Ratul Steves is this week’s Destiny winner at Spartan

Wednesday brought with it the excitement of tournament poker online as well as a potential live experience through everyone’s favourite middle-of-the-week tournament at The Spartan Poker. The Destiny tournament is uniquely positioned by Spartan to allow players to get rewarded in two ways. The obvious one is through the prizepool paid out and then there is a slightly delayed gratification which will take place a couple of weeks from now.

A 10 week long sojourn, the Destiny culminates in its Finale SnG in Week 11 where the 10 previous weekly winners get into a single table SnG, worth a buy-in of INR 1 Lakh each, of which there will be just one single winner who takes home the grand poker package of INR 10 Lakhs. This dream-come-true package includes a Main Event buy-in to a prestigious European poker series, return flight tickets and hotel stay too! Last night was the completion of Week 9 of the Destiny series and it was Ratul ‘Atriohm’ Steves who scored the win in this much sought-after tournament.

With a juicy INR 20 Lakhs guaranteed, there were about 20 Lakhs reasons for players to get in on the action at last night’s Destiny tourney. 304 entries ponied up the INR 5,500 buy-in to take the prizepool up to INR 23.8 Lakhs, well past its original guarantee. While the biggest and sweetest prize was right on top, 40 players in all would make their way into the money with a min-cash assured of INR 14,280. Plenty of familiar faces, or names shall we say, making it deep and in the money.

There was Anirban Das a.k.a ‘pokernoob‘ who finished in 8th place for INR 57,120. Das has previously “been there and done that”, winning not only 2 weekly Destiny tourneys but also a Finale SnG which allowed him to head to Vegas courtesy The Spartan Poker. Another winner who ran deep was ‘FunkeyFox’. Our readers may remember him from recently winning the Big Daddy tournament and winning a Goa package. FunkeyFox got busted in 3rd place when his Deuces got outkicked by Atriohm’s Queen kicker. That brought the latter into heads-up battle with ‘thak‘ with the latter having 1.7 million chips compared to Atriohm’s massive 5.3 million stack.

thak did not let that chip disadvantage dissuade him as he put up a lengthy battle to wrestle the lead and perhaps title from his opponent. Over the 20 minutes long headsup, a number of pots went back and forth and while thak came close, he was never quite able to fully bridge that gap. Eventually, it came down to the final hand which saw Atriohm make a min-raise with pockets Fives (5h 5d) and then thak, thinking his opponent displayed weakness, moved all in with Qd 2d. Atriohm of course made the call and would have been quite happy to see a scattered dry board of 6d 8c 3h Tc 9h. And with that hand, we had our winner in Ratul Steves a.k.a Atriohm who made an impressive score of INR 6,30,700 and it wasn’t too shabby a payday for thak in runnerup who made INR 3,92,700.