EPT Barcelona 2025 Day 1A Report

The latest stop of this years PokerStars European Poker Tour is Barcelona. Yesterday the €5,000 buy-in Main Event began at the Casino de Barcelona and Day 1A drew 263 players with 137 of those players surviving the day. Finishing as chip leader for the day was Winamax-sponsored pro Loic Sa who ammassed over 200,000 chips.

Like every year the EPT Barcelona Main Event attracted some of the best poker players in the world. Some of the familiar faces to participate in Day 1A of the tournament were Lex Veldhui, Ville Wahlbeck, Ludovic Lacay, 2025 WSOP January Niner Antoine Saout, Kevin Stani who won the 2025 EPT Tallinn event, Arnaud Matter, and last years EPT Barcelona Main Event winner Carter Philips was also back to defend his title.

Unfortunately for Lex Veldhuis and Ville Wahlbeck they failed to survive the day and found themselves eliminated along with 124 other players. Other EPT regulars who found themselves eliminated were Darius Suharto, Anthony Lellouche and Arnaud Mattern.

Meanwhile it was Loic Sa (who is a sponsored pro that represents French poker site Winamax) who finished the day as chip-leader. He blasted through the field and quickly held over 100,000 chips and built on his stack throughout the day to finish with just over 200,000 chips.Second in chips after Day 1A was Yann Dion with 162,000 chips and in third place was Claudio Piceci with 143,000 chips.

Day 1B started today and again there was a whole host of stars participating. Top names to buy-in and take their seats in the tournament included Daniel Negreanu, Dario Minieri, Bertrand ‘ElkY’ Grosspellier, Alexander Kravchenko, Juha Helppi, and newly signed Team PokerStars pro’s Liv Boeree and Maxim Lykov – and that is only some of the big names.

After todays play ends, players will resume tomorrow for Day 2 of the event. Currently there is no prize pool established, however it should be announced at the end of todays play and rumours suggest it could see the winner walk away with around €750,000 so everyone will be playing their best poker and hoping to avoid any bad-beats!