An accomplished online tournament pro, Simon Wiciak switched his focus to the live game a little more than a year ago and has demonstrated in a dominant display at EPT Barcelona that he has the skills in this environment too. He took over the chip lead on Day 4, kept it throughout Day 5 and heads into the final leading the way with six remaining.
Wiciak was a promising student at high school in his native La Rochelle, France, with particular specialization in maths. However, he was also a talented footballer and joined a specialist sport-studies college, where regular academic lessons complement at least 10 hours of football training per week. He progressed to be captain of the U-19 team and might have gone further, but opted instead to refocus on his studies, specializing now in engineering.
He had learned how to play poker with the football team, betting sticks of chewing gum in various changing rooms. But it was while he was employed in his first engineering job, for an industrial gases company Air Liquide, that he really found an appetite for the game. He soon found that he was making more money playing poker than in his day job and gave the life of the online pro a go.
He lived in Mauritius and Hungary as he played, becoming friends with many of the leading lights of French poker, including EPT final tablists Antoine Saout and Adrien Allain as well as former champ Jean Montury. After a successful summer at the WSOP this year, he is now committed to live poker and seems set to burnish his reputation after this performance in Barcelona.
It wasn’t even a decade ago that Carl Shaw was making the 40-minute drive from his home in Telford to the casinos of Birmingham to play a £20 buy-in tournament. In the years since he’s become a tournament regular and consistent performer in Europe and beyond, racking up almost $1.3 million in tournament cashes prior to this event.
This is Shaw’s first Main Event final table and deepest run on the EPT, but he’s playing like a man who is right at home. Shaw has had the chip lead multiple times throughout this tournament and has hovered near the top of the counts since a surge on Day 3.
His comfort at the table is all down to experience in high-pressure moments. It was 2019 when Shaw enjoyed breakout success, first putting up a deep run in the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event, then immediately following it up by winning a bracelet in a $5K no-limit hold’em event for $606,562, proving he knows how to navigate a prestigious final table.
Railed by the EPT London champion Ian Hamilton, Shaw will more than double his best score with victory here in Barcelona.
It’s almost a prerequisite to be a hockey fan when you’re from Montreal, but Santiago Plante admits he only really follows the Canadiens when they make the playoffs. Unlike the hometown team, he has been on a tremendous run – especially here at EPT Barcelona, where he’s turned each of his four tournament entries into an ITM result.
Plante said it was perhaps a little surprising to him. He felt he came to Barcelona slightly unprepared, having just taken a break from poker. Instead of sharpening his skills, he'd been recharging batteries, mostly at music festivals.
The break was well deserved after an exhausting summer grind in Las Vegas, where he cashed in 16 tournaments and made three final tables. Now he’s picked up where he left off, guaranteed to collect the biggest prize of his career.
“Making the televised EPT final table is a fanboy’s dream,” Plante said. He revealed that the EPT streams played an important role in sparking his passion for the game. “This is the biggest tournament outside the United States, and the last 10 days here have been a lot of fun,” he added.
The gold-plated PokerStars European Poker Tour (EPT) Barcelona Main Event trophy has been standing sentinel in its case for the past week, just waiting for one lucky player to emerge from among a field of 2,120 and hoist it in the air. That wait will finally come to an end today when the final table resumes at 12:30 p.m. local time.
Simon Wiciak is the player everyone is hoping to catch at the final table. The 30-year-old Frenchman has dominated the tournament for the better part of three days and holds the chip lead with 22,875,000. Wiciak is a former professional soccer player and engineer who only took up live tournaments over the past year; all of his live cashes have come since April 2022. With just over $100,000 in earnings, he’s already guaranteed to triple that total but will be looking for much more today.
Final Table Chip Counts
Place
Player
Country
Chip Count
Big Blinds
1
Simon Wiciak
France
22,875,000
92
2
Carl Shaw
United Kingdom
17,400,000
70
3
Santiago Plante
Canada
7,500,000
30
4
Joao Sydenstricker
Brazil
6,150,000
25
5
Ezequiel Waigel
Argentina
5,150,000
21
6
Andre Akkari
Brazil
4,500,000
18
Carl Shaw follows behind him in second place with 17,400,000. The Englishman is no stranger to navigating through massive tournament fields. He made a deep run in the 2019 WSOP Main Event, then followed that up by winning a WSOP bracelet a few days later. He also made the final table of the Irish Open back in April. Shaw was on the right side of the biggest pot of the tournament yesterday to briefly take the chip lead away from Wiciak as the two players hold more than 63 percent of the total chips in play between them.
Carl Shaw
The four players playing catch up at the final table are led by Canadian Santiago Plante. The 27-year-old from Montreal was already enjoying an incredible trip to Barcelona before entering the Main Event. He had cashed in each of the three events he played in, including a final table in a €2,100 No-Limit Hold’em event and 45th place in the record-breaking Estrellas Poker Tour Main Event. He’s now navigated his way through this field and wound up at another final table in third place with 7,500,000.
Joao Sydenstricker is one of two Brazilians remaining in the field and will be supported by a raucous rail today. He comes into the final table in fourth place with 6,150,000. He cashed in the ESPT but otherwise had no live cashes outside his native Brazil before coming to Barcelona. His best results have come online, where, playing under the name “sydens,” he won the Sunday Million in June for $86,099.
Ezequiel Waigel of Argentina has 5,150,000 to begin the day and is the one player at the final table who can’t eclipse his largest career cash even with the €1,488,000 top prize. Known as “eze8888” online, he won the WCOOP Main Event in 2018 for more than $1,500,000. He only came to Barcelona after qualifying for the ESPT online, then earned his seat in the Main Event in a live qualifier. Waigel’s previous best EPT result was 32nd in Prague in 2022.
Then there is the Brazilian legend and Team PokerStars Ambassador Andre Akkari, who once again finds himself at the bottom of the leaderboard for the third straight day with 4,500,000. Akkari has been nursing a short stack for days, consistently finding ways to stay alive and double up just when his chances appeared the most bleak. He’s been cashing in EPT events for more than 15 years and first cashed at EPT Barcelona in 2011. He’s one spot away from matching his fifth-place finish from EPT Barcelona in 2017 but will have to work some magic once again. Akkari can take some optimism from last year’s final table, where Giuliano Bendinelli found himself in an even more dire situation, down to just one big blind, but battled back to take the trophy.
Final Table payouts
Place
Player
Country
Prize
1
€1,488,000
2
€931,250
3
€664,750
4
€511,300
5
€393,300
6
€302,500
7
Curtis Knight
Canada
€232,700
8
Robin Ylitalo
Sweden
€179,000
The remaining six players will come back with 65 minutes remaining on Level 33, with blinds of 125,000-250,000 and a 250,000 big blind ante. The final table will be streamed on a 30-minute delay by PokerStars TV on YouTube and Twitch. They are all guaranteed at least €302,500, but by the end of the day one player will take home €1,488,000 and the right to forever be known as an EPT champion.
The trophy has been waiting. The day has finally arrived. A new EPT Barcelona champion will be crowned today, and Pokernews will be providing all the updates as the six survivors from a once-massive field battle throughout the night until only one is left standing.
