---

Neeraj Kumar and Rubin Labroo chop The Elite on Spartan

Here’s one tournament for poker’s most elite group of players. While The Spartan Poker hosts featured tournaments daily, Friday’s tournament has a whopping INR 11,000 buy-in which usually attracts only the best players from across India, batting it out for the top prizes.

The Elite INR 18 lakh GTD kicks off every Friday night at 7:30pm and yesterday was no different, attracting 208 entries and beating the guarantee quite easily. By the end of the registration period, a total prize pool of INR 20.8 lakh was generated and as the night and tournament progressed, this was divided among the top 20 places with a minimum cash of INR 27,872.

Among the many top names who finished in the money were Anant Purohit aka ‘Pro’ (18th), Siddhanth Kapoor aka ‘bullzeye’ (15th), Shravan Chhabria aka ‘D.Trump04’ (14th), Abhinav Iyer aka ‘Schumi91’ (12th), Sumit Sapra aka ‘mrgr33n’ (11th), and a few others, all taking away smaller prizes.

A few other lesser known names also cashed along the way, but the heads-up battle saw a couple more known pros – Neeraj Kumar aka ‘Jannat52’ and Rubin Labroo aka ‘kornkid’. Kumar was on a single bullet whereas Labroo fired three bullets to get to this stage, but it was a brilliant effort from both these players, nonetheless.

It was even stevens in heads-up and The Elite always has huge cash prizes at stakes, so considering the massive pay jumps either player would miss out on, they decided to call a deal and chop the tournament. Kumar was slightly ahead in chips at the time of the deal, which made him the technical winner, but both players took away nearly identical prizes.

Both had 1.5 million odd chips before the final hand which took place in Level #39 of the tournament, with the blinds at 10,000/20,000-2,500. Here, Kumar bluffed on the 2h 2s 9c flop with nothing but 6d 7h in hand, but Labroo folded before they decided to split the top two cash prizes.

Kumar was declared winner of last night’s Elite when the tournament ended at 2:34am, wrapping up a 7-hour grind. He was awarded the top prize of INR 4,23,386 while Labroo was not too far behind, cashing in second place for INR 4,14,854. Both Rubin Labroo and Neeraj Kumar are known names in the Indian poker industry, with plenty of online poker victories in the past.

Gutshot spoke to Kumar after he shipped The Elite and made this massive bankroll addition this morning. He said, “The Elite is one of the best structured 6-Max tournaments provided by Indian poker websites. It feels good to chop it on the last day of the month and then finishing second on Spartan’s Lightning Leaderboard.”

For more updates on India’s top poker tournaments, both online and live, keep reading GutshotMagazine.com.

Don’t have an account on The Spartan Poker? Check out their review page here, and don’t miss out on their bonuses, promotions, and guarantee-smashing tournaments. Sign-up now.

---

---