A close battle between all 12 teams saw a prolific Pune Sharks come out on top at day 1 of the inaugural Poker Sports League edition with 21,600 points, after winning the Freeze Out main event ahead of the Delhi Panthers, who registered a score of 212400 points. Despite not being able to register a single point on the board, Gujarat Acers Captain Sumit Asrani was positive about the team’s chances in the event.
Speaking exclusively to Sportskeeda, he said, “I honestly feel it's too early there are still 3 days of competition to go and we were just unlucky on some tables. Bhavesh had a strong Heads Up game and Raman went far in the Heads-Up tournament. So we’ve shown enough potential, now it's just to work harder on the executions and see how far we can go.”
The day began for the Acers with Abhinav Iyer and Mayank Jain crashing out of the tag team event, despite having the highest chip stack, after day 1. Abhinav who built up the stack said, “I think that’s how poker functions sometimes, you can be right at the top and one bad hand and you’re done. We had a very strong start, but a couple of bad hands and it was over. We learned a lot from it and tomorrow, we will follow a similar format and see how it goes.”
Gujarat’s wild card Henrik Tollefsen also made a premature exit in the main event, after also leading the chip count on his table. He said, “I personally feel, that it's too early to say it's turning out to be a trend of sorts because, in my hand, I had a 52 % chance of winning and I went all in, and I had no option but to call. The flop came and he had only two cards to get and he got one of them. Sometimes its just the luck of the draw, we are confident of our chances tomorrow as we are more in tune with the format now.”
Team Owner Mukesh Agarwal was also present at the event, backing his team with much fervour. He stated, “See, it’s not a one-day thing right? Yes if it was a one-day event, then we would be worried. We can still catch up over the next three days and now that we are more used to that format, we can make things work according to our plans.”
Other participants for Acers such as Ramesh Rao Thotapalli also came close to winning his Omaha round, but narrowly fell short. Day 2 is set to follow a similar format with the main event scheduled to begin first, followed by a tag team, heads up, Omaha heads up and the Turbo event.
