Tom Fuchs has won the €100,000 EPT Super High Roller at PokerStars EPT Barcelona, defeating Norway's Kayhan Mokri heads-up on August 22 to collect €1,126,540 and the second live tournament title of his career. The young German professional's score, worth roughly $1.31 million, narrowly edges the $1,292,000 he banked as champion of the 2024 WSOP Paradise $50,000 high roller, making it the largest result he has recorded.
Twenty-seven entries. One week of poker. More than a million euros to the winner. The €100,000 Super High Roller is the most concentrated wealth-transfer mechanism in the tournament calendar, and it operates on a logic almost nothing else in poker shares.
The Arithmetic of a 27-Entry Tournament
Start with the raw numbers. Twenty-seven entries at €100,000 apiece produces a gross of €2.7 million. Super high rollers of this type typically pay only the top three or four finishers, which means the entire pool is compressed into a handful of seats. Fuchs's €1,126,540 represents something in the region of 42 percent of everything wagered.
That distribution has consequences that ripple through every strategic decision made at the table.
In a 4,000-entry Main Event, roughly 15 percent of the field cashes, and the pay ladder climbs in dozens of small steps. A player laddering from 400th to 350th gains real money for surviving. In a 27-entry, four-paid event, there is no ladder. There is a cliff. Twenty-three players receive nothing at all, and the difference between fourth and first is measured in the high six figures.
Why the bubble is brutal, and then irrelevant
The practical effect is that these tournaments have two completely distinct phases. Before the money, the ICM pressure is extreme: with 85 percent of the field due to receive zero, every marginal spot is weighted toward survival. Short stacks fold hands they would happily jam in a deep-field event, and chip leaders exploit that reluctance mercilessly.
After the bubble bursts, ICM considerations largely evaporate. With four players left and a top-heavy structure, the correct approach flips toward accumulating chips at nearly any reasonable price, because second place is a consolation prize and third is a rounding error against first. Mokri, arriving heads-up against Fuchs, was playing for a gap that in percentage terms dwarfs anything a mid-stakes player will ever face.
Players who want to understand this dynamic without risking €100,000 can work through the same structural logic in far cheaper satellites and sit-and-gos, where winner-take-most payouts create identical incentives at a fraction of the cost. The reasoning is the same; only the zeroes change. Anyone building that skill set will find the fundamentals covered in a good poker strategy grounding and reinforced by studying equity in short-handed spots.
Why Super High Rollers Cluster Around Festivals
The €100,000 event did not appear in isolation. It ran inside EPT Barcelona, a two-week festival at Casino Barcelona that also produced Klemens Roiter's €25,000 title (39 entries, a €936,390 pool, €266,030 for the win after a deal) and Brock Wilson's €20,000 victory worth €233,556. The €5,300 Main Event, running concurrently, had passed 1,800 entries on Day 2.
This stacking is deliberate and it is economically necessary. A €100,000 tournament cannot exist as a standalone event. There are perhaps 60 to 80 players in the world who will regularly fire that buy-in, and they will not fly to a single-event destination. They will, however, attend a festival where they can also play a €25,000, a €20,000, a €50,000 and whatever else appears on the schedule, spreading a week of travel across five or six opportunities.
The festival provides the density. The high rollers provide the prestige and the media coverage. The €1,650 and €5,300 events provide the volume that pays for the room. Each tier subsidises the others in ways that are not always obvious from the outside.
The recreational element nobody discusses
There is a second reason these fields exist at all: a meaningful share of the seats in any €100,000 event are not filled by professionals. Wealthy businesspeople, crypto entrepreneurs and successful players from other disciplines buy in for the experience, and the professional field tolerates — actively welcomes — their presence because they are the source of the edge.
A 27-entry field containing four or five such players is a materially different proposition to a 27-entry field of pure regulars, where the collective edge approaches zero after the house takes its cut. This is the single most important variable in high stakes poker economics, and it explains why event selection at that level is as much a scouting exercise as a scheduling one.
Variance at €100,000 a Bullet
Consider what a professional's year looks like at this buy-in. Suppose a strong regular plays 15 super high rollers annually at an average buy-in of €80,000. That is €1.2 million in entries before a single flight is booked. Even a genuinely excellent player with a 20 percent return on investment expects a €240,000 profit over that sample, which sounds substantial until you account for the distribution around it.
In fields of 20 to 40 entries paying three or four spots, a player might cash in only a quarter of their events. A run of eight consecutive min-cash-or-bust results is entirely ordinary. Eight bullets at €80,000 is €640,000 down with nothing to show for it, and no amount of skill prevents that sequence from occurring.
This is why the super high roller ecosystem runs almost entirely on staking, swaps and syndicates. Very few players fire these events for their full share. A typical entrant might hold 30 to 50 percent of themselves, with the balance sold to backers or swapped with other players in the field. It is a risk-mutualisation system that makes the variance survivable, and it means a headline score of €1.1 million rarely lands in one person's account.
Fuchs's win is his second title. That is a reminder that the number of tournaments a super high roller specialist plays in a year is small enough that career title counts stay low even for excellent players. Contrast that with the all-time money list, where Bryn Kenney leads on more than $85 million, Adrian Mateos has passed $61 million and Alex Foxen recently became the ninth player to clear $60 million. Those totals are built from a decade of exactly this kind of event.
The Contrast With the Main Event Downstairs
While 27 players contested €2.7 million upstairs, more than 1,800 were grinding a €5,300 Main Event. The two tournaments could hardly be less alike.
The Main Event rewards endurance, deep-stack technical play, and the ability to navigate a field containing every skill level from world-class to first-time. It runs for the better part of a week. The Super High Roller rewards short-stack precision, aggressive equity realisation, and detailed reads on a small circle of opponents you have played thousands of hands against. It runs for a day or two.
Neither format is harder in an absolute sense. They test different things. A player who excels in one can be actively poor in the other, which is part of why the modern circuit has segregated into specialists rather than generalists. The broader point about game-selection fit applies at every stake, and it is one of the recurring themes in the cash games versus tournaments discussion as well.
What This Means for Players
Payout structure should drive your strategy more than buy-in does. A top-heavy, few-paid structure demands a fundamentally different approach to a flat, deep-paying one. Check the payout table before you register, not after you bubble.
Winner-take-most formats reward aggression after the bubble. Once ICM pressure lifts, playing for the win rather than for pay jumps is usually correct in structures where first place holds 40 percent or more of the pool.
Risk mutualisation is a legitimate professional tool, not a crutch. Selling action and swapping percentages is standard practice at the top of the game for good reason. Scaled down, the same principle applies to anyone playing tournaments meaningfully above their comfortable bankroll level.
Small fields are not automatically soft. A 27-entry field of world-class regulars is one of the toughest lineups in poker. Field composition matters more than field size.
Study the endgame. Most of the money in any tournament moves in the final few tables. Time invested in short-stack and heads-up work returns far more than the same hours spent on early-level ranges.
Tom Fuchs has now won two live titles and both have been worth well over a million dollars. In the super high roller world, that is what a good career looks like: not a long list of trophies, but a short list of very large ones.