As the 20th Edition of the Macau Poker Cup starts at PokerStars LIVE at the City of Dreams from 10th January, the very celebrated poker tournament will see a star participation from Indian poker players. The most awaited poker tournament of the Asia-Pacific region is celebrating its 20th anniversary this time and will see a 11 day schedule from January 10-21st, 2014.
While the tournament regs like Kavish Kukreja, Aditya Agarwal, Aditya Sushant, Rajiv Kanjani and Abhishek Goindi are heading towards the coveted Red Dragon event which is the signature event of MPC. Others including Amit Jain, Sahil Aggarwal and Prateek Bhartia are looking to do the complete schedule. Some others also expected to do the Macau outing include Sameer Rattonsey who won two back titles at GAPL in November 2013, Apoorv Goel who created history for Indian poker when he won the Event 3 of ACOP; a first Title Event for an Indian and Sailesh Lohia who finished 7th in the MPC Main event in 2013. One of the big names missing from action will be Sangeeth ‘Samohh’ Mohan.
OPN spoke to a few poker players from India to see how they are preparing for the MPC. Prateek Bhartia is headed to Macau on 13th January and will be playing 9 events from the 14 onwards. He added that he hasn’t really done any preperation except watch FT streams of people like Stevie444 , Timex, Tymashenko etc.
Amit Jain who just won the top prize in the PokerStars Sunday 500 to mark a great start to 2014 also decided to use some of those funds to make it a full schedule for MPC. He mentioned that he along with Kavish Kukreja are now all geared up to spend the 11 days in Macau and play most of the events.
Sameer Rattonsey who had a terrific tourney run in 2013 is reaching Macau on Jan 15. Speaking to OPN, he said, “My focus is only on the Main event. If i get busted early i plan to play all the side events around the main. No real prep for this series..I have been wrking out(gym) 4-5 times a week to be as physically fit as possible, the rest is all about just getting into the right frame of mind during the series. Besides the above i prefer to keep it simple and not over prepare for any event by overdoing the videos and theory books.”
MPC 20 is offering a HK $ 8,000,000 guarantee for the Red Dragon Event with a buy-in of HK $ 10,000 to be held from 16th January 2014. Satellites to the Red Dragon will also be conducted through the length of MPC. Other than that, there will be 12 other events including the high Roller Event with a buyin of HK $ 50,000. The complete schedule of MPC 20 can be found here