4,333 entries. The €1,650 PokerStars Open Main Event, the opening flagship of EPT Barcelona 2026, closed registration at triple last year's mark of just over 1,300 entries, pushing the prize pool past €6 million. And the player on top of the counts is coming straight off the most expensive final table of the year.
The facts
Eight starting flights fed the field, and only 648 players reached Day 2 — all locking up at least a min-cash. Another day of carnage left 80, led by American Han Feng with 5,125,000 chips, just weeks after his fifth-place finish in the WSOP Main Event for $2,250,000. Sweden's Alexander Ivarsson sits second (4,580,000), with Brazil's Felipe Boianovsky third (3,495,000) — a player with over $7 million in live earnings and a BSOP R$50K Super High Roller title.
Day 3 runs Friday from 11:00 a.m. Barcelona time, with the finale on Saturday — the same day the festival's main course, the €5,300 EPT Main Event, gets underway. The casualty list from Day 2 reads like a who's who of the circuit, which tells you everything about how deep this field ran: hundreds of seasoned regulars cashed and still never sniffed the chip lead.
Why it matters: a heater is really sustained A-game
The lazy read on Feng is "he's running hot." The useful read: chaining a WSOP Main Event final table into the chip lead of a 4,333-entry field isn't stacked luck — it's a player executing his best poker for weeks on end, spot after spot. Variance decides a hand; decision quality decides a season.
Boianovsky offers the second lesson. A high-roller regular with seven figures banked is grinding a €1,650 event at full intensity. Elite players don't scale their effort to the buy-in. And in fields this deep, the edge compounds quietly: tight discipline early, then using a big stack to widen ranges and apply pressure exactly when the payout jumps make opponents fold too much.
Eighty remain and every pot now carries ICM weight. We'll be following the finale table by table in our community — if you're building your own tournament game, endgames like this one are free study material.