Another season of PokerStars European Poker Tour (EPT) is in the books, as EPT Prague concludes with Main Event and EPT High Roller champions named.
One of the biggest European poker extravaganzas of the year attracted 1,458 players, and Portuguese player Pedro Marques beat them all to walk away with €963,450 in prize money and the first EPT trophy of his career.
Marques was not the only one to celebrate in Prague, as the likes of Espen Jorstad, Thomas Santerne, and Patrik Jaros also had a series to write home about, while plenty of others made final table appearances and took home significant prize money.
The Prague event also hosted the first-ever Spin & Go Championship, an invitational event that saw 81 entries play for €100k in cash and mystery bounty prizes.
The festival once again demonstrated just how popular poker is with European players, as hundreds showed up to play despite the overlap with other high-stakes poker events on both the WSOP and WPT circuits.
Marques Wins the Main Event – Chops the Win with Paul Runcan
The 2024 EPT Prague Main Event was a massive affair, with 1,458 players paying the €5,300 buyin fee, all hopeful of a million Euro payout at the end of a gruelling week of poker.
As action played down to a final table, players from eight different countries were still left in the field, with Romania being the only country represented by two.
One of them was Paul Runcan, who came into the final day of action as the chip leader, and was eager to dominate the table and use the chips as leverage against his opponents.
This worked quite well, as he managed to play down to a heads-up match, but his efforts were not enough to win him an EPT trophy.
Instead, it was the Portugesse player Pedro Marques, who already had over €4 million in tournament winnings to his name, that would eventually walk away with the most coveted prize of the festival.
Yet, the two players made a deal before heads-up action started, which meant Runcan would still walk away with exactly €900k in prize money.
Here is a quick look at all the final table payouts at this year’s EPT Prague Main Event:
| Place | Player | Nationality | Payout |
| 1st | Pedro Marques | Portugal | €963,450 |
| 2nd | Paul Runcan | Romania | €900,000 |
| 3rd | Jaehyung Park | South Korea | €512,100 |
| 4th | Barak Oz | Israel | €393,950 |
| 5th | Anton Bergstrom | Sweden | €303,000 |
| 6th | Siarhei Alontsau | Belarus | €233,050 |
| 7th | Tjenno Eskes | Netherlands | €179,250 |
| 8th | Siegrfied Kapeller | Austria | €137,900 |
| 9th | Danut Chisu | Romania | €106,050 |
Santerne and Jaros with Dominating Performances
The most significant title of EPT Prague went to Pedro Marques, but high roller Thomas Santerne dominated the festival in an equally impressive fashion, taking down three separate high roller events for almost €700k in combined cashes.
His first win came in the €20,000 High Roller on December 6, and was worth €175,000 in cash. Just a couple of days later, Santerne was back at it, this time taking down the €50k EPT Super High Roller for €385k in prize money.
His impressive run was completed with another victory in the €25k Super High Roller Second Chance, a small event played by an elite group of players.
On his way to the three titles, Santerne faced off against players like Morten Klein, Niklas Astedt, and Espen Jorstad, which makes the victories all the more impressive.
The former WSOP Main Event champion Jorstad took home a High Roller title of his own, as he took down the Super High Roller Warm-Up event for €277k in cash.
The High Roller portion of the festival was concluded with one final event, the €10,300 EPT High Roller, which created a field of 289 players and a first-place prize of €573,500.
Czech player Patrik Jaros took down the title and the money, just days after winning the €5,200 PLO event for another €151,600, completing the most successful poker festival of his career.
Spin-and-Go Championship Goes to an Online Crusher
For the first time ever, PokerStars organized a Spin-and-Go Championship event as part of an EPT festival, and it turned out to be quite a success with the participants and fans of the game.
This was not the first time the popular online poker format was put into the live arena, but it was by far the biggest live spin-and-go event to date.
A total of 81 players were given entry into the tournament, with a prize pool of €100k distributed among the winners through regular prizes and mystery envelopes.
The Star Trophy and €25k in cash went to Spaniard Carlos Gurdiel, a former Supernova Elite who is quite used to playing small field tournaments with a fast structure online.
Despite the lack of live poker experience, Gurdiel was still able to dominate the event, winning the final round by 6-2-2, easily being the first player to reach six wins, and clenching the title.
He was joined in the winner’s circle by Murilo Monteiro of Brazil and Mantas Meskevicius of Lithuania, who won €15k and €10k respectively.
Another EPT Season Is in the Bag
The Prague event marked an end to another exciting season of EPT, the biggest live poker tour on European soil.
With the 2024 season now in the books, European poker elite will be looking forward to another action-packed year in 2025.
Yet, there will be some questions asked about that, as PokerStars recently announced they were cancelling the EPT Paris event, which was originally scheduled for February 2025, due to regulatory changes in the country.
It remains to be seen if the EPT Paris event will be replaced by another venue, or whether players will have to wait significantly longer for the next EPT festival, which is currently scheduled to play out in Monte Carlo in late April and early May.
Should that be the case, it will be interesting to see what other poker events will fill the void and how the long break impacts the overall numbers and success of EPT moving forward.
