The EPT Barcelona has long ago become a staple event within the European Poker Tour. The sunny Spanish city of Barcelona has been a stop to an EPT festival in each and every of the popular poker series’ fourteen seasons and this will not change anytime soon, given the massive and growing popularity of EPT Barcelona.

The 2018 edition of the EPT Barcelona Main Event saw a record-breaking field as another manifestation that the tournament is getting bigger and more attractive with every year passing. The €5,300 buy-in Main Event drew 1,931 entries from all over the world this year. That record-breaking field generated a prize pool of €9,365,350. The money was split into payouts for the top 296 finishers.

Poland’s Piotr Nurzynsky bested the behemoth field to collect a first-place prize of €1,037,109. The player would have been awarded more than €1.6 million in prize money, but he struck a four-way deal with the other final three players left in contention, which reduced the first-place prize in favor of bigger payouts for the other three players.

To celebrate this massive tournament that is loved by players from different parts of the world and of different level of poker skill, Casino News Daily has looked back at previous editions of the EPT Barcelona Main Event to compile the following list of the largest ones to have taken place in the 14-year history of the series.

The Season 13 edition of the EPT Barcelona drew 1,785 tournament entries. Of them, 359 received a share of the prize pool. And the prize pool itself totaled €8,657,250. A Polish player topped the field of that event, too.

It was Sebastian Malec who emerged as the victor. The young Pole collected €1,122,800 for his important accomplishment. Germany’s Uri Reichenstein was the player whom the tournament champion had to face heads-up. The German scooped €807,100 for finishing second.

It is important to note that the Season 13 EPT Barcelona took place in 2016. PokerStars, the owner of the EPT, announced later that year that it would retire that particular brand as well as several more from its live tournament roster and would replace them with the PokerStars Championship and PokerStars National brands. It can be said that the experiment might have not proved as successful as the poker operator might have expected as the EPT was brought to live this year, and it seems that its more than one-year hiatus has not affected its popularity.

The Season 12 edition of the EPT Barcelona took place late in August 2015. The tournament built a 1,694-strong field. A prize pool of €8,215,900 was generated as a result and the lucky top 247 finishers received a share of the money.

The lion’s share went to John Juanda. The player, who is also a five-time WSOP gold bracelet winner, took home a hefty payout of €1,022,593. He played against UK’s Steve Warburton in the concluding heads-up match. Warburton was awarded €941,613 for his efforts.

It is also interesting to note that Juanda was vying for his second title from the series during this year’s edition of the EPT Barcelona Main Event. However, the player eventually left in ninth place after being eliminated by another former EPT Main Event champ looking to claim his second title – Bulgaria’s Ognyan Dimov.

The 2014/Season 11 edition of the EPT Barcelona saw its Main Event swell up to 1,496 entries, of whom 240 received a share of the €7,255,600 prize pool. Germany’s Andre Lettau took down the tournament for a first-place prize of €794,058.

The German played against his fellow from the US Sam Phillips. It was actually Phillips who collected the lion’s share of the prize pool of €1,021,275, but that was the result of a three-way deal, which involved Hossein Ensan, another German, as well. The third participant in the deal took home €652,667 for rounding out the tournament’s podium.

The 2013/Season 10 edition of the EPT Barcelona saw 1,234 entries flock to the poker tables at Casino Barcelona to take part in the €5,300 Main Event. A prize pool of nearly €6 million was generated as a result. Payouts were distributed to the top 183 finishers.

UK’s Tom Middleton was the king of that edition of the tournament. The player emerged as the victor to receive all the accolades a champion deserves as well as a first-place prize of €942,000. His payout was determined in a two-way deal with the second-place finisher – Finland’s Kimmo Kurko, who took home €750,000.

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