EPT Grand Final Prize Pool Announced

The official count of participants and the prize pool numbers are in from the 2012 PokerStars and Monte-Carlo Casino EPT Grand Final main event. On day 1a, 271 posted the €10,000 buy-in and day 1b drew in 394 participants. A total of 665 players have created an amazing prize pool of €6,650,000 to be won by 96 players with major attention on the €1,500,000 meant for the champion. Although this year's payout is certainly nothing to sneeze at, the turnout has decreased just over 3% from the 686 participants last year in Madrid and further down over 21% from the 848 participants that entered the event when it was in Monte Carlo 2 years ago. There are a series of contributing factors to the decrease including Black Friday and various taxations on European countries making these the biggest contributors to this year's decreased turnout. At this point, the overall chip leader going into day 2 is Nick Yunis with 191,700 in chips. Yunis is joined at the top of the counts by some well-known names such as David Sands (160,300), Alessio Isaia (139,600), Tristan Clemencon (121,100) and Freddy Deeb (114,600).