The India Poker Championship (IPC) January 2020 edition has come to a close with online poker phenom Rubin Labroo winning the biggest event of the series – the 50K Main Event, which went on to become a grand success drawing 693 entries across its two starting flights to collect a whopping prize pool of INR 3.36 Crores, which was distributed among the top 86 with a min-cash of INR 82,700.
The largest share of the prizepool went to the 31-year old Labroo who defeated the in-form player Siddharth Mundada in HU to become the ‘India Poker Champion’ and win INR 61.8 Lac along with a 20 Lac sponsorship package from The Spartan Poker and a limited edition Panerai watch worth 5 Lac.
“It’s amazing! I’ve been trophy-hunting for a while now. My last trophy was in April 2017, in the DPT. So, it was long back. And I came second in the WPT Vietnam Kick Off. And I’ve final tabled here and there, but nothing converted,” said Labroo after taking down the coveted IPC Main Event title.
A beast on the online felts, Labroo, who got his first live title by winning DPT April 2017 Kickoff, entered the final table as the chip leader and went on to keep his lead all the way to eventually claim the coveted title. He displayed a very bold and fearless play and went on to eliminate Alexandr Moiseev (8th), Pradeep Sharma (4th) and Alok Birewar (3rd) to eventually reach heads-up with the runner-up Siddharth Mundada who has been in amazing form throughout the series. Mundada started off well with a runner-up finish in the 10K Kickoff event of the series and ended in a similar fashion, finishing runner-up in the Main Event and banking a hefty INR 43.33 Lac prizemoney.
Coming back to heads-up battle, Labroo ((16,850,000) entered the dual with a commanding chip lead over Siddharth Mundada (3,825,000). While Mundada tried his best but it was tough for him to overcome. Eventually, he shoved all-in with Kd 7d and Labroo called with 9s 9h. The board ran out Qd 10h Ad 6s 8s where pocket nines of Labroo held up to win him the pot as well as the title.
The Main Event was filled with notables and some of them to finish in the money were Ujjwal Narwal (10th for INR 5.12 Lac), Madhav Gupta (13th for INR 4.10 Lac), Phanindra Akkina (14th for INR 4.10 Lac), Television personality Chetan Hansraj (16th for INR 3.40 Lac), Akanksha Singh (22nd for INR 2.35 Lac), Vikram Kumar (23rd for INR 2.35 Lac), Harsh Dembla (25th for INR 1.99 Lac), Jasven Saigal (26th for INR 1.99 Lac), BPT January 2020 Main Event champion Gautam Sachdeva (27th for INR 1.99 Lac), Chirag Sodha (30th for INR 1.62 Lac), Adda52 Team Pro Kunal Patni (38th for INR 1.42 Lac), Laksh Pal Singh (40th for INR 1.42 Lac), Goonjan Mall (41st for INR 1.42 Lac),Jayjit Ray (42nd for INR 1.42 Lac), defending champion Raj Talwar (47th for INR 1.26 Lac), Eka Vedantham (49th for INR 1.26 Lac), Siddarth Singhvi (52nd for INR 1.26 Lac), and Rajeev Kanjani (55th for INR 1.12 Lac).
Final Table Payouts (INR):
- Rubin Labroo – INR 61,80,000
- Siddharth Mundada – INR 43,33,900
- Alok Birewar – INR 27,94,400
- Pradeep Sharma – INR 20,46,900
- Jagdeep Singh – INR 15,64,600
- Mubeen Saudagar – INR 12,48,600
- Manish Gandhi – INR 10,34,200
- Alexandr Moiseev – INR 8,23,100
- Abhishek Katiyar – INR 6,18,100