Before we get to the action — which was wild at the end — a quick bit of housework.
The old €1,100 Estrella Poker Tour (ESPT) Main Event, part of the wider EPT Barcelona schedule, had grown into a monster, attracting more than 7,000 runners for the past two years. The biggest was in 2023 when the field hit 7,398 entries, making it the largest live event in PokerStars’ history, with a prize pool of €7,102,080.
Fields that big come with logistical challenges and knock-on effects for the players, though, with long waitlists and 10-handed play. Success has its downsides.
This year, the ESPT Main Event was reborn as the PokerStars Open Barcelona Main Event, and it was the first of the Opens at main EPT stops to run with an increased buy-in of €1,650. Along with that, PokerStars guaranteed that play would never be 10-handed and only ever 8-handed when in the money.
What effect did that have? Pretty much what PokerStars wanted. The field size was reduced this year, but the total prize pool was up. 5,036 entries from 80 different countries combined to create a prize pool of €7,251,840 — the biggest ever for a mid-stakes PokerStars event — and a truly diverse final table with eight different nations represented, all playing for a first prize of €772,000.
Play never went 10-handed, though there was some 9-handed action in the money.
I fired Day 1C, the morning flight on the festival's second day. We played eight-handed throughout the first day, which feels like first-class compared to the economy of nine, or, poker gods forbid, ten-handed. All dealers are now trained to use the 'slide' method, and I saw zero issues. I managed to bag an average stack, and made the money on just one bullet.
On Day 2, so many players returned that the venue was short on space. Unfortunately, this meant playing nine-handed. This was the only real logistical hiccup of the event. The best part of Day 2 was bagging at 8pm. We started at 11am, had no dinner break, and bagged while there was still sunlight outside.
Staff were vigilant on Day 3. Tournament directors were always nearby, monitoring play closely, especially near pay jumps. Multiple players were put on shortened clocks when excessive stalling was seen. I busted in 47th place after getting it in with a turned flush against trips — but he boated up on the river. Regardless of the result, though, playing an event like this genuinely feels worth the rake. This is what players want: a nice venue, qualified dealers, competent and plentiful floors, and the chance at a big payday.
Big names come to party in the Open
It attracted some big names as well, with Shiina Okamoto, Steve O’Dwyer, Stephen Song, Juha Helppi, Kasey Mills, Alejandro Lococo, Ren Lin, Brock Wilson, Spraggy, Benny Glaser, Eugene Katchalov, and Jon Kyte all making the money.
Kenny Hallaert, fresh off his Main Event final table appearance, cashed for the first time since his $3 million Vegas score. He took a more modest €15,530 here, for 43rd place.
PokerOrg’s Terrance ‘TJ’ Reid went out just before Hallaert in 49th place and was unlucky not to make a much deeper run.
On a board reading 
, TJ bet 480,000 with 
for the made flush. Daniele Cuomo moved all-in with a covering stack and 
for trips. If he lost, he would have been left with 10 big blinds, but the 
river gave him a full house and a stack of over 6 million.
Drama at the final table
Cuomo made the most of TJ’s chips, riding his stack all the way to the final table.
He eventually busted in fifth for a huge score of €203,910 after shoving his last 8 million with 
and running into the kings of Alexis Nicolai.
At this point, with four players left, Mengshi Tian was the big chip leader, followed by Nicolai, Chin Wei Lim and Day 1 chip leader Ben Zech.
Things escalated quickly from there. Nicolai took out both Lim (fourth) and Zech (third) before closing out a heads-up that was packed with drama.
Shoving does the job for Nicolai
The stacks were close to dead even before Tian took a monster lead over three hands. That left Nicolai with around 30 million and looking at a literal mountain of 130 million chips from across the table.
He decided his best way back into the tournament was aggression — and he shoved. Again. And again. And Tian folded all three hands before snapping Nicolai’s next shove. He had Nicolai out-kicked with A-T to A-3, but a three on the flop saw the chip lead swing to the Frenchman.
If Tian thought that was bad, the final hand will likely lurk in his nightmares for years to come, in a heads-up match worth close to €300,000. You can watch how that played out below.
Nicolai’s lifetime earnings ahead of this tournament were just under €300K ($342,237). He won €772K here and celebrated with his rail, leaving Tian (lifetime earnings: $233,458) with his hands on his head wondering what had just happened.
2025 EPT Barcelona PokerStars Open results
| Place | Player | Prize |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alexis Nicolai (France) | €772,000 |
| 2 | Mengshi Tian (Hong Kong) | €482,290 |
| 3 | Ben Zech (Germany) | €344,560 |
| 4 | Chin Wei Lim (Malaysia) | €265,200 |
| 5 | Daniele Cuomo (Italy) | €203,910 |
| 6 | Jakub Sterba (Czech Republic) | €156,830 |
| 7 | Kazuhiko Yotsushika (Japan) | €120,610 |
| 8 | Joseph David (France) | €92,770 |
| 9 | Bernardo Neves (Portugal) | €71,350 |
Images courtesy of PokerStars.
