Level 33
: Blinds 125,000/250,000, 250,000 ante
2024 PokerStars EPT Barcelona
€5,300 EPT Main Event
Day: 7
Event Info
Final Results
Event Info
Level Info
Players Info - Day 7
2024 PokerStars EPT Barcelona
Buy-in
€5,300
Prize Pool
€9,578,750
Entries
1,975
Level
37
Blinds
300,000 / 600,000
Ante
600,000
Entries
6
Players Left
1
Level 33
: Blinds 125,000/250,000, 250,000 ante
The final six players have taken their seats and cards are in the air.
Level: 33
Blinds: 125,000/250,000
Ante: 250,000
After a grueling night of play in the €5,300 EPT Main Event at 2024 PokerStars European Poker Tour Barcelona, the final six players return today for a shot at the golden 20th-anniversary trophy and €1,512,000.
Leading the way is 2022 GPI Player of the Year Stephen Song, who is no stranger to success in this venue. At 2019's EPT Barcelona, he won a €2,200 No-Limit Hold'em event for $205,341. Should Song finish second or better, he will surpass his current best live cash of $712,650.
Two other Americans are among the final six, and one of them was in this same position just months ago. Rania Nasreddine has become one of the select players to make back-to-back EPT final tables after finishing third in April's EPT Monte Carlo Main Event for $473,639.
Meanwhile, David Coleman seeks to continue his lucrative summer after winning a WPT Alpha8 Trifecta High Roller in July for $730,300. Coleman had aces cracked on Day 2 of this event but stayed strong and now finds himself in contention for an EPT title.
Also among the final six are PokerStars online $55 qualifier Marius-Catalin Pertea of Romania, Britain's Andrew Hulme and Croatia's Boris Kuzmanovic, who will enter as the shortest stack with 21 blinds.
EPT Barcelona Final Table
| Seat | Player | Country | Chip Count | Big Blinds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||
| 2 | Andrew Hulme | United Kingdom | 5,525,000 | 22 |
| 3 | David Coleman | United States | 10,425,000 | 42 |
| 4 | Stephen Song | United States | 15,150,000 | 61 |
| 5 | Marius-Catalin Pertea | Romania | 14,575,000 | 58 |
| 6 | ||||
| 7 | Rania Nasreddine | United States | 8,300,000 | 33 |
| 8 | Boris Kuzmanovic | Croatia | 5,275,000 | 21 |
Action on Day 6 slowed significantly with nine players left, but three knockouts at the end of the night left 31:01 minutes on the clock in Level 33. That is where Day 7 will pick up at 12:30 p.m. local time as the tournament continues on with 90-minute levels.
PokerNews will continue to provide updates on a 30-minute delay to avoid spoilers of the PokerStars TV stream.
Stay tuned as PokerNews is on-site here in Barcelona and ready to provide updates before the 20th-anniversary EPT Main Event champion is crowned.
Remaining Final Table Payouts
| Place | Player | Country | Prize (EUR) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | €1,512,000 | ||
| 2 | €944,000 | ||
| 3 | €674,150 | ||
| 4 | €518,600 | ||
| 5 | €398,950 | ||
| 6 | €306,900 | ||
| 7 | Alexandre Fournier | Canada | €236,100 |
| 8 | Jianwei Lin | China | €181,600 |
| 9 | Fabiano Kovalski | Brazil | €139,750 |
You’d never guess it from his cool, calm demeanor, but Boris Kuzmanovic is on the verge of making history. If he takes down the EPT Barcelona Main Event he’ll become the first Croatian champion in the tour’s history.
“It has crossed my mind,” he says, smiling. “I'm usually very calm and I don't expect much but now I'm so close and the chances are real.”
Kuzmanovic, a 37-year-old computer consultant from Zagreb, used to play online cash games seriously around a decade ago. These days, however, he cherry-picks tournaments and only plays around 15 events a year. He’s played plenty under the PokerStars banner in that time and has more than half a million in live cashes. “I’ve had deep runs but nothing this big,” he says.
This will be his biggest cash wherever he finishes, but 2024 has already been his best year yet. At the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in July, he finished eighth in a $3,000 buy-in event for $133,479.
Rania Nasreddine has pulled off an incredible feat at EPT Barcelona, making back-to-back Main Event final tables. The 44-year-old finished third for €442,900 in Monte Carlo earlier this year, by far the biggest score of her poker career. But she could top it this week.
Nasreddine, a lawyer from Tulsa, Oklahoma, already had plenty of live poker experience before her maiden EPT final. Still, she downplayed her talent. “I’m not that good,” she said at the time. “I’m outkicking my coverage, as we say in America.”
But here she is, once again playing on an enormous stage with another six-figure score guaranteed, so don’t let her modesty fool you. Throughout the Barcelona Main Event, she’s shown not only how you build chip-leading stack, but how you recover when you’re down and almost out. At one point sitting with just seven big blinds, Nasreddine charged back and entered the penultimate day with the biggest stack.
Seven years ago, Marius Pertea fell just short of reaching the final table in Monte Carlo; he bowed out in 11th place after losing with king-jack to Davidi Kitai's queen-jack.
We haven’t seen too much of Pertea thereafter. He wasn't around for a few years in the post-Covid seasons, but has now returned to the big stage and done so in style.
Pertea won a seat to the EPT Barcelona 2024 Main Event online at PokerStars. And after busting that first bullet, he opted to re-enter paying the full buy-in. It turned out to be a fantastic decision as he's now locked up the first six-figure prize of his career.
The 44-year-old construction industry entrepreneur has called poker his hobby for the past 12 or 13 years. He plays mostly home games, but when he decides to travel for poker, it’s almost exclusively to EPTs. Now he has a chance of making his mark on the tour should he become Romania's second EPT champion after Razvan Belea.
One of the most accomplished American players on the circuit, Stephen Song is making one of his regular overseas trips to Barcelona and is enjoying his deepest Main Event run to date.
Song already has $6.5 million in documented live tournament earnings, including one WSOP bracelet and a victory in a WPT Prime event. He's the most successful tournament player from his home state of Connecticut, a fact that did not go unnoticed by reporters at the Stamford Advocate newspaper, which profiled Song in 2023.
“Life's pretty good,” Song told the newspaper, describing how he learned poker from watching TV and playing with his dad. The Song family first tuned into the WSOP in 2006, when former PokerStars Team Pro Joe Hachem took down the Main Event. Song went on to play with friends at high school.
Song turned pro during his first semester at college, and has gradually proved to his initially sceptical parents that he made the right decision. They've been present on the rail for his biggest successes to date — but the EPT Barcelona final could outstrip anything he's managed before. He won $712K for the WPT Prime victory, which is less than half the first prize for the tournament he's now playing.
Song was named GPI Player of the Year for 2022, the year of that WPT win. But his best result outside of North America came here in Barcelona in 2019, when he took down a €2K side event for €185K.
David Coleman has a strong online background. Like many, he picked up poker in high school and then increased his volume in college. After graduating in finance and economics, he turned poker pro.
While also an established force on the live scene, the 31-year-old entered 2024 without a single outright live tournament win on his resume. By the end of January, however, he had nabbed four first places and now boasts six, including a $730,300 top prize from a $25,000 event at Wynn Las Vegas.
Originally from New Jersey, Coleman moved to Vegas last year and regularly competes in high buy-in tournaments held in the city. That's where he also finished third in the NAPT Main Event last November. He’s already looking forward to returning to the same event in the fall.
In the meantime, Coleman has a shot at winning the EPT title on what is only his second attempt (he debuted on the tour at EPT Paris 2024).
“I love it here, I'll definitely be back,” Coleman said. “PokerStars does a great job and I'm excited about the event.”
When away from the tables, Coleman says he likes to stay active, mentioning hiking, working out, and playing pickleball and frisbee golf.
Before he became established as one of UK poker’s brightest talents, Andrew Hulme was best known in his home country as a hugely successful contestant on the popular television words and numbers show Countdown. Hulme first appeared as an 11 year old, before returning as an adult to claim eight consecutive daily victories, the most the show allows, and the distinction of being a so-called “octochamp”.
Countdown does not pay cash prizes, but poker thankfully appeared in Hulme’s life to take care of that side of things. He progressed through the ranks as both an online and live player, featuring prominently at the PokerStars tables as “stato_1”, while also playing regularly on the EPT and beyond. He has hundreds of major tournament scores online and has also racked up more than $2.2 million in live tournament results, including a $345K payday at the World Series of Poker Main Event in 2023. This EPT Barcelona result is already his best on this tour, bettering a 12th-place finish in Prague in 2016.
Hulme is a graduate of Warwick University, a hotbed of poker talent in the UK, and the alma mater of previous EPT champions Rupert Elder and Zimnan Ziyard. He is now based in Nottingham, near to the Dusk Till Dawn poker club, which has similarly fostered many of the UK’s best players.