Jonas Kronwitter has won the 2026 PGT PLO Series, closing out the PokerGO Tour’s dedicated Pot-Limit Omaha circuit in Las Vegas with two outright titles and a points total that no other player in the field could match. For a player who watched a commanding chip lead evaporate in the same series two years earlier, the victory plays like a long-delayed correction.
Two Titles, One Dominant PGT PLO Series Run
Kronwitter’s championship run was built on back-to-back results rather than a single standout score. He first broke through by winning one of the series’ early events, then followed it up by taking down Event 7, a $15,700 buy-in tournament that drew 65 entries. Between the two victories he banked $576,088 in combined earnings and accumulated 598 PGT points, enough to clinch the overall series trophy before the schedule had even finished playing out. In a format where most fields are small, elite and stacked with specialists, winning twice in the same series is a far rarer feat than it sounds.
The PGT PLO Series is PokerGO Tour’s answer to a simple problem: Pot-Limit Omaha talent tends to cluster among a small group of players who rarely get a dedicated, multi-event battleground to separate themselves. Each event carries a steep buy-in and draws fields built almost entirely of specialists, so a player who can final table repeatedly across the series is making a statement about where they rank in the discipline rather than simply catching a hot run of cards.
Event 7: The Heads-Up Deal That Sealed It
Kronwitter’s second title of the series came in Event 7, where he worked through the 65-entry field and arrived at the final heads-up confrontation holding roughly a 3:1 chip advantage over Finland’s Joni Jouhkimainen. Rather than play the lead down to the felt, the two agreed to a deal that locked in the bulk of the prize money while still awarding Kronwitter the win and the larger share: a $267,563 payday. Chip-advantage deals are common at this level of buy-in, where the gap between first and second is often small enough that neither player wants to gamble away a seven-figure swing in variance, but closing it out as the overwhelming favorite still required him to navigate the rest of the field first.
From Runner-Up Heartbreak to Champion
The win carries extra weight because of how Kronwitter’s history with this exact series had gone previously. Two years earlier, he took a roughly 13:1 chip lead into heads-up play in a PGT PLO event, only to watch Matthew Wantman reel off three consecutive double-ups and complete one of the more dramatic collapses the series had produced. Wantman walked away with the title that night; Kronwitter was left with a story about the one that got away. Coming back to not just final table the series again but to win it twice and claim the overall crown turns that old near-miss into a footnote rather than a defining moment.
The PGT PLO Series champion’s list now reads like a who’s who of Omaha specialists, with Kronwitter joining past winners Chino Rheem, Jesse Lonis, Matthew Wantman and Lautaro Guerra on the honor roll. Unlike some series where the champion is decided purely by a season-long points race run alongside unrelated events, the PGT PLO Series crowns its winner based on performance across its own compact run of tournaments, which makes every cash and every elimination within the series directly relevant to the final standings.
Kitzbühel’s Pot-Limit Omaha Specialist
Kronwitter was born in Germany but has represented Austria for most of his career, and he has built his reputation as one of the most dangerous Pot-Limit Omaha players at the high-stakes level from his base in the Austrian mountain town of Kitzbühel. His career-best score before this series came at the 2023 World Series of Poker, where he finished third in the $50,000 Pot-Limit Omaha High Roller for $1,037,441, and earlier in 2026 he added a title at the Portomaso Grand Opening in Malta, winning the €5,200 Pot-Limit Omaha event for $239,068. His total live earnings now sit above $3.6 million, the large majority of it won in Omaha variants rather than the no-limit hold’em games that dominate most tournament schedules.
That specialization matters in a series like this one. Understanding how starting hand values shift in Omaha, where every player holds four cards instead of two and the best five-card combination at showdown can come from a huge range of combinations, is a different skill set entirely from reading hold’em ranges. Players who want a refresher on how hand strength is actually evaluated across variants can consult Poker Pro Academy’s poker hand rankings guide before trying to follow the finer details of how Kronwitter’s holdings held up through two deep runs.
What the Win Means for the PLO Scene
The PGT PLO Series has quietly become one of the more closely watched proving grounds in high-stakes poker precisely because it rewards consistency rather than a single lucky week. Kronwitter’s two titles and his redemption narrative give the series a storyline that extends well past the final payout, and they reinforce Pot-Limit Omaha’s growing share of the high-stakes tournament calendar at a time when more players are migrating toward four-card games. For a player who has spent years as a respected specialist without matching the header-grabbing results of hold’em’s biggest stars, a series championship, won twice over and in redemption fashion, is the kind of result that resets how the rest of the field views him heading into 2027.
