Mithun Mahesh wins Mega Stack at Spartan

It started from winning the Little Big Series Main Event and then there were never ending wins for the Ratnagiri based poker player Mithun Mahesh who plays under the moniker ‘ThePokeRaja’ who came out as a champion in last night’s featured tournament – the 12L GTD Mega Stack at TheSpartanPoker.com. Mahesh has made big online scores on Spartan, claiming titles with dedication and hard work towards the game. These scores are the results of poker studies and many improvements in his game.

Mahesh is a 24-year old Electrical Engineer working in a steel plant from the last 2 years and currently, also a serious poker player in the online circuit. His family faced a huge blow in business to which now his father is the support system, with his educational loan also keeping them crumbling every month. Speaking about his introduction to poker where he came across a game called ‘Texas Hold’em Poker’ by Gameloft on his Nokia mobile phone, he mentioned how he fell in love with the game and then went on to Google to learn more about the game and read how psychology is the integral part of poker – something he believes he is naturally good at. Then his real money poker began with home games during engineering where he also taught 50 players (fishy poker).

Speaking about last night’s tournament, Mahesh outlasted 373 entries to take down the title and first place prize of INR 2,53,800. He defeated ‘dhruvinkothari’ at second place for INR 1,70,880. The prize pool was distributed to the top 31 places with a min-cash of INR 10,560. Speaking about the tournament experience, Mahesh likes to play Deepstack and Freezeout tournaments. He said, “I played a pretty straightforward, exploitive approach. I made use of my maniac image which gave me crucial double ups. I was pumped up when I saw players like Aditya ‘SuperuSer’ Sushant and Anant ‘Pro’ Purohit on the FT, as I admire them. Hence, I wanted to play short ring and heads-up with them which didn’t happen since they busted early.”

Key hands – “When 3 players were remaining, ‘Demogorgon’ claimed to have a lot of notes on me. He opened 2x, I 3-bet with Kx Kx from the button. He called. I had decided to package it as a bluff considering player history. The flop was Qx Xx Xx I bet 3/4th of the pot which seemed isolator bet, so he jammed with Kx Qx, I snap called and took the pot.”

An excited Mahesh for the upcoming India Online Poker Championship said, “IOPC is the greatest online poker tournament series available right now, and obviously, the leaderboard prizes are insane. So, very excited. In fact, I have resigned from my job to focus. The Spartan Poker is undoubtedly the best poker site in India. It would be a great learning experience.”

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