PokerStars has added WCOOP Games to the build-up to the 25th World Championship of Online Poker, giving players a one-cent route into selected $109 events and a shot at team prizes. The promotion runs alongside the main WCOOP festival and is built around four community teams.

According to PokerStars, players choose which community they want to represent, then try to win their qualifier and earn the ambassador’s Centroll. Successful qualifiers move on to a series of last-longer Face-Offs played inside regular WCOOP tournaments, with Benjamin “Spraggy” Spragg, Marle “MarlzTV” Spragg, Sebastian “peace&loove” Huber, and Del & Phil leading the four teams.

As reported last week, PokerStars had already published the 25th WCOOP schedule, which runs from Sept. 6 to 30 and covers 350 tournaments across 121 numbered events. The series carries at least $40 million in guarantees, most events are split into Low, Medium and High buy-in tiers, and every tournament winner will receive an official WCOOP trophy shipped home.

WCOOP Games qualifiers are scheduled for Aug. 23, Aug. 30 and Sept. 6. The winning communities will receive dedicated freerolls worth up to $7,000, and every member of the overall winning team will collect a $1,000 WCOOP Main Event ticket.

The broader WCOOP package also includes qualification paths starting at $0.55 through traditional satellites, $0.75 Spin & Go qualifiers, the returning WCOOP Lucky Dip promotion with $500,000 in tournament tickets, and Power Path Express, which adds more than $175,000 in ticket bundles and Main Event entries. PokerStars is also running WCOOP leaderboards for Low, Medium, High and overall Player of the Series, with another $100,000 set aside for those races.

Panagiotis Mavritsakis won Event #24 at EPT Barcelona, taking down the €825 PokerStars Open Cup after beating Taiwan’s Yen Han Chen heads-up. The victory was worth €193,120, while Chen collected €146,450 for second place.

According to Spade Poker, the event drew 2,004 entries and turned that field into a €1,442,880 prize pool. The win gave Mavritsakis his first EPT trophy, and it also denied Chen what would have been a third career victory at EPT Barcelona.

The final table was international, with players from Argentina, Ukraine, Ireland, Switzerland, Colombia and Mexico. Emmanuel Lopez Lasuen finished third for €93,280, followed by Ruben Cabrerizo in fourth for €71,750 and Pavlo Havrylyshen in fifth for €55,190. Conor O’Driscoll took sixth for €42,450, Dimitrija Bogdanovski was seventh for €32,650, Carlos Alberto Mejia Mora finished eighth for €25,120, and Jose Manuel Nadal Sordo placed ninth for €19,320.

Jason Wheeler won the PokerStars Open Barcelona Main Event, taking the €1,650 no-limit hold’em title from a field of 4,333 entries and banking $847,960. The event was built from eight starting flights and produced a prize pool of nearly $7.3 million. It was Wheeler’s biggest score yet, topping the $671,591 he earned for runner-up in Prague in 2017, and it came only a few weeks after his fifth-place finish in the World Series of Poker Main Event for $2,250,000.

According to Card Player, the final day began with just eight players left and Han Feng in the lead, with Wheeler sitting third in chips. As covered in our Aug. 21 preview, Feng had already been the name to catch after taking the chip lead into Day 3. Wheeler worked his way through the last table and eventually beat Alexander Ivarsson heads-up to close out the event.

Feng finished sixth for $172,388 after outlasting Felipe Boianovsky in eighth and Gregoire Jarry in seventh. Mahersh Selvakumaran took fifth for $224,100, Bogdan Petrascu was fourth for $291,299, and Darko Svesko was third for $378,392. Ivarsson finished second for $530,120.

Wheeler also collected 1,320 Card Player Player of the Year points, giving him 2,479 for the season and putting him inside the top 100 in the 2026 standings presented by CoinPoker. It was his first title of the year and his fifth final-table finish.

Michael Dwyer ended Day 1a of the €5,300 EPT Barcelona Main Event with 363,500 chips and the lead at Casino Barcelona. The first starting flight drew 635 entries, and 193 players survived ten one-hour levels to bag for Day 2.

As covered in our Aug. 12 look at the Barcelona festival, the Main Event runs alongside a busy EPT week. PokerNews reported that Dwyer took over the top spot in the final level after rivering two pair to crack Jakob Karlsson’s cowboys and send him out.

Matteo Cecchetti finished second with 345,000, and Mark Teltscher was third with 324,000. The other notable bags included Matthew Frankland and Romain Locquet on 200,500 apiece, Nicholas Seward on 141,000, Arian Kashani on 136,500, Anton Wigg on 131,000, Mihai Niste on 126,500, Barny Boatman on 125,500, Maria Konnikova on 109,000, Nicolas Chouity on 106,500, Tomasz Brzezinski on 105,500, Simon Wiciak on 97,500, Benjamin Spragg on 93,500, and Simon Brandstrom on 60,000. Frankland had also recovered from an early stumble by tripling up before dinner with a rivered flush against Alexander Yen, then later busting Seunghyuk Jung when his queens held. Spragg and Konnikova are PokerStars ambassadors.

The prize pool climbed to €3,079,750 after Day 1a, and it still has room to grow because Day 1b is still to come and late registration remains open until the start of Day 2. Day 1b gets underway at noon local time later today.