Scott Margereson won the €2,700 EPT Second Chance at PokerStars EPT Barcelona for €361,060, taking down one of the most consistently overlooked events on the festival calendar — and one that quietly does more for the tour's economics than most of the marquee tournaments around it.
The Second Chance is exactly what its name suggests: a substantial-buy-in tournament scheduled to run in parallel with the closing stages of the Main Event, aimed squarely at the enormous population of players who busted the Main and still have a week of Barcelona left. For a British professional like Margereson, a €361,060 score from a €2,700 entry is a career-relevant result. For the festival, it is proof that the format works.
Why the Second Chance Exists
Think through the arithmetic of a major festival Main Event. Thousands of players enter. Roughly 15 percent cash. By Day 3, the overwhelming majority of the field is out, and most of those players have flights booked for the end of the week, hotel rooms paid through the weekend, and no tournament to play.
Historically, festivals handled this badly. The schedule would thin out after the Main Event's opening flights, leaving eliminated players with a menu of turbos and low-value side events. Players left early, the room emptied, and a substantial amount of potential rake and atmosphere evaporated.
The Second Chance solves that. By scheduling a meaningful buy-in event with a real prize pool specifically into the Main Event's back half, the festival gives busted players an event worth staying for. Margereson's €361,060 win demonstrates the scale involved — this is not a consolation tournament, it is a genuine six-figure opportunity.
The design has been widely copied across the tournament world for the obvious reason that it works for everybody. Players get another shot. Venues keep tables running. Tours keep their festivals full through the closing weekend rather than watching them empty out.
Barcelona's Scale
EPT Barcelona remains the largest festival on the European calendar and one of the largest in the world, and the 2026 edition reinforced that position. Beyond the Second Chance, the festival produced a range of significant results: Tom Fuchs won the €100,000 EPT Super High Roller, defeating Kayhan Mokri heads-up in a four-handed money structure that paid Jamie Dwan third and Byron Kaverman fourth. Vinodan Lingham took the €30,000 Warm Up, Yves Thalmann won the €3,250 Senior's High Roller, and Jason Wheeler captured the €1,650 PokerStars Open.
That spread — from €1,650 opens to €100,000 super high rollers, with Mystery Bounty events and a dense schedule of mid-tier tournaments filling the gaps — is what makes Barcelona the reference point for how a modern poker festival should be built. There is a viable event at essentially every buy-in level a player might occupy, running essentially every day.
The festival's gravitational pull is strong enough to reshape the rest of the calendar around it. The 2026 WPT Cyprus Championship, which overlapped with Barcelona, drew 520 entries against a $2 million guarantee and required a $388,000 overlay from the host venue. That is the cost of scheduling against Barcelona in August, and it is a lesson the tournament industry keeps having to relearn.
What Margereson's Win Says About Field Quality
A €2,700 event at a major festival occupies an interesting strategic zone. It is expensive enough to filter out the pure recreational tourist population but cheap enough that a large number of entrants are not full-time professionals. And critically, the field is composed disproportionately of players who just busted a Main Event — which means a meaningful percentage are playing while tilted, fatigued or over-adjusting from a hand that did not go their way.
That last factor is genuinely exploitable and almost never discussed. Emotional state is a real variable at a poker table, and a tournament explicitly designed to catch players immediately after elimination from the biggest event of their year has a field-wide emotional profile you will not find in an ordinary Tuesday tournament.
The practical adjustment is straightforward: expect wider ranges, more hero calls, and more spite-shoves than the buy-in level would otherwise suggest. Value bet thinner. Bluff less into players who are visibly frustrated, because frustrated players call. Our poker tells guide covers reading these states in live play, and our what is tilt explainer covers the mechanism from the other side — which is the more important lesson, since you will be the busted player far more often than you will be the one exploiting them.
The Professional Grind Behind the Headline
Margereson is a long-established name in European tournament poker with a substantial results history, and that context matters when reading a score like this. A €361,060 win is not a lottery ticket for a player at that level. It is the payoff from a volume approach — entering a large number of well-selected tournaments across a long calendar, accepting that most will produce nothing, and relying on the fact that a positive edge compounded across enough events eventually produces a result of this size.
That is the actual economics of professional tournament poker, and it is systematically misrepresented by headline-driven coverage. The distribution of tournament results is enormously skewed. A profitable tournament professional loses money in the majority of the events they enter. The wins have to be large enough and frequent enough to cover a long tail of losses, and the bankroll has to be deep enough to survive stretches where they are not.
Anyone drawn to tournament poker by results like this should read our cash games vs tournaments comparison before committing. The variance profiles are not remotely similar, and the bankroll requirements for serious tournament play are far higher than most players estimate.
What This Means for Players
Play the side events. If you travel to a major festival, the Main Event should rarely be the only tournament on your itinerary. Second Chance and equivalent formats offer comparable prize pools at a fraction of the buy-in, with fields that are frequently softer than the Main's. The value density is better.
Budget for the whole festival, not the Main. The most common mistake first-time festival travellers make is allocating their entire trip bankroll to a single Main Event entry. Bust on Day 1 and the trip is over. Splitting the same budget across a Main entry and two or three side events produces dramatically more expected value and a far better week.
Understand what you are entering. A €2,700 field at a major festival is not a soft field in absolute terms. It contains serious professionals. Our tournaments guide covers how to assess field quality before you buy in, and our poker odds reference is the foundation for the in-game decisions that actually determine whether you are one of the players with an edge.
Barcelona's Closing Stretch
The festival's schedule ran a dense closing week, including €3,250 and €1,650 Mystery Bounty events and a €10,300 EPT High Roller in the final days. The Mystery Bounty format in particular has become a fixture of major festivals, and its popularity reflects a genuine shift in what recreational players want from a tournament: more frequent payouts, more moments of tangible reward, less of the long grind toward a distant pay jump.
Whether that is good for the game's strategic depth is debatable. What is not debatable is that it fills fields. And after a summer in which multiple major events missed their guarantees, filling fields is the industry's dominant concern heading into the autumn calendar.
For players building their own schedules, our poker strategy hub covers the format-specific adjustments that separate players who enter these events from players who beat them.