The game of poker is majorly a game of skill which decides the winner says India Poker Championship 2020 winner Rubin Labroo, who won this year’s championship which took place at Big Daddy Casino in Goa last month.

“Technically Poker is a mind game played with a lot of strategies. Obviously, luck is involved but a lot of it can be beaten by your skills and how good you understand how the game is. It’s a very strategically motivated game”, says Ruben who was introduced to the sport during his college days back in 2006.

Talking about the skills involved, he said: “It’s a long term game and the result doesn’t depend on what happens in one game.

“On a given day one might beat me but on the long term you will not be able to do so, that’s the idea of a game. It’s long term strategy you put in volume, numbers and over a period of time. If your math is strong and you are strategically better you will definitely beat the odds.”

“In terms of skills edge, there is a lot of maths involved, selling and buying courses. There’s a lot of studies involved, people study online, live and books written on this and it’s basically a statistical probability game. And also there is a lot of live tells that you can pick up on the table. Different kind of people drop hints via hand movements and this all understanding will come with experience.

The 2020 edition was his second appearance in the IPC and speaking about the experience of playing in it, he said: “I was playing in some other tournament before the IPC and was not in good touch, so I booked my ticket back home and decided to skip the event. But then on my friends’ insistence, I decided to play and I am glad that I stayed back and won the tournament,” he said.