Fabiano Kovalski became the only two-time winner at the 2026 PokerStars EPT Barcelona festival, taking down the €3,250 Mystery Bounty for $447,099 on 27 August and then winning the €10,300 No Limit Hold'em High Roller two days later for a career-best $843,645. Across four cashes at the festival, the 38-year-old Brazilian banked more than $1.3 million.
Winning one title at a festival the size of EPT Barcelona is a career highlight. Winning two inside three days, in events separated by a factor of three in buy-in, is the kind of run that reshapes a player's standing in the game.
The Two Wins
The Mystery Bounty came first. At €3,250, it sat in the festival's accessible mid-tier — the price point that draws the largest fields at European stops and produces prize pools substantial enough to change a player's year. The format itself has become one of the most popular on the live calendar, and it carries its own strategic wrinkles that reward players who understand what a bounty is actually worth at each stage.
Two days later Kovalski entered the €10,300 High Roller, a field that filters far more aggressively for skill. High rollers at EPT stops draw the professional core of European tournament poker plus the strongest travelling players from South America, Asia and North America. Winning that event for $843,645 — a personal best — against that field is a substantially harder achievement than the buy-in differential alone suggests.
The fourth cash of note was a 120th-place finish in the main event, which rounds out a festival where Kovalski appears to have registered widely and run exceptionally well in the events that mattered.
Barcelona and the Brazilian Wave
Kovalski's run fits a pattern that has been building for several years. Brazilian players have become one of the dominant forces in international tournament poker, and their presence at European festivals has grown from a curiosity to a defining feature.
The reasons are structural rather than accidental. Brazil has an enormous online poker population, a well-developed domestic live circuit, and a coaching and staking infrastructure that has professionalised rapidly. The result is a steady pipeline of technically strong players who arrive at European stops with substantial volume already behind them. At recent festivals across Europe, Brazilian players have been consistently over-represented at final tables relative to their share of the fields.
Barcelona in particular has become something of a second home for the Brazilian contingent. The festival's timing, its accessible buy-in tiers, and the sheer number of events on the schedule make it an efficient trip for players travelling from South America — you can justify the flight because there are three weeks of tournaments to play once you arrive.
What a Festival Double Actually Requires
The instinct when a player wins two events at one festival is to reach for explanations about form or momentum. The more useful analysis is about volume and structure.
Modern festivals like EPT Barcelona run dozens of events across three weeks, with multiple tournaments starting every day at buy-ins from a few hundred euros to six figures. A professional playing a full schedule might enter twenty or more events. At that volume, multiple deep runs become statistically unremarkable; two outright wins remains rare, but it is rare in the way that a well-played hot streak is rare, not in the way a miracle is.
What separates players who convert deep runs into titles is generally endgame execution. Final tables at this level are decided by short-handed and heads-up play, by accurate ICM awareness through the pay jumps, and by the willingness to apply pressure at the moments when opponents are playing to ladder rather than to win. Those are learnable skills, and they are where the gap between good tournament players and elite ones is widest.
The buy-in range across Kovalski's two wins also required genuine adaptability. A €3,250 mystery bounty field and a €10,300 high roller field are different populations playing different games. In the former, exploitative adjustments against weaker opponents dominate. In the latter, opponents are largely playing balanced, solver-informed strategies, and edges come from small deviations and from reading which regulars are deviating themselves. Our poker strategy section covers the underlying frameworks, and the GTO versus exploitative tension is precisely the axis on which this kind of range-of-fields performance turns.
Mystery Bounty: The Format Behind the First Win
The mystery bounty format deserves particular attention because it now appears on virtually every major festival schedule and it changes correct play substantially once the bounty phase opens.
The structure works in two phases. During the early stage, no bounties are paid and the tournament plays as a standard freezeout. Once a threshold is reached — typically a set number of remaining players — bounties activate, and each elimination awards a randomly drawn prize whose value is unknown until claimed.
The strategic implications are specific. In the freezeout phase, treat every decision as you would in a normal tournament; do not take marginal flips because you cover an opponent, and do not tighten defensively. Once bounties are live, calling ranges legitimately widen when you cover an opponent's stack, because each elimination carries expected monetary value beyond the chips.
The common errors run in both directions. Some players ignore bounty equity entirely and play the tournament as though nothing changed. Others chase knockouts recklessly, calling off stacks for bounties whose average value does not justify the risk. Both are exploitable by players who have done the arithmetic on what a randomly drawn bounty is actually worth given the prize distribution.
What Players Can Take From It
The transferable lesson from a run like Kovalski's is not about running hot. It is about schedule construction.
Playing a festival means choosing which events to enter, and those choices compound. A player who enters only the main event has one shot at a result. A player who enters fifteen events across a range of buy-ins and formats has fifteen shots, with the variance smoothed across them. The trade-off is bankroll: a full festival schedule at EPT buy-in levels represents a substantial commitment, and players stretching to afford it are taking on risk that the format's variance will punish.
That is where satellites and qualifying routes matter, and where our bankroll management guidance applies directly. The players who can sustain full festival schedules are those who have either the bankroll to absorb a losing trip or the staking arrangements to share the risk.
For most players reading this, the practical route toward a festival like Barcelona runs through online qualifiers rather than direct buy-ins. Our tournaments hub covers where those qualifiers live, and real money poker rankings cover the operators running them.
Kovalski's festival ends with over $1.3 million banked and a new career-best score. The European calendar continues through the autumn.
Sources: Card Player — Fabiano Kovalski Wins Back-To-Back Big Titles At EPT Barcelona, PokerNews — Fabiano Kovalski Improves His EPT Barcelona Results With €385K Win, Card Player — Fabiano Kovalski Wins EPT Barcelona Mystery Bounty