Deputy Editor
PokerStars’ European Poker Tour stop is off and running at Casino Barcelona. It started off with a bang in the form of a well-attended €100,000 Super High Roller won by German pro Leon Sturm.
Additionally, the new PokerStars Open brand drew a record-setting field, while the experimental Cuatro Knockout bounty format is back for a second year, though player response to it appears lukewarm.
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€100K Draws 47 Entries In Barcelona
The Barcelona stop has enough high roller traffic to justify a €100,000 event. That makes it one of only a handful that will run this year, outside of dedicated tours like Triton. PokerStars managed to draw 47 entries for the EPT Barcelona Super High Roller. That’s a healthy-sized field for an event at that buy-in level. More importantly, it’s a 50% year-over-year increase after it had 28 in 2024.
Six players advanced to Day 3, with World Series of Poker Main Event champ Espen Jorstad holding a sizable lead.
Ultimately, though, Sturm and American pro David Coleman made a heads-up deal after Jesse Lonis busted in third. Each player secured more than €1 million, and Sturm emerged victorious for the extra €200,000 they left, bringing his total take to €1,450,385.
Jorstad finished fourth.
High roller fans will have plenty more to follow as the series continues. A €50,000 tournament remains, as does the signature €10,000 High Roller, which drew more than 400 entries last year and awarded more than €700,000 to the top earner.
PokerStars Open An Unsurprising Hit
For this year’s EPT Barcelona, PokerStars made a notable switch. It bumped the buy-in for the lower-stakes multi-flight event from €1,100 to €1,650 while dubbing the event a PokerStars Open. The change may have borne a small chunk of fruit, as the prize pool increased to €7,251,840 from last year’s comparable event, which had €6,852,480.
PokerStars Open represents the operator’s attempt to unify some of the branding across its various live events on different continents. In prior years, the EPT had co-branded the €1,100 multi-flights with one of its regional tours that served the same locale. For example, the Barcelona €1,100 was co-branded with the Estrellas Poker Tour.
In popular stops like Barcelona and Prague, these produced some of the biggest fields and prize pools in Europe with first-place prizes in the mid-six-figures.
The new PokerStars Open pushed that even closer to seven figures as France’s Alexis Nicolai pocketed €772,000. The 5,036 entries have established an early high-water mark for the tour.
North American players will get a few tastes of the PokerStars Open in the coming months. PokerStars Open comes to Maryland in October, and it will make its Las Vegas debut alongside the North American Poker Tour stop in November.
Cuatro Knockout Struggling To Gain Traction
While PokerStars brass can rest easy knowing their smaller-stakes events have lost no momentum in a branding switch, they’ll have to wonder about the viability of the new Cuatro Knockout format. Ostensibly laying a middle ground between regular bounties and mystery bounties, the Cuatro Knockout debuted at last year’s EPT Barcelona. Registration numbers seem lackluster, but the tour has decided to keep the format around for a second season.
What is a Cuatro Knockout? It’s a tournament where one-quarter of the prize pool is set aside for bounties. The catch is that bounties don’t kick in until one-quarter of the field remains.
That makes the bounties quite large in comparison to a traditional bounty. Each bounty matches the buy-in. For example, the EPT Barcelona Cuatro Knockout had a €12,300 buy-in with €12,000 going to the prize pool. Thus, when 25% of the field remained, every player sported a €12,000 bounty.
Unfortunately for PokerStars, the format hasn’t become an instant hit in the manner as its mystery bounty cousin. A mystery bounty at a similar buy-in level drew better attendance than the €12,300 Cuatro Knockout:
| Start Date | Event | Entries | Prize Pool |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug. 18 | €10,200 Mystery Bounty | 77 | €746,900 |
| Aug. 19 | €12,300 Cuatro Bounty | 22 | €258,720 |
In a blog post explaining the Cuatro Knockout, PokerStars touts the clarity as a differentiating factor.
The difference is that there’s no ‘mystery; it’s clear from the start what the bounty will be
At least based on the numbers in Barcelona, players prefer mystery to clarity when it comes to bounties. The total prize pool of the Mystery Bounty nearly tripled the total of the Cuatro.
It’s worth noting that the Mystery Bounty featured Day 2 registration, which closed a couple of hours before the start of the Cuatro. Players had a chance to enter the mystery and then see if they ran deep. That may have excluded them from participation in the Cuatro.
Upcoming EPT stops Malta (Oct. 1-12) and Prague (Dec. 3-14) also feature €12,300 Cuatro Knockouts. If Mystery Bounties continue to significantly outperform them, their days may be numbered.
Image credit: Jorge Franganillo/Wikimedia Commons (license)
