Guide to the European Poker Tour

**Has Been Cancelled by Pokerstars at the End of 2016

The European Poker Tour was a high stakes poker tournament series started in 2004 that featured stops all across Europe and a few other stops around the world. As a competing tour to the World Poker Tour and similar tours, the European Poker Tour aimed to capture a wider player pool by offering buy-ins about half the size of those at the WPT. This lower buy-in trend continued through the end of season three when they were forced to raise the buy-ins due to space constraints.

Many European casinos are smaller and don’t have massive spaces to accommodate huge poker tours. As poker boomed in popularity, they quickly were getting too many players for the event venue spaces they had for the tournaments. To deal with this, they raised the buy-ins for most of the main events to £8.000.

The first two seasons of the tour saw seven events which were increased to eight in the third season. The number of tour stops continued increasing to its peak of 13 events through season eight and then began decreasing through its final thirteenth season which only had three events. Each stop on the tour had several preliminary events of varying buy-ins and games but always culminated in a main event for each stop.

Each season of the European Poker Tour had a championship event known as the EPT Grand Final which has been held in Monte Carlo every single season except for Season 13 which had no final event. Unlike some of the other tours, the European Poker Tour usually kept a lot of the same stops through all of the seasons. As new ones were added during the rise, they would usually stay on the schedule for multiple years.

The events all took place in Europe until Season 4 when they added the Pokerstars Caribbean Adventure series held at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas. This tournament regularly had the largest prize pool as the island spot drew a lot of competitors looking for poker fun and some sun. The usual first prize in the main event of the Caribbean Adventure was ~ $2,000,000. This was significantly higher than the other stop on the tour.

The list of winners of the EPT events is full of decorated players and some of the best in the world. While a lot of the winners are European, the American and UK players have made a strong statement on the scene. This is to be expected as travel costs are significantly higher for Americans to get to these European-based events.

Here is the list of the prior winners for each main event as well as the amount they won for their troubles.

At the end of the 13^th Season in 2016, Pokerstars decided to call an end to the European Poker Tour. The move was made to make way for their new tour that launched in 2017 known as the Pokerstars Championship. While this is a brand-new tour, many see this as a rebranding and continuation of the European Poker Tour as many of the inaugural stops were the same including the Bahamas, Monte Carlo, and Barcelona.