President of the EPT, Edgar Stuchly, talked about their approach when making the schedule: “We looked at every EPT season up until now and asked ourselves how we could make the tour even better for the players.”

And the biggest change in philosophy clearly came in taking a less-is-more approach. The EPT stops have been reduced from 13 to 8, with more events taking place at each stop.

They have also merged the EPT field with those from the United Kingdom & Ireland Poker Tour (UKIPT) and the Estrellas Poker Tour. These two changes should help facilitate larger turnouts at each of the stops, which means for more action and more concentrated star-vs-star bouts in the televised events.

Though the EPT has had an effective formula of success during its 8-year run, it should come as no surprise that PokerStars is taking this opportunity to re-envision a few things. This is, after all, the first season of the tour without Founder John Duthie at the helm.

Another one of the tweaks has EPT polarizing their ranges a bit: they will be offering a wider selection of low-buy-in events but will also have 5 High Roller and Super High Roller tournaments, the most of any season. The first of these will be a €50,000 buy-in on the first leg in Barcelona; then there will be two big buys each at the PCA in the Bahamas and the Grand Final in Monte Carlo, Monaco. Those stops will include a €25,000 buy-in event and a €100,000 one.

PokerStars and the EPT have also made strides to try and improve the game variety. Each of the 8 stops will have a €10,000 Championship Series that will feature non-standard fare—from Heads Up NL Hold’em to 8-game.

The big carryover from the past season is that the finale will be returning to Monte Carlo for the EPT Grand Final.

The full season’s schedule is as follows:

8/15-8/25: Barcelona
10/3-10/11: San Remo
12/5-12/15: Prague
1/6/2013-1/15/2013: Bahamas (PokerStars Caribbean Adventure)*
1/30/2013-2/9/2013: Deauville
3/6/2013-3/16/2013: London
4/24/2013-5/4/2013: Berlin
5/6/2013-5/15/2013: Monte Carlo*

*: Denotes stops that will have a main event with a €/$10,000+ buy-in.

The tournaments wish to play second fiddle to none, running the gambit of the biggest PokerStars-sponsored events in some of the most desirable destinations and, of course, headlined by some of the biggest female names in poker, including Liv Boeree, Vanessa Rousso and Vicky Coren. The series has seen two tournaments in the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) and three in the European Poker Tour (EPT), passing through London, the Bahamas and Madrid along the way.

American Kathy Saraf took down over $25k in the last event in the Bahamas, just a few months after satellite qualifier Jan Combes had won the preceding title in London.

The next stop should not disappoint either. In April, the PokerStars Women Live series will join the EPT Grand Final in Monaco. It shall be an eventful and lavish week of poker, being sponsored not only by PokerStars, but by the world famous casino eponymous for the hosting city–the Monte Carlo.

Now it’s just a matter of waiting to see what stories may come out of the event.

“It is time to move on,” he said, “and to leave the European Poker Tour in the capable hands of the existing management team.”

This is the second retirement, of sorts, for Duthie over the last couple days. Earlier this week, the British pro bowed out of his sponsorship deal with Team PokerStars. The 53 year-old stated his intention to remain active in the game, however, citing the coming of new opportunities over the next few years. Specifically, he is closely watching the potential legalization of the US poker market, which could provide new business opportunities.

As one of the main forces behind the establishment of the EPT in 2004, Duthie has seen his creation rise to incredible popularity. Fans of the Seasons 1-3 will remember his voice as part of the commentary team, which has since been handled by a number of other poker personalities.

Now in the midst of their eighth season, the EPT has become one of the premier series on the global poker calender. The most recent event, the EPT Prague, boasted a prize of €720,000. Next on the schedule is the popular PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, which is currently in progress.

Filling the vacated position will be Edgar Stuchly, a veteran of more than 20 years in the poker industry. Like Duthie before him, the the new CEO formerly served as the Head of Poker for Casinos Austria.

“I wish the new President of the company… the best of luck in his position,” said the outgoing captain, “and trust that he will oversee the continued growth of the largest poker tour in the world.”

EPT Barcelona, whose Main Event is running this week, has done so well in fact that the tournament staff can now boast that this year’s event is the largest field ever to be hosted in Spain.  In all, 811 runners have posted their buy-in (5,300 Euro) to take a shot at this title, and it looks to be a resounding success for the players and for EPT event organizers.

As for the Tournament itself, several players who have made names for themselves at the WSOP are running well in Barcelona, including Guillaume Darcourt, Eugene Katchalov, Victor Ramdin, and Vanessa Selbst.  Darcourt has the most recent success of that group, finishing 35^th in this summer’s WSOP Main Event. However, every one of those players has a ton of live tournament success and experience, so don’t be surprised to see their names near the top of the leaderboard the rest of the way.

Now for the biggest question of all: ‘What does a big EPT field say about the future of Tournament Poker?’  Well, just like you can’t always judge a player on one result, you can’t judge an industry on one event, so it would be foolish to suggest that this somehow ‘proves’ the imminent health and stability of the poker world.  Some skeptics have even suggested that any large tournament field from now until next year’s WSOP will still be an aberration over the long-term, because those large tourneys could be the simple result of former online players finding a way to get the last of their funds into circulation/action.  That was the argument made by nay-sayers for the huge turnouts at the 2011 WSOP Events, for example.  But I would suggest to them or anyone that if you look at the player lists for these big events, one thing you see a TON of names from countries besides the United States!  You see names showing up from markets where online poker is still played and still thriving, and the reality of it is that unless and until the online game dries out in those parts of the world, there is no reason for tournament numbers to go down.

Our hats are off to the players, organizers, and local staff for the EPT Barcelona; its been a great tournament thus far, with a great finish sure to follow.  Stay tuned to FTR.com as we bring you the results from Spain and around the world – - Good Luck at the Tables!!

Season 7 set the bar high with memorable tournaments, including last year’s epic Grand Final in Madrid, which had a prize pool of €6,860,000! Plus last year’s PokerStars Carribean Adventure, held at Atlantis, was the largest poker tournament ever held outside of Las Vegas with a prize pool of over $15 Million!

This year’s EPT promises to take the action to epic levels! The EPT Tallin last week got the first half of the EPT officially underway with Ronny Kaiser from Switzerland taking first place in the main event for €275,000 ($430,054). The next 7 stops are as follows:

-EPT Barcelona, Spain, August 27-Sep 1
-EPT London, England, Sep 30-Oct 6
-EPT San Remo, Italy, Oct 21-27
-EPT Prague, Dec 5-10
-2012 PCA, Bahamas, Jan 5-15
-EPT Deauville, France, Jan 31-Feb 6

Play at the EPT and get a chance to play with the EPT all time leaderboard champs, including Bertrand Grospellier, Luca Pagano, and Johannes Strassman! PokerStars is currently running online qualifiers for many EPT Season 8 events now!

Let’s preview the next two EPT events coming up on the radar! EPT Barcelona (Aug. 27) is expected to have a huge turn out after last year set a new record, with 750 players in the main event and a € 3,790,000 prize pool! A huge first place prize of €825,000 went to Spaniard Jose Cortes Lizano.

This year, all EPT Barcelona events will be held at the Casino de Barcelona located at Port Olimpic, right on the ocean. Fabulous ocean walking paths are right at your feet, with the world famous “Las Ramblas” rambling scenic path cutting through the heart of the city straight to the ocean. The EPT Barcelona is within short distance of world class shopping and international quality fine dining. Nothing can compare to Barcelona at night!

Then one month later finds us at EPT London (September 30th). This will be a full on poker festival, a massive non stop celebration of poker! This is the first Poker Festival of Season 8! The tournament is to be played at the luxurious Hilton Metropole Hotel. Last year’s EPT London was the biggest tournament to ever be held in the UK, paying out first place winner David Vamplew a £900,000 first prize! Highlights of this year’s EPT London will surely include the £5,250 Main Event, the High Roller and European 8-Game Championship!

Formerly known as Moneybookers, Skrill has a long and storied history in the online gaming arena. With over nineteen million account holders, they are one of the largest and most versatile online wallet services in the world. Their new partnership with GPTL will give the company “a strong visible presence at EPT events across Europe,” according to a recent press release, “with representatives talking to customers on the ground and helping players register for accounts by offering various incentives and loyalty programs.”

This presence will begin to show in the newest edition of the EPT, Season Eight. Other major sponsors include Copag, a playing cards manufacturer, and Shamballa Jewels.

“Skrill is delighted to join the European Poker Tour as its Official Payment Provider Sponsor,” said Nikolai Riesenkampff, the company’s co-CEO. “Now in its eighth season, the EPT has grown to become one of the largest and most lucrative poker tours in the world. Our headline sponsorship promises to deal a winning hand when it comes to strengthening our position as the leading digital wallet and bankroll management option among the world’s poker players.”

Jefferey Haas, the managing director of GPTL, was equally optimistic regarding the new alliance.

“The European Poker Tour operates in more countries and markets than any other tour in the world,” he said, “and it’s wonderful that companies with global aspirations, like Skrill, recognize the opportunity we provide them to reach new customers in meaningful ways.”

One of the new ones is called the EPT Tallinn Adventure. With the EPT coming back to Estonia, PokerStars is giving players a chance to win a buy-in at the Main Event. This is worth a huge €4,250!

There are a lot of ETP Tallinn Adventure Satellites being held right now. These are all exclusive to Finland players. Each Monday through Saturday, Finland players have the chance to play in three different tournaments per day to have a chance at the Weekly Final.

The Freeroll tournament offers the top two players to be entered into the Weekly Final. The €2.20 Rebuy sends four players into the Weekly Final. And the €11 Freezeout sends six to the Weekly Final.

There are a total of four Weekly Finals played on Sundays. The top four players from the Weekly Finals win a room at the Swissotel for 2 nights plus a seat in the live satellite to the EPT Tallinn. The top two players in this live satellite are rewarded with a seat to the EPT Tallinn.

Players must be 21 to enter. Good luck to all!

The EPT is, of course, the abbreviation for the European Poker Tour, a PokerStars-sponsored series of live poker tournaments which are televised and later broadcast for fans to enjoy. As such, the EPT is broken up into seasons, which each stop of a season taking place in a different beautiful location around Europe. Having begun in 2004 the Tour has now enjoyed seven seasons or one each year, including this most recent which has just come to a close with the tournament in Madrid, Spain.

As the cleverer amongst you can probably guess the EPT Grand Final in Madrid was the last stop of this season’s series, wrapping up an awesome collection of tournaments in some of Europe’s most fantastic locations. Kicking off on May 7th and running through until May 12th, the tournament was hosted in the Gran Casino Madrid, and sported a buy-in of €10,000 + €600 for those not fortunate enough to win a package through one of the many PokerStars satellite tournaments. Falling only slightly short of the 800 cap, the tournament drew 686 players which generated a prize pool of €6,860,000 (just under $10 Million US) to be split among the top 104 competitors, with the winner receiving €1.5 Million.

Among the players to make it to the final table was Team PokerStars Pro Alex Gomes, seeking the  elusive so-called Triple Crown of poker. Having won a WSOP Event in 2008 and a WPT Championship in 2009, Gomes was looking to pull off the hat-trick but was sadly eliminated in 7th place. After this Ivan Freitez really took charge of the final table, and ended up eliminating four of his seven opposition players as the final table dragged on, building up an impressive chip stack. When he knocked out Tamas Lendvei in third place it was time for heads-up play against German Torsten Brinkmann.

Having been busy at the final table, Freitez came into heads-up play with a roughly four-to-one chip lead against Brinkmann. After early drama Brinkmann pushed all-in with Ace King offsuit and was called by Freitez’s much behind Ten Nine suited. A nine on the flop promptly turned the tables, however, and the blanks on the turn and river sealed the deal, sending Brinkmann to the rail in second place and crowning Freitez as the latest EPT Champion. The winner received a handsome €1.5 Million (over $2,100,000 USD) for his troubles in addition to the EPT title.

The European Poker Tour is a series of poker tournaments which are sponsored by PokerStars and shown on television for fans around the world to enjoy. The tournaments themselves take place in beautiful locations around the European continent, with each location counting as one of several “stops” in every season of the Tour. The Tour first began in 2004 and since then there have been a total of seven seasons, with the seventh concluding last week in Madrid, Spain. The combined events of these seven seasons produced a list of 50 Main Event winners to battle it out in this Champion of Champions tournament.

Jason Mercier is an extremely well-known tournament poker player who first entered the spotlight when he won an EPT Main Event in season four of the Tour at the San Remo stop. His tournament poker accomplishments know nearly no bounds. He sports 14 WSOP in-the-money finishes including one Bracelet win, two WPT money finishes and four EPT money finishes, three of which were final table performances. His tremendous skill as a poker player sees him ranked third in the world by ESPN and he has career tournament earnings well in excess of $5,000,000.

The tournament was naturally a freeroll put on by PokerStars and the EPT, with a prize pool to the value €100,000 (just under $150,000). As you have to expect from this kind of tournament the competition was truly tough, with every EPT champion from the absolute first Alex Stevic right through to Ivan Freitez who won the 2011 EPT Madrid stop just one day before the Champion of Champions tournament kicked off. Alongside the eventual winner Jason Mercier the biggest name was most likely Bertrand Grospellier, better known by his online poker screenname ElkY. ElkY made it to the final table of eight but was the first to bust, being eliminated by Mercier himself.

As the star-studded final table became smaller and smaller, the chips were flying in every direction. Max Lykov was sent to the rail in third place by would-be runner-up Galen Hall, signaling the beginning of heads-up play. Hall had a three-to-two chip lead over Mercier as the two began to play some pots, but a fateful Jack saw Mercier’s AJ pull ahead of Hall’s AK as the two were all-in and the tables were drastically turned, with Mercier having eight times as many chips as his opponent. The two were soon all-in once again and Mercier’s A2o held against K3o, giving Mercier the €50,000 in first place prize money and, more importantly, the title of EPT Champion of Champions.

The European Poker Tour is sponsored by PokerStars and is a series of poker tournaments which take place in beautiful locations around the continent of Europe. The format is similar to the very well known World Poker Tour, although final tables consist of eight players as opposed to the six found in WPT events. The tournaments are televised so that fans can enjoy every bit of the action, and since its beginnings in 2004 we’ve seen six complete seasons, with the current seventh season wrapping up its final stop soon in Madrid, kicking off on May 12th.

This penultimate stop to Season Seven of the European Poker Tour took place in the far north of Italy in San Remo, on the beautiful Italian Riviera. It was the most populated event of this series with 987 players turning up to compete, each putting up a buy-in of €5000+300, which generated a massive prize pool of €4,786,950 (just under $7 Million USD). The action took place from April 27th to May 3rd at the Casino San Remo.

The final table was a very experienced and talented one, with players such as Max Lykov who already has one EPT title and Max Heinzelmann who just recently finished second in EPT Berlin. Lykov started the final table seventh in chips and managed to hang on before being eliminated in fourth place, ending his chances of becoming the first ever player to win two EPT titles. Canadian Xuan Liu was knocked out in third place, leaving Rupert Elder and Max Heinzelmann alone on the table to fight it out for the title and the first place prize money.

As heads-up play kicked off the British Elder had over a 2 to 1 chip advantage, although Heinzelmann was able to quickly even out the stacks and then pull ahead. It looked like it was going to be all over when Heinzelmann’s flopped straight got all-in against Elder’s set of sixes on the turn, but the river paired the board saving Elder and giving him the decisive chip lead. The two got all-in preflop and Elder’s A5 offsuit held against the Q5o of Heinzelmann, sending him to the rail in his second runner-up EPT finish within a month. In addition to the EPT title, Elder won €930,000 (over $1.3 Million USD) for his efforts.

In light of the slew of poker tournament poker television cancellations it is awesome to see that the European Poker Tour is continuing to put on great tournaments, at least for this season. There’s still one more stop left in this year’s tour with a massive €10,000+600 buy-in, so make sure you stay tuned for our coverage of EPT Madrid if you’re unable to get amongst the action yourself.