The summary of EAPT 2020

Minsk

Second year in a row Minsk is an opener of EAPT. Lots of players came to Belarus in the beginning of February, when the world pandemic wasn’t even expected. 37 tournaments with average buy-ins for 10 days and with total prize pool of the festival was around $492k.

The Main Event champion was a well known Russian player Andrey Pateychuk who got $38k and added the EAPT title to his EPT and WPT titles. This helped him over the $5m live cashes his poker career.

Montenegro EAPT Online

June was supposed to be the next and the warmest stage of EAPT at glamorous Casino hotel Maestral. However, the COVID-19 pandemic had taken over the world by that time, and caused many travelling restrictions. Thus, PCM team in a partnership with our old friend partypoker LIVE decided to do an online version of the event.

partypoker has been a regular sponsor and an online partner of EAPT for many years. It’s worth to say that lots of tournaments series’ were moved online due the pandemic. That’s how EAPT online went.

The guarantee of the 18 tournaments was about $135k. Well, yes, it’s not that huge online series as you are used to, but it was our first step. The Main Event winner with $330 buy-in of the first EAPT online was Russian player Alexander Volkov. He earned $23k and it was his the best cash in his poker career. The entries to the main event were three times higher then the tournament guarantee and made up over 400 entries.

In comparison with EAPT live stages where final tables are full of Russian players mostly, EAPT online final table was completely international: two Russian, two British, Moldovan, Brazilian, Austrian and Finnish.

Altai

Next stop was in Altai Republic and by august the Covid-19 pandemic stepped back a bit and we were allowed to organize the public event. 6 months of isolation, it showed how much players got missed about live poker because the tables in Altai were full. We’ve been coming to Altai for many years and this place is truly stunning and worth to visit.

The players confidently broke the festival guaranteed prizepool in every tournament. The stated guarantee was $132k in the beginning of the series and it raised up to $230k by the end. The Main Event winner was Evgenii Tambovcev after cutting the deal by ICM between final table players.

Tambovcev had a valid but sad reason to ask for that and other members of the final table agreed, but the trophy went to Tambovcev because of the highest stack. Lately, Evgenii told us in an interview his terrible story he had a few days before the game. He nearly drown whilst rafting, but thankfully he survived. After he won EAPT Main Event.

Grand Final Sochi.

Usually, EAPT Grand Final isn’t just about poker only, but also lots of other entertainments for players such as sports or quiz activities. This part of activities we couldn’t incarnate because of the COVID-19 restrictions. All we had was poker!

Face coverings and gloves were compulsory for everyone and the EAPT Grand final was looked like a masquerade and you couldn’t read anything on the faces of your opponents. 37 events without any guarantee and the attendance was unexpectedly high, cash games were 24/7 and the total prize pool of the event reached $210k.

Some words about our new Main Event champion. Anatoly Zyrin was the champion of the main event EAPT Grand Final. Actually, Anatoly won a fantastic amount of $130k at Sochi Casino in 2020. It helped him to gain points of the World’s top live players. He was in the 4th place before EAPT GF and the editors of Global Portal Index haven’t counted the points yet. We crossed our fingers for our player and hope to see him go top.

By the way, another regular guest of the Sochi Casino, Georgy Shululiia, is in the 3rd place.

Summary

We did 4 stages out of 4 planned and EAPT is the one series which managed to do each festival with no cancellation. Generally, we had 115 different events, including satellites, Hold’em, Bounty, Omaha and even Chinese poker. The combined prize pool of each stages of EAPT 2020 was $2,568,000. We think, we can be proud of that.

What will we have in 2021 is still not clear. Two out of four stages aren’t in Russia and unfortunately there are difficulties with travelling in the world.

Stay tuned to know more about our future plans and huge thanks to everyone who was with us at every stage of EAPT and who helped us to organise our lovely game (to us :))

Do not forget about SPF Grand Final in December 17-27. The last stage of the year will the the hottest one because one of the players will drive home in a new Lexus NX 300 which will be raffled between arrived players. If you want to see the full schedule click here.

But here are the main tournaments

Don’t forget your masks and gloves. Take care!