Neel Joshi, a fourth-year student pursuing chemical engineering, has recently come into the spotlight owing to his prowess in poker. Neel is a regular in the online poker circuit and his most recent (and possibly biggest) win was at 9Stacks.com’s tournament on 17th April 2019. He won an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he’ll be participating in the World Series of Poker (WSOP), the most prestigious tournament of the year, and in Neel’s words, “the Mecca of the poker community”. Placed in Bain Capability Network (BCN), he also has high scores in competitive examinations such as the Common Aptitude Test (CAT), Graduate Record Examinations (GRE), and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). The English Press Club spoke to Neel to find out more about his passion, and how he pursued it while in college.

Neel told us that he started playing poker at the end of his second year and fell in love with it immediately. ‘More than the money, I used to immensely enjoy playing and studying the game,’ he says. He started by playing live games with friends, and his first online experience was with an Indian app, where he earned a lot but learnt little. He started playing poker tournaments online on Indian websites in his third year. In a poker tournament, every participant pays an equal registration fee and prizes are given to the top few ranked players in the form of either money or buy-ins to live poker tournaments. On the other hand, a”cash game” is where your initial stack is based on the amount of money you pay and you can leave at any point of time with whatever you have left.

An active poker maverick on over ten websites, Neel is a pro at ‘Sit-n-Go’ tournaments or SnGs, where the winner takes all. Neel has won all-expenses-paid trips to Malta, Vietnam, Costa Rica, and many other countries, along with cash prizes. Neel is currently playing at a net profit of over two hundred percent.

According to Neel, poker is a game of skill in the long-term. He uses different applications to analyse each hand like a puzzle and find the best solution, along with his “study group” which has a total of four people from across India. ‘For a few games, the variance is very high, but over a span of time a bad player will lose money and vice-versa,’ said Neel, talking about the role of luck in a game of poker.

His parents have always supported him in his endeavours, as long as he puts his academics and career over poker. Having applied to quite a few business schools in India and abroad, Neel talks about his BITSian life, and how the 0% attendance policy has been a blessing. A member of the Department of Theatre, Poetry Club, and an ex-captain of the table tennis team, Neel was thankful for the all-round development he experienced while at BITS. ‘I was never really an academically-oriented person, so poker did not interfere with my career plans. However, to the people that it does matter, there will always be a choice between an important tournament or a submission/test, and for me that choice was crystal clear.  But this may not be the case for everyone,’ said Neel on the topic of handling poker along with academics.

Poker has now become an integral part of his life, and someday he plans to play poker for a living. The poker scene in India, according to Neel, is flourishing rapidly. Websites have been spending exorbitant amounts on marketing, which leads to an influx of beginners, resulting in more money in the circuit. ‘The best time to start playing in India is right now,’ says Neel, who is currently in the talks with Dalmia Group’s website PokerJohny.in, for representing them as their brand ambassador.

Neel also commented on the social stigma associated with poker. He stressed the importance of loving the game and training hard to earn well early on. This can then be used as a selling point when convincing your family to let you pursue this hobby. ‘It’s important that you make some money first, and after that any rational person can, in a one-hour sitting, understand that poker is more of a game of skill and a sport, rather than the mere “gambling” it is usually associated with,’ he said. ‘In the end it is about doing what you love, and what you are good at, rather than what is expected of you.’

Currently, Neel is torn between joining a business school, partaking in the WSOP main event or starting his job as an analyst, but as Neel said, ‘Poker players are generally excellent decision-makers off the table as well, as they weigh advantages objectively.’