Bibek Karki ships IOPC Event #5 on Spartan

It was a brilliant first day of the India Online Poker Championship on The Spartan Poker, with all five events on Day 1 beating the advertised guarantees and a lot of players taking home handsome prizes. By the looks of it, the INR 7+ crore in guaranteed prizes for this series is going to be beaten by a long way.

The major event of the day was The Elite, which was the fourth IOPC tournament of the day and it was shipped by ‘equity_hunter’, who took home a massive prize of INR 7,40,250. To wrap up Day 1 was IOPC Event #5 INR 8 Lac GTD (3200 PKO,RE) which kicked off at 9:30pm IST last night.

The advertised prize pool was crossed as 409 entries were recorded to the INR 3,200 buy-in tournament, meaning the guarantees for all five tournaments of the day were beaten. The top 55 players were paid out a minimum cash prize of INR 4,008 and Bibek Karki aka ‘BIBEK329’ shipped the tournament, taking home the top prize of INR 1,58,692.

He was up against Pranav Khandalkar aka ‘pranavpoker’ and he built a good lead against him in heads-up before they went all-in pre-flop and Karki’s Kings and Sevens turned out to be better than Khandalkar’s pairs of Kings in the final hand. Khandalkar finished in second for INR 1,00,614. Remember, pranavpoker also won May’s Millionaire tournament on Spartan, for a massive INR 25 lakh.

Gutshot caught up with Karki after this win. The IT Entrepreneur first encountered poker in University games in USA, back in 2005. He started playing regularly around 2007 with his first deposit on Full Tilt Poker. After losing $100 thirty times, he finally managed to win and by 2009, he was playing 8 tables of $5-10 on Full Tilt.

“With two tables left in the bounty event I was dealt KK on the cutoff. There was a player on the small blind with a big bounty and he was really short. I min-raised and the short stack was all. The player in the big blind who had the second biggest stack after me also jammed A9. I called both bounties and had a huge chiplead entering the final table. That hand just made sure that I was able to dominate the final table moving forward,” he said, telling us about a vital hand in the tournament.

Talking about his future plans in poker, he said, “I have played cash for a long time but the thrill of playing a tourney has really been pushing me to play more often. I want to play more live and online tourneys and want to dominate the table wherever I play.” Keep reading GutshotMagazine.com for a daily update on the IOPC series on Spartan.