Sebastian Malec: The €27 Satellite That Won an EPT Title

Sebastian Malec spent €27 on an online satellite and walked away with €1,122,800. In between, he beat the biggest field an EPT Main Event had ever seen, danced circles around some of the sport's most experienced professionals, and left his own final hand to take a selfie with a stranger in the crowd. It remains one of the most unlikely wins in European Poker Tour history, and it happened to a 21-year-old who had barely played a live tournament before.

How did Sebastian Malec qualify for the EPT Barcelona Main Event?

He won his seat through a €27 online satellite on PokerStars, not by paying the €5,300 buy-in outright. That kind of long-shot entry is common on the European Poker Tour, where satellites let recreational players turn a small stake into a shot at a main event, but Malec had almost nothing in the way of live tournament results to suggest he belonged at the final table of one. He had built some experience grinding low-stakes games online, then converted a tiny outlay into a seat among the game's more established names.

Who is Sebastian Malec?

He was a 21-year-old Polish student, studying in London, with a background as a competitive chess player before he picked up poker. By his own account he was something of a poker superfan rather than a rising professional: he had gone to earlier EPT stops just to watch, taking photos with well-known pros in the crowd the way any spectator would. Barcelona in the summer of 2016 was the first time he showed up as a player rather than a fan on the rail.

How big was the 2016 EPT Barcelona Main Event field?

It was the largest EPT Main Event field on record at the time, with 1,785 entries building an €8,657,250 prize pool. That scale is part of what makes the result notable. A €27 satellite winner beating out nearly 1,800 players, most of them with far more live experience, is a different proposition than winning a small field.

What made Sebastian Malec's table presence so different?

He played loud, physical, and constantly in motion, which is not how most players behave at a Main Event final table. Commentators covering the event described him standing up repeatedly, talking through his own hands out loud, and moving around the table between decisions, a mix later put down to nerves and adrenaline as much as strategy. Against a table of calmer, more practiced opponents, that unpredictability became an edge in its own right. Seasoned professionals are used to reading a still, quiet opponent. Malec rarely gave them one.

What happened on the final hand against Uri Reichenstein?

Malec beat chip leader Uri Reichenstein heads up after a battle that ran roughly five hours, longer than most Main Event heads-up matches. On the last hand, Malec held A♦8♦ and turned a flush. Reichenstein held A♥8♠ and turned a straight, a hand that looks strong right up until it runs into a flush. Malec moved all in on the river.

Then he did something almost nobody does at that moment: he got up and walked away. He left the table entirely, sat down in the crowd, and took a selfie with a fan on the rail while Reichenstein sat alone deciding whether to call for the title. Reichenstein called. Malec had already won before he made it back to his seat, and by most accounts of the moment he broke down in tears once it registered.

Was Sebastian Malec's prize really $1.2 million?

Not exactly, though the rounded figure is close enough that it is easy to see how it gets repeated that way. EPT events are run in Europe and paid in euros, and Malec's actual prize was €1,122,800. At the exchange rate that August, that converted to a little over $1.2 million, so the dollar figure people quote is roughly right in size, just not the actual currency of the win. It is worth being precise about, since €1,122,800 is the number that shows up in the official tournament records and every serious poker database, not a dollar amount.

Is Sebastian Malec still playing poker?

Yes, and he has kept cashing well past that one Barcelona run. His career live tournament earnings now stand at more than $3 million, according to the Hendon Mob Poker Database, a tracker widely used across the poker industry. That total includes a $697,115 runner-up finish at the 2024 EPT Cyprus high roller and cashes as recently as EPT Barcelona in 2026, a decade after his breakthrough. Tournament databases vary slightly on the exact figure depending on when they last updated, but all of them place him just past the $3 million mark.

Malec's route into the game also connects to a wider pattern in online poker's history. PokerStars, the platform that ran his €27 satellite, spent years building the software and tournament infrastructure that made a result like his possible in the first place. Mark Scheinberg helped build that platform with his father before selling it for $4.9 billion in 2014, two years before Malec's win. Both stories are a reminder of how much of modern iGaming still traces back to a handful of founders willing to build the infrastructure other people just play on, the same instinct behind operators like the founders of Stake.com, who built their own platform from scratch rather than paying to play on someone else's.

The bottom line

Sebastian Malec's win was not a fluke dressed up as a good story. He beat the largest EPT Main Event field on record, outlasted a five-hour heads-up battle against a far more experienced chip leader, and did it all while playing a style that made seasoned professionals visibly uncomfortable. The €27 satellite and the selfie on the rail are the details people remember, but the actual poker underneath both of them held up.

It is also a useful reminder of how thin the line can be between a hobbyist and a life-changing result in this industry, on either side of the table. Malec's story runs through a platform, PokerStars, that someone else had to build first. If you are thinking about what it takes to build that kind of platform yourself rather than just playing on one, see our pricing for what launching a white-label casino platform costs today.