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Goonjan Mall wins Spartan’s The Elite tournament

Featured tournaments take place every day at The Spartan Poker, with varying buy-ins and varying prize pools. Friday is one such day where multiple featured tournaments take place including The Elite tournament and Spartan’s new introduction called the Triple Bubble tournament.

The Elite kicked off at 7:30pm IST last evening and it was a very long grind for those who reached till the end. The tournament came to an end in Level #44, with the blinds at 21,000/42,000 – 5,250 and the final hand finished at 3:23am today, wrapping up a tournament of nearly 8 hours. 176 entries created a prize pool of INR 17.6 lakh, easily beating the guarantee. 

A couple of days back, popular poker player Ratul Steves aka ‘Atriohm’ shipped the Destiny tournament on Spartan, taking home over INR 5 lakh plus a ticket to the Destiny SnG finale. He carried on his brilliant streak last night, nearly pulling off a victory in The Elite as well.

Steves was up against Goonjan Mall aka ‘gmtesting’ in heads-up and the latter got himself a healthy chip lead before the final hand took place. Steves decided to go all-in pre-flop with 6h 7h and the hope of hitting a flush, while Mall would’ve been happy to call with Ks Qc.

The community cards opened Jd 3h 8d 8h 3s and none of the players could better their existing hands. Both players hit two pairs – Eights and Threes, but Mall took down the pot and the title, with a higher kicker – King. For this, he received the massive top prize of INR 4,42,816, while Steves made another big addition to his poker bankroll, taking home INR 2,99,200.

We spoke to Goonjan Mall, Founder & CEO at OnlinePrasad.com, after this big win and he told us about his introduction to poker, playing small stakes with friends at BITS Pilani. He was then re-introduced to the game by playing on Zynga before he took up the game more seriously. First low stakes, then medium and now here he is, shipping The Elite. 

“The tournament experience was pretty good. It was a tough field and my key motivation for playing is the battle against good competitors. One of the tough players were ‘TheInternetKid’ (Kartik Ved). I won a vital pot against him taking me to chip lead and another tough player on the Final Table was ‘Lone Believer’, who finished third,” he said about the overall tournament experience.

Mall has played plenty of live events in the past in Goa, Manila and other venues. He plays poker recreationally and has no immediate plans of playing in live poker tournaments, with the probable exception of the World Poker Tour’s second tournament series in India later this year. 

Keep reading GutshotMagazine.com for more updates on Spartan featured tournaments across the weekend.

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