lakh into the Destiny Finale SnG which will take 8 weeks from this week. 10 of these SnG finalists will play in a 10 Lakh winner-take-all tournament which features buy-ins, hotel stay and return air tickets to a prestigious poker tournament in Europe. The last finale took place at the end of October and saw ‘Tiger10’ winning that 10 Lakh Europe package. Sharma is the second week’s winner of the seventh edition of this Destiny tournament. Week 1’s winner was Satish Ananth who claimed the first SnG ticket of Destiny 7.0.

Coming to this particular week’s Destiny, 196 entries took part and 23 of the top finishers would make a min-cash of INR 12,000. Recent title winners like ‘alienrobot’ (3rd for INR 2,25,000), Sagar Choudhury a.k.a ‘Strangeplay’ (4th for INR 1,60,000) and ‘Ktr19733’ (5th for INR 1,30,000) came close but fell short of heads-up. That position went to ‘hitesh bhai’ who knocked out alienrobot with a King high flush to get into headsup with Rajat Sharma who plays as ‘Garammasala’. With that elimination, hitesh bhai took his tack to just under 2 million but Garammasala was still ahead holding 2.7 million chips. Neither player was going to give up without a fight and what a (long) fight it was. Both players battled each other for just over 40 minutes which in online poker is probably similar to a couple of hours on a live table. A number of swings took place but most of the big pots went Garammasala’s way and so he continued to hold his lead going into the final hand.

Both players held good hands and hitesh bhai (Ad Jc) raised the action pre-flop and Garammasala fired back with his Qs As. 3-bet by hitesh bhai led to a 4-bet all-in by his opponent. hitesh bhai made the call and saw the bad news when the board 8c 8d 4s 6h Ac gave the pot and the title to Garammasala. For the win, Rajat ‘Garammasala’ took home a sweet INR 5,30,000 (from which 1 Lakh will be in the form of that Destiny Finale SnG ticket) while runner-up hitesh bhai got a pretty good INR 3,25,000 for his finish.

Keep reading GutshotMagazine.com for more updates on India’s biggest online poker tournaments.

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