Brazil’s Fabiano Kovalski has won the EPT Barcelona Mystery Bounty, outlasting a stacked field of 1,027 entries to bank a career-best €385,430 and add yet another headline result to a résumé that already reads like a love letter to Casino Barcelona. The €3,250 buy-in event, one of the marquee mid-size tournaments on the 2026 PokerStars EPT Barcelona schedule, produced a €2,988,570 prize pool, with more than €1 million of that total carved out for mystery bounty envelopes that scrambled the payout order all the way to the final table.
A Massive Field and a Bounty-Heavy Prize Pool
The €3,250 Mystery Bounty was always going to draw a crowd. With unlimited re-entries and one of the more forgiving buy-ins of the EPT Barcelona festival, the event pulled in 1,027 total entries, comfortably making it one of the best-attended tournaments of the series. That volume pushed the prize pool to €2,988,570, a healthy number for a mid-stakes event, and the mystery bounty structure meant a huge chunk of that money, north of €1 million, was distributed not through the standard payout ladder but through envelopes tied directly to eliminations.
That format has become a staple of modern tournament poker precisely because it rewards aggression. Players are incentivized to accumulate knockouts rather than simply survive, since every bust-out they engineer can be worth anywhere from a modest sum to a life-changing envelope. It also means the final leaderboard rarely mirrors a traditional payout structure, and this event was no exception.
Kovalski Closes It Out Against Brandon Harris
Kovalski went heads-up against the United Kingdom’s Brandon Harris to decide the title, and when the final hand was dealt it was the Brazilian who emerged with the trophy and €385,430, a figure that includes both his share of the standard prize pool and the bounty envelopes he collected along the way. Harris was no consolation-prize runner-up. His second-place finish was worth €216,820, comfortably the largest score of his career and a result that instantly reshapes his tournament résumé.
Behind the two finalists, the rest of the unofficial final table featured a genuinely international cast. Japan’s Ai Tsuchiya took third for €159,720, while Portugal’s Andre Moreira, India’s Paawan Bansal, Chile’s Edgard Moreau, China’s Longmao Fan, Russia’s Viacheslav Goryachev and the United Kingdom’s Philip Corion rounded out the remaining places. Because of the mystery bounty format, several of those finishers actually out earned players who technically finished above them in the running order once envelope values were added in, a quirk that has become one of the signature talking points of bounty tournaments.
The EPT Barcelona Mystery Bounty Format Rewrites the Story
Nowhere was that quirk more visible than in the run of Candido Cappiello, who busted in 21st place yet still walked away with €124,250 in total winnings after opening mystery bounty envelopes worth €113,000 along the way. That made his overall payday the fifth-largest of the entire tournament, despite exiting well before the unofficial final table was even set. It is exactly the kind of storyline that mystery bounty formats are designed to generate: a player can go home early and still leave with a result that outstrips finishers who lasted far longer.
The event also produced a feel-good milestone away from the headline result. Paawan Bansal, who finished fifth for €179,420, recorded the first tournament cash of his career in the process, instantly becoming one of the largest debut scores logged anywhere on the circuit this year. For newer players following along, results like this are a reminder of how quickly variance can turn a first real cash into a life-changing one, particularly in bounty-format events where survival alone is not the only path to a big payday.
Kovalski’s Long History With EPT Barcelona
For Kovalski himself, the win extends what has become a defining relationship with this specific festival. According to career results, four of his five largest career cashes have now come from EPT Barcelona events specifically. His biggest remains a fourth-place finish in the 2022 EPT Barcelona Main Event worth €565,280, but the Mystery Bounty title now slots in as his second-largest score, ahead of a ninth-place Main Event result in 2024 (€139,750) and an 11th-place Main Event finish back in 2018 (€98,900). He also has a title from a 2017 Deep Stack event worth €93,701.
Taken together, that body of work makes Kovalski one of the more quietly consistent Brazilian exports on the European high-volume circuit, someone who returns to Barcelona year after year and routinely leaves with results that most players would consider the highlight of an entire career. The Mystery Bounty title is not just a career-best score, it is confirmation of a pattern that has been building since his first deep run in the city nearly a decade ago.
What the Win Means for Brazilian Poker
Kovalski’s title also lands at a moment when Brazilian players are making outsized noise across the EPT Barcelona festival more broadly, with multiple compatriots posting deep runs across different bracelet and title events on the schedule this series. For a fan base back home that has increasingly tuned into the European tour thanks to streaming coverage and live updates, a home-grown champion in a marquee mid-size event is exactly the kind of story that resonates. It also reinforces Barcelona’s status as something close to a second home for Brazilian tournament regulars, a trend that shows no sign of slowing as the festival calendar continues to grow.
For players looking to sharpen their own tournament game before chasing a similar run, understanding fundamentals like starting hand strength is essential, and our guide to poker hand rankings is a good place to start before stepping into a bounty-format field of this size. As always, tournament poker carries real financial risk, and results like Kovalski’s are the exception rather than the rule; players should only compete within their bankroll and treat these buy-ins as entertainment, not investment.
