Friday, 29th March 2024 13:30
Home / Uncategorized / APPT7 Cebu: The Aditya Agarwalii

There’s occasionally some confusion in player lists.

Sometimes a player’s country has a question mark as we hunt down their true origins. Other times players attempt to sign their end-of-day bag with a nickname that isn’t on records. There are also a few times a player seems to have grabbed their bag and just violently vibrated with a pen in their hand.

Today we spotted a mistake that turned out to not be a mistake. We had the same name twice on our player list, “Aditya Agarwal.” The names were from the same country and both were PokerStars players, but they each had their own seat.

We know there’s been a multi-tabling fad going on during the WSOP, but you can’t multi table the same tournament. Can you? What treachery is at work here? Is Agarwal a wizard?

No.

Agarwal is not a wizard, neither of them are actually. There are two Aditya Agarwals (Agarwalii?) in the field and they share more than just the same name. They’re currently sharing the same room and they’re neighbors back in Calcutta, India.

To avoid confusion that undoubtedly follows them everywhere they meet humans, the two Agarwal’s have nicknames.

This Aditya Agarwal:

Bitti_Agarwal.jpeg

Goes by the nickname of Bitti.

And this Aditya Agarwal:

Intervention_Agarwal.jpeg

Chose “Intervention” as his identifier. The name comes from Agarwal’s online screen name of choice, which is “intervntion” on PokerStars. Intervention has more than $3.5 million in online cashes with $1.8 million in PokerStars alone.

Intervention started playing online poker more than eight years ago when he was a student at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Intervention quickly got a hang of the game and was consistently posting good results until April 15, 2011.

Black Friday.

While the poker scene went dry for online players in the USA, Intervention went back to India where the internet was lush with poker. The live scene was also starting to emerge.

During a trip to Calcutta in December, 2010, Intervention Agarwal met Bitti Agarwal. They met in a tournament hosted by the India Poker Series and quickly became friends.

They started to play, travel and learn together, something made easier since they only live 10 minutes apart from each other. While Intervention has more than $270,000 in live tournament cashes, including nine WSOP, two EPT and one APPT cash, this is Bitti’s first time traveling outside of the Indian poker circuit. Bitti says his specialties are cash games, but has been learning under Intervention’s tutelage and stake-age.

But Bitti is now here on his own dime as both Agarwals were hunting a bigger field and prize pool than India has to offer. They started with a trip to the Macau Poker Cup and are now here in Cebu for a chance at an APPT title.

We’re down to 60 players and both Agarwal’s are still alive. Intervention is currently above average with about 75,000 while Bitti is slightly below average with 40,000.

For more live updates, check out our live-updates page.

Alexander Villegas is not an Aditya Agarwal for the PokerStars Blog.

Study Poker with Pokerstars Learn, practice with the PokerStars app