Martin Schleich has been crowned the EPT Barcelona Main Event champion after besting not only a record-breaking field of 811 but also a marathon final table that went on for more than 14 hours! Schleich’s victory netted him a massive €850,000 but it may have cost him some extra flight tickets due to the final table running for so long.
Moments after defeating Dragan Kostic heads-up, Schleich was asked how he felt and what his plans were for the money he had just won. The 29-year old Munich resident replied, “I’m very tired and my flight leaves in two hours!! I’m really happy but it’s too early to think about what I’ll do with the money.”
Schleich had started the final table fifth in chips but began accumulating chips in a quiet, efficient and typically German way. His climb through the chip counts seemed to go relatively unnoticed as most of the media’s eyes were fixated on Team PokerStars Pro, Eugene Katchlov and his own meteoric rise up the leaderboard. Katchalov started the day with 690,000 chips, or around 14 big blinds, but with the first hour he had managed to double up through Saar Wilf and then after knocking out the last remaining female player, Isabel Baltazar, he found himself armed with a healthy 2,900,000.
Katchalov had gone from zero to hero and the journalists in the Gran Casino were bust penning headlines of the Ukranian winning a live Triple Crown of titles with him having already won a World Poker Tour title and a World Series of Poker bracelet. However, they had to re-write their headlines as Katchalov’s amazing comeback ended with a third place finish.
He had raised preflop whilst holding 7s7s and when Schleich three-bet with his 9h9s the writing was on the wall for Katchalov, but the first card out on the flop was the 7d improving him to a set, unfortunately for him the next two cards were the 9c and 3d awarding Schleich a higher set. The turn and river failed to alter anything and Katchlov was eliminated in third place.
Schleich held a two-to-one chip lead over Kostic going into heads up and after half an hour of play he managed win all of the Spaniard’s stack. Kostic had begun to three-bet shove over the top of Schleich’s button raises and when he did so for the third consecutive time, Schleich called. The German turned over Ah9s, which was up against Ac7h. The final board ran out Qs-5h-2c-Kc-9h and Schleich was EPT Barcelona’s champion.
Final table payouts
1st: Martin Schleich: €850,000
2nd: Dragan Kostic: €532,000
3rd: Eugene Katchalov: €315,000
4th: Raul Mestra: €244,000
5th: Tomeu Gomila: €185,000
6th: Saar Wilf: €145,000
7th: Juan Manuel Perez: €105,000
8th: Isabel Baltazar: €73,000
