EPT Prague: Celebrate (quietly). The EPT is 150!
The European Poker Tour (EPT) is quietly celebrating a significant milestone in the Czech Republic this week.
The festival here in Prague is the 150th EPT. It’s come a very long way since humble beginnings in Barcelona back in 2004.
But why is this just a quiet celebration? Why not hang out the bunting and go wild?
The short answer: it’s complicated, and it relates to the way we’ve been counting EPTs.
The long answer, which we’ll expand on below, takes in all kinds of considerations, including trips across continental boundaries, the Covid-19 pandemic, and a year when the EPT wasn’t really the EPT at all.
It all combines to make it less than perfectly easy to count EPT events, and makes it less than obvious that we should be celebrating.
But here’s the reasoning as to how we can state officially that this is EPT #150.
AS EASY AS 1-2-3
Back in the early days of the EPT, the poker tournaments were arranged into seasons, with a Grand Final in Monte Carlo rounding it off. The season typically started in Barcelona in late summer and ended in Monaco in March.
With very slight variations, and with various new destinations appearing on the schedule, this format endured for 12-and-a-half years, or through 12-and-a-half seasons.
The EPT celebrated its 100th event in Barcelona in 2014 (the opening event of Season 11), and there had been 115 EPT Main Events by Prague 2016. But then things changed…
The EPT’s first champion, Alexander Stevic
A GLOBAL EXPANSION FOR WHAT WAS ONCE THE EPT
When it first began, the EPT was pitched specifically as a Europe-centred poker tour the equivalent of similar tours in the United States. (Though the “W” in both the WPT and WSOP stood for “World” — as in World Poker Tour and World Series of Poker — they did not stray outside the USA.)
In 2008, however, the incredibly popular PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) became an official part of the EPT. Though no one was really proposing bringing the Bahamas into Europe, it made good sense to haul the PCA into the EPT family.
In 2016, there was another idea along similar lines. With the Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT) and Latin America Poker Tour (LAPT) also booming, the PokerStars live events team of the day proposed a new global tour.
The EPT essentially vanished to become a part of the PokerStars Championship, with festivals also now taking place in Macau, Panama and Sochi, as well as Barcelona, Prague and Monte Carlo.
The “final” EPT festival took place in Prague in December 2016, with Jasper Meijer van Putten becoming the tour’s final champion. In an emotional on-stage presentation, James Hartigan led tributes to the EPT as we all bade farewell to an old favourite.
Including nine PCAs, the EPT was 115 and out.
Farewell to the EPT!
NOT SO FAST…
The PokerStars Championship was fun. All of thoroughly enjoyed visiting Panama, Macau and Russia, in addition to our familiar favourite trips to Paradise Island, the Salle des Etoiles, Barcelona and Prague.
But something else was obvious: it wasn’t quite as good. Player numbers were down on equivalent EPT-branded events, and something didn’t feel quite right.
In early 2018, and by popular demand, the EPT returned. It wouldn’t be divided into seasons anymore, but many of the old favourites were back. There was no doubt that our new trips to Barcelona, Monte Carlo, Prague etc., could add to the total numbers of EPTs. But what about those PokerStars Championship events? Could we count those as EPTs too?
We’ll come back to this…
A new era of live poker…ahem
A NEW COMPLICATION AS THE WORLD CLOSES DOWN
There were lots of things that couldn’t survive an infectious disease pandemic. But with thousands of people sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in a single room, live poker tournaments never stood a chance.
So it was that when the Covid-19 pandemic shut down countries across the world, the EPT as we knew it ground to a halt.
But PokerStars, of course, is primarily an online poker card-room and just as university learning, pub quizzes and awkward first dates all shifted to the internet, it was a fairly trivial decision to move the EPT online.
Though players in certain jurisdictions wouldn’t be allowed to play, plenty would. The EPT Online festivals of November 2020 and December 2021 attracted 1,304 and 402 entries, respectively.
The most remarkable thing was that Sweden’s “WhatIfGod” won both of them.
Were these official EPT Main Events? Could they go on the tally? It wasn’t a straightforward decision, but the event ticked pretty much all the boxes. So the answer was: Yes.
WhatIfGod, later identified to be Anton Bergstrom, became a two-time EPT champion almost overnight.
Anton Bergstrom: WhatIfGod unveiled
DO THE MATH
In March 2022, the EPT came back. And, touch wood, it hasn’t gone anywhere since. These days — and, again, with slight variations — there are five EPT events per year, including Barcelona in August, Monte Carlo in March and Prague in December.
We have started counting them normally again.
However, it’s not exactly straightforward what events we should count as EPTs from those days where we were travelling all over the world.
The EPT returned, with masks, in 2022
After much back and forth behind the scenes, where we discussed whether to include all the PCAs, the PokerStars Championships, and EPT Online, senior managers inside PokerStars decided the following.
- All events branded as official EPTs from 2004-2016 (115 events) and from 2018-present (30 before Prague 2025) would count.
- This includes the two EPT Online Main Events of 2020 and 2021.
- It also includes all PCAs held from 2008 to 2016, which were officially declared EPT events.
- PokerStars Championship events held in established European destinations would be retrospectively considered EPT events. These are the PokerStars Championships held in Monte Carlo, Sochi, Barcelona and Prague — ie., four events. NOTE: it did NOT include the PokerStars Championship events held in Macau, Panama or the Bahamas.
The total from all of the above is 149 EPTs. That means only one thing: EPT Prague 2025 is OFFICIALLY the 150th EPT Main Event.
It’s convoluted, but the EPT is officially 150 not out!
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