Published 18 August 2026. Analysis and views here are our opinion,
not a guarantee of anything. 18+, please gamble responsibly.
The European Poker Tour’s Barcelona stop runs from 16 to 29 August at Casino Barcelona, and this week is the part of it worth paying attention to. The festival’s opening days have already dealt the PokerStars Open Main Event, and the schedule now steps up through the high rollers into the €5,300 EPT Main Event, which starts its first Day 1 on Saturday 22 August.
Barcelona is the stop that reliably draws the biggest fields on the tour, helped by an August slot in the calendar and a buy-in ladder that starts well below the flagship event. That matters for what the week actually looks like: several tournaments running at once, most of them affordable by live-tour standards, rather than one headline event with a small field.
What is on this week
Thursday 20 August is the busiest day of the run-up. The PokerStars Open Cup starts at €825, the €30,000 Super High Roller Warm Up gets going, and the PokerStars Open Main Event reaches Day 2 with its €1,650 buy-in field already trimmed.
Friday 21 August adds the PokerStars Open High Roller at €2,700 and the €100,000 EPT Super High Roller, which is the tournament that brings the recognisable names out. The Open Cup finishes the same day.
Saturday 22 August is the pivot. The EPT Main Event opens Day 1/A at €5,300, the PokerStars Open Main Event plays down to a winner, and the Super High Roller reaches Day 2. From 23 August PokerStars streams seven days of coverage across Twitch and Facebook in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and German. The €10,300 EPT High Roller closes the festival from 27 to 29 August.
The one genuinely new thing on this schedule is a €2,200 event called In the Money at 180,000, running from 17 to 27 August. Reach 180,000 chips and you have both a Day 2 seat and a locked-in cash, which removes the money bubble from the tournament entirely.
Whether that is an improvement depends on what you think the bubble is for. It takes out the stretch of a tournament where short stacks fold into the money and big stacks bully them, which is the phase that rewards players who are paying attention. It also takes out the part most recreational players find unpleasant. It reads like a format built for the second group, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as you know which one you are in before you buy in.
Last year sets the bar high
Thomas Eychenne won the 2025 Barcelona Main Event for more than €1.2 million, out of what was the third-largest Main Event field in EPT history. That is the number the 2026 edition is measured against, and the reason the Main Event Day 1s tend to run across multiple flights.
For anyone playing online rather than flying to Catalonia, the qualifiers and satellite structures around events like this are where most of the field comes from. Poker is a game where the buy-in you enter at is a decision in itself, and satellite routes exist precisely so that the €5,300 number is not the only way in.
The poker offer we hold terms for
Ad: new William Hill customers who opt in can claim a £100 poker bonus and the Twister Discovery Pack on a first deposit or transfer of £10 or more.
Read what that £100 actually is before you treat it as £100. It is a playthrough bonus, released through WHPoints earned at real-money tables in a two-stage redemption, and it expires after 45 days. You unlock it by playing rather than by depositing, which is the normal shape of a poker welcome bonus and the reason poker offers look larger than casino ones at the headline. The Twister tickets are the part that lands up front and the part a new player is most likely to actually use, since Twister sit-and-gos are three-handed and take minutes rather than hours.
The bonus spins portion carries 40x wagering, a 14-day expiry and a £20 maximum redemption, which is the least generous element in the package. Full significant terms are on the offer card below. One per customer, new customers only, 18+.
If you are playing this week
Treat any tournament buy-in the same way you would treat a bet: money you have decided you can lose, in a bankroll you have set aside for it, not money doing another job. Poker rewards study and volume over time, and a single festival is a small sample whatever happens in it. Anything here is our opinion rather than advice.
If Barcelona has you wanting to play rather than watch, the William Hill poker welcome offer is the one we currently hold published terms for, at a £10 minimum deposit with the bonus released over 45 days. Its full significant terms are on the offer card below, and they are worth reading before you deposit rather than after.
Sources: PokerNews, CardPlayer, PokerTube.
