Winning one major is hard. Winning two, at the same casino, twelve months apart, is a different tier entirely. Thomas Eychenne — the reigning EPT Barcelona Main Event champion — just took down the €2,700 PokerStars Open High Roller for €589,395, beating a 1,551-entry field that built a €3,761,175 prize pool.
The facts: a final table ruled by pocket queens
If this final table had a protagonist, it wasn't a player — it was pocket queens. QQ knocked out the 7th-place finisher (against AK), the 6th (another AK, this time with Virgile Turchi holding the ladies), the 4th (Eychenne flopped a set against AJ) and ended the tournament on the very first hand of heads-up play, when Turchi shoved T9 straight into Eychenne's queens.
The heads-up battle barely happened: Eychenne arrived with a 6.5-to-1 chip lead and closed it immediately. Turchi, also French, collected €371,000 for second; Denmark's Lars Tungel earned €265,440 in third after his A6 ran into the champion's pocket eights, which flopped a set.
Context makes the story bigger. In 2025, Eychenne won the Barcelona Main Event over 2,045 entries for €1,217,175. This trophy is worth roughly half that score — and he confirmed he will defend his title, late-registering the 2026 Main Event.
Why it matters: repeating isn't luck — but it isn't a guarantee either
There's a double-edged lesson here worth absorbing. First: repeating results on the same stage is no accident. Behind two titles in a year sits volume, study and selective aggression. Eychenne didn't win because the queens favored him — he won because he reached heads-up with 6.5 times his opponent's stack, and that cushion gets built one decision at a time across three days.
Second — and this is house policy: a run like this is still not a system. The same QQ that crowned Eychenne could have lost three flips in a row, and nobody would be writing this story. The difference between a player who evolves and one who stalls isn't the outcome of a single hand; it's whether they played it well the previous thousand times. The trophy is the snapshot; the process is the film.
Eychenne returns to the felt today to defend his Main Event crown, with registration about to close and the year's biggest field already in motion. Barcelona 2026 is just getting started.
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