For 13 years, the online tables of PokerStars have been both breeding ground and springboard for success in the most prestigious live poker tournaments in the world–specifically those of the European Poker Tour.
New players Only. £10 min deposit. £5 max bet using bonus. 40 x wagering applies. Bonus valid for 14 days. 20 Spins on Starburst Malec Poker games will be credited instantly + then 20 per day for 9 days. Free Malec Poker Spins valid for 72 hours from credit. Max Free Malec Poker Spins winnings £100. Skrill + Neteller excluded. Young poker player Sebastian Malec is the happy winner of the European Poker Tour Barcelona Main Event. This year's EPT had the largest Main Event field in history with 1784 entries. Malec won his seat through a 27€ online satellite to pick up €1,122,800 and a silver trophy.
It is only fitting, then, that in the year that the EPT as we know it visits Barcelona for the final time, a 21-year-old Polish player named Sebastian Malec has become its final champion. Like thousands of players before him, Malec qualified for the €5,300 Main Event for peanuts and turned it into a life-changing pay-day.
It cost Malec precisely €27 to enter that online satellite. Today he picked up €1,122,800 and a trophy that is nearly the size he is. It was hugely emotional too.
“It means everything to me,” he said. “It feels good, definitely good. The money is amazing, of course, but heads up it is all about the trophy.”
On the final hand, Malec wandered away from the table while his heads up opponent, Uri Reichenstein, pondered a call that could end the tournament. Then, learning that Reichenstein had put the chips over the line, Malec sprinted back to turn over a winning flush, leapt up and down on the spot, and started weeping. They were tears of pure joy.
Although the EPT is re-branding at the end of this calendar year, it will return to Barcelona as a PokerStars Championship event, and one suspects that Malec will quickly become a fixture in this environment. And a firm favourite.
A self-confessed poker fan-boy, Malec was only 9-years-old when the EPT played its first tournament here in Barcelona. But he matured alongside the tour: learning the game from his chess instructor, visiting an EPT event in London a few years ago, trading checkered board for cards and chips and then finding himself in line for the title today. And when he closed it out, he was delirious.
In order to secure the trophy, he had to beat another graduate from the online tables. Reichenstein, 28, is a former winner of scores of online tournaments, including the Sunday Million and Super Tuesday. Although he was appearing in the deep stages of an EPT event for the first time, Reichenstein showed the nous of a tournament veteran. He is the very epitome of the kind of poker star that has become some dominant during the decade that the EPT has risen to preeminence.
Reichenstein pinched the chip lead late last night when he put the squeeze on a few less experienced players at the table. Then he picked his spots throughout an 11-hour final today to lead when they got heads up. But having beaten all but one of this record-breaking 1,785-player field, he couldn’t beat the young Malec.
To get there took some grinding from both of these guys.
Play on the penultimate day ended in the small hours of Sunday morning with Harcharan Dogra Dogra, the last remaining Spanish player, opting not to commit his final seven big blinds to a pot against Reichenstein. “Tomorrow,” he said, apparently happy to return to a tiny stack on the last day rather than risk missing out entirely. It meant he got to come back to pose for the final group shot.
However it also meant that although he could return to his home casino with a loyal band of supporters, all of them knew he would be up against it. The cards didn’t help him out in his bid to get something going, and when he posted a big blind and had only five more behind, he was given the mighty 3♥2♣.
All of the rest of his chips went in when there was a deuce on the flop, but by the time the river was out, Thomas De Rooij‘s A♥4♠ had improved to a pair of fours and Dogra Dogra was out. He won €230,950.
The early stages of the final table were brutal on more than just Dogra Dogra. Adam Owen, for so long a chip leader yesterday, couldn’t get any hand to hold up and he dwindled down to about 30 big blinds after losing a series of small pots.
But then he sighted a chance to play a big one after Andreas Chalkiadakis three-bet shoved after another open from De Rooij and Owen found A♣Q♣ in the big blind.
Owen pondered for a while. He was running cold and seemed to be concerned about De Rooij sitting behind him. But eventually he re-shoved, De Rooij folded and Owen had chosen the right move. Chalkiadakis had K♥Q♠ and Owen had made an unbeatable full house by the turn.
Chalkiadakis picked up €330,290 but won’t remember the final fondly. He played only one hand: the one that knocked him out.
With five players left, there was something of an imbalance. All of Owen, De Rooij, Reichenstein and Malec, who had the chip-lead, are either fully fledged professionals or on the way to it, while Zorlu Er, also still involved at that stage, was a pure recreational on a heater.
Er had refused to be bullied through five days of competition, though, taking his own time to make every decision even if it got under the skin of some of his more experienced opponents. But that made it all the more mystifying when his tournament came to an end in arguably the quickest hand he had played all week.
Er defended his big blind with A♠J♣ after Reichenstein opened with his 10♦4♦. But Reichenstein flopped a flush and Er top pair when the A♦K♦3♦ appeared. Reichenstein didn’t stop betting from there, setting up a shove on the river, and Er was unable to find a fold.
That was that for Er, who won €431,550 for fifth.
Reichenstein took the chip lead back with the elimination of Er, and the four players agreed to take a look at the numbers in a tentative bid to work out a chop. There was still more than €3 million on the line, and some deep stacks, but they could not come up with a deal that suited them all. They played on.
And they played on. And they played on.
The stacks at this stage were only a matter a few blinds apart and each of the remaining quartet had shown ample aptitude to make smart decisions. The first man to really put distance between himself and the pack was Malec, who won a series of pots against all comers, but then Reichenstein hit back with an enormous double up through Owen.
Reichenstein found kings and disguised it well. Owen had K♦Q♣ and a queen came on the flop. Reichenstein completed a full double-up to put him way out in front and leave Owen with the short stack.
However it was De Rooij who perished next. In a bid to eliminate Owen, De Rooij open-shoved with Q♥7♥ from the small blind, attacking Owen’s big. Owen made a marginal–but marginally correct–call with K♠2♠ and faded outs to double, leaving De Rooij perilously short.
When he got his last three big blinds in with A♠7♣, he couldn’t beat Reichenstein’s J♠3♦ when a three came on the flop. De Rooij had the most vocal of all the rails in the room, but they were silenced as they swept their man to the payouts desk looking for €535,100.
Owen still didn’t have an enormous stack despite the double up and, much like his beloved Tottenham Hotspur, his tournament ended with him in third place in the league table.
It was actually the very next hand after De Rooij was knocked out when Owen handed his 5.6 million chips to Malec, unable to beat A♦8♦ with Q♦J♠. Owen was the dominant force in this tournament for almost all of yesterday and demonstrated that he has a pretty good hold’em game to match his mixed game prowess. Third was worth €646,250.
That brought them to heads up and a slight lead for Reichenstein. But with nearly 180 big blinds between them, it was worth settling in.
It was an intriguing heads up battle: the seasoned online pro taking on the young upstart. Reichenstein has has won pretty much all the major tournaments online, but although Malec is only recently graduated from the chess tables, he is following the likes of his countrymen Dominik Panka and Dzmitry Urbanovich to an EPT final table.
No Polish player has ever lost heads up at a Main Event final table, and Malec didn’t seem prepared to become the first. He wouldn’t give up as the chip lead swung both ways.
There were many, many pots that fizzled out, but a few humdingers. In one, Reichenstein bluffed with queen-high into Malec’s quads; in another he filled an inside straight on the river and value shoved. It got paid off.
Reichenstein was absolutely motionless at the table, but Malec was the complete opposite, bouncing up and down out of his chair and playing at least an hour standing up. He talked to himself, sometimes he sung to himself, he sucked on a straw, he ordered more drinks.
It seemed on occasion as though he was slightly melting down, but it was also clear that he was keeping his wits about him. “My happiness grows exponentially the longer we play,” he said. He couldn’t get enough.
When he got super short, he managed to find another double and keep it going beyond midnight. And then he continued to battle until his A♥3♥ made a flush on a board of J♠6♥Q♥8♥8♦. It was rough for Reichenstein. He had a straight.
That proved to be the decisive moment. A shell-shocked and exhausted Reichenstein finally succumbed, leaving another extraordinary young talent under the ticker tape, hoisted aloft by his friends.
Read the blow-by-blow account to see how this all played out.
EPT13 Main Event
Date: August 22-28, 2016
Buy-in: €5,000 + €300
Players: 1,785
Prize-pool: €8,925,000
1 – Sebastian Malec, Poland, €1,122,800
2 – Uri Reichenstein, Germany, €807,100
3 – Adam Owen, United Kingdom, €646,250
4 – Thomas De Rooij, Netherlands, €535,100
5 – Zorlu Er, Turkey, €431,550
6 – Andreas Chalkiadakis, Greece, €330,290
7 – Harcharan Dogra Dogra, Spain, €230,950
8 – Pavel Plesuv, Moldova, €165,950
In the summer of 2016, one of the most bizarre and exciting final hands of any tournament brought a controversial PokerStars EPT Barcelona Main Event to a close. Sebastian Malec defeated Uri Reichenstein to claim the title he’d imagine winning his whole youth. The ultimate fan of the European Poker Tour won the most coveted title of his dreams.
EPT Barcelona, however, was no ordinary EPT. PokerStars had halted play before the first card was dealt to break the news to fans and players alike that the EPT was being closed as a brand, and that the new PokerStars Championship (PSC) was the way forward.
James Hartigan, presenter, commentator, and senior editorial manager of the EPT and many other PokerStars shows, remembers the moment well.
'I don’t think there’s any harm in anyone saying, 'OK we made a mistake, we never should have ended the EPT, and we’re bringing that back.'
“It was difficult,” says Hartigan, “I make no secret of the fact that I never wanted to say goodbye to the EPT. I found it a curious decision. One of the reasons why I drank the Kool-Aid and bought into it was that I thought the EPT wasn’t ending; I thought it was expanding and transitioning into the PSC which would be taking the EPT global. Bizarrely, when we got to the end of 2016, we were saying it was the end of the EPT the beginning of something new. That confused me because that’s not what I thought was going to happen. It’s obvious that it didn’t work, and I don’t think there’s any harm in anyone saying, ‘OK we made a mistake, we never should have ended the EPT, and we’re bringing that back.’”
Looking back, everyone has 20/20 vision in retrospect, but at the time, Hartigan thinks that the ‘final days’ element helped created one of the most unique Main Event winners the EPT has ever seen.
“I think it played into Sebastian Malec’s emotions at the time. He’d heard along with everyone else that there were going to be three more - Barcelona, Malta, and Prague - and then it was going to be something else. To him, he was going to be one of the last EPT champions.”
Malec was young, just about to turn 21 when EPT Barcelona Main Event rolled around. Malec was almost unheard of, yet strangely had been in the winner's photo for an EPT previously.
“In a remarkable piece of foreshadowing, at the EPT Dublin final table earlier that year, which Dzmitry Urbanovich won, on his rail, there were a number of Polish players... among which was Sebastian Malec. In the winner’s presentation when Urbanovich lifts the trophy, Malec is there as part of that contingent cheering. Fast forward six months, and he’s lifting that trophy, and the polish poker community is celebrating his victory.”
No-one has ever won an EPT like Sebastian Malec did. From bathroom habits to a pantomime every time he was in a hand, Malec was like an excited child on Christmas Eve. He was going to get the present of a lifetime.
“He was such a one-off. We identified him when we were down to four or five tables at the end of Day 4. He won a huge pot on the very last hand of the day. We didn’t see it on the stream, but the crew out in the field noticed that after winning that hand, he got really emotional and broke down in tears. The fact that he made it to the penultimate day, the final 24 or 16 players and obviously had a huge stack, he was someone who was very invested in it.”
No-one had any idea how invested. But Hartigan and the team interviewed every player on the eve of the final table, and the picture became clear. Malec was a fan. A superfan.
“We only made TV shows of the final tables of the EPT that year, so we interviewed everyone who was at the final table. We heard Malec’s story and found out about his background as a chess prodigy [who] discovered poker.”
'It was a combination of nerves and excitement that made him behave the way he did.'
It turned out that Malec was a student who had visited the EPT tournament while studying in London.
“He was this ultimate poker fanboy. He’d come to have his picture taken with people like Jason Mercier and to see Liv Boeree play. To be in the position where he could qualify for the EPT, play in the EPT and then go deep and potentially win what at that point was the biggest EPT ever held, it clearly meant so much to him. It was a combination of nerves and excitement that made him behave the way he did.”
Malec’s final hand was the poker moment of his life, and possibly that of his opponent, Uri Recihenstein too, just for different reasons.
“The reason I love the hand is because it has a bit of everything. You’ve obviously got this ridiculous cooler, and you’d had this back-and-forth heads-up battle where both players had enjoyed a dominant chip lead. Sebastian needed to go to the bathroom several times, and they were almost dead even in chips. I sat there thinking ‘This will go on until five in the morning!’ and then: Cooler Alert!”
Malec turns a flush, with Reichenstein making the nut straight with the same card. Malec goes all-in on the paired river, and Reichenstein then proceeds to deliberate the call which would end the tournament in his opponent’s favor, while Malec prances, dances and prowls around the table. Malec even left the table to take a selfie with the crowd on the rail, to raucous laughter.
“Malec walks away from the table. Part of you loves it, part of you knows that the tournament staff probably shouldn’t let him leave the table and sit in the crowd and letting someone take a sip of his drink. But it was so fun to watch. More than that, Sebastian Malec goes through every human emotion from the moment Uri Reichenstein throws in that single chip to call. The sheer excitement as he jumps up and realizes that he’s got to get back to the table, flips over his cards, he’s jumping for joy, then the emotion hits him, and he realizes ‘Oh my God, I’ve won!’ and he just bursts into tears.
'He’s in the corner crying his eyes out, then the celebrations start again, his friends and the other Polish players are around him and lifting him up and he realizes ‘I’m the winner. The last hand is hilarious, fun, and ridiculous. And what follows afterward is probably the best winning moment we’ve ever had in any live event ever.”
Better players have won EPT Main Events. Bigger names have never even got close to achieving what Malec did. It was clear that his EPT win was the biggest moment of the young man’s life.
'To see the TV set, all those tables, the pros, and then play on the tour and win it, is just an incredible journey which encompasses everything about why we do what we do.'
“I think he’s very lucky by the way, with everything he was saying and doing, he was exuding so much strength to the point where Reichenstein said ‘Everything you’re doing right now tells me that you’ve got it, that you’re really strong.’ It’s absolutely telegraphing his hand, but somehow he still gets a call.”
We can all identify with the pain Reichenstein is in. He’s turned an improbable straight heads-up and knows that it’s a huge hand and he should be winning. But his gut is screaming at him to fold. He has to know if his gut is right or wrong.
“It’s something we can all relate to. Granted not for the same stakes with an EPT on the line, but we’ve all been 100% they’ve got it, but we can’t help ourselves but put the chips out there. We need to see it, to be proved right, but the cost [to Reichenstein] was an EPT title and a huge difference in prize money.”
Sebastian Malec will always be remembered, and for many reasons, so will the 2016 EPT Barcelona festival. Hartigan believes that Malec’s miraculous moment in the sun is something that brings together the aspiration and organization of the EPT.
Sebastian Malec Poker Wiki
“He’s taken that journey from poker fanboy to EPT champion. For someone who’s grown up watching the shows on TV, followed the live stream and came to an event to see what it’s like, to actually walk into that room, it’s amazing. To see the TV set, all those tables, the pros, and then play on the tour and win it, is just an incredible journey which encompasses everything about why we do what we do.”
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