Poker as a mind sport is all about variance and the notion was on display, at day 2 of the Poker Sports League in Goa. After losing 8 straight flips on day 1, Gujarat Acers were rock bottom with 0 points, and also had the dubious distinction of being the only team to not register a single point. However, convincing victories by Ramesh Rao Thotapalli, Anish Juwarakar and Bhavesh Nainani in the tag team and Heads Up Texas Hold 'em events, along with a second place finish in the main event by Mentor Sumit Asrani, propelled the franchise from Western India into fourth place in the overall standings.
Speaking exclusively to Sportskeeda, one half of the tag team duo Ramesh said, “Actually I played Omaha yesterday something I’m not that comfortable with, in fact, Anish didn’t play yesterday, but ever since the beginning of the trip, we have been discussing strategies, playing together, so we had a comfort level and we proved that on the table today. Both of us knew our roles as we were switching between aggressive and passive, we got the chip lead very early on and decided to not give it up.”
For the first time during the tournament, a hint of animosity was sensed between the teams, during the final between Gujarat Acers and Kolkata Royals. Ramesh added, “I won’t comment what it essentially was, I will keep it to myself as you know Poker is a sport of psychological impact, but when it comes to on table banter, it's tough to defeat me.”
In other results, both Mayank Jain and Raman Gujral failed to qualify for the main table, but the latter showed some impressive performances by reaching the final table, along with Norway’s Henrik Tollefesen in the Turbo event. Mentor Sumit Asrani held his nerves into the wee hours of the morning, narrowly missing out on the top spot in the 14-hour long main event.
Gujarat has climbed from the bottom of the pack to the top 5, by registering 60,000 points for Tag Team, 30,000 points for the Heads up event and a whopping 158000 points in the main. This also meant that the Smile Group owned franchise registered the most number of points for the day. Speaking about the turnaround owner, Mukesh Agarwal said, “It's too early in the competition to say anything, even now that we have made a comeback there is still two days of competition to go, so again it's too early. However, I must commend the team’s ability to comeback from such a difficult situation. Our goal is definitely first place and we are right on track.”
In other results, Abhinav Iyer lost the Omaha event to Sumit Sapra from the Rajasthan Tilters and Hendrik also failed to make it to the featured table in the main event. With two days of competition to go, Acers look all set to be serious title contenders, after a relatively slow start on day 1.