An amateur player from Poland won the EPT Malta Main Event

Author

Vargoso

A sports betting industry professional won the EPT Malta Main Event. Pole Tomasz Brzezinski emerged victorious, beating nearly 400 opponents and taking home €631,632. Read this article for the tournament's highlights.

Tomasz Brzezinski Wins 2025 Ept Malta Main Event

A professional bookmaker won a poker tournament

The European Poker Tour returned to Malta for the first time in nine years. The series schedule featured 71 events with buy-ins ranging from €300 to €100,000. The Main Event attracted 640 entries (382 players + 258 re-entries) and a prize pool of €4,355,300.

Polish player Tomasz Brzezinski celebrated his victory in the Main Event after a five-hour heads-up.

Tomasz is not a professional player. He says he once tried to make a living playing poker, but was faced with a choice between the game and a career. He chose the latter: ten years ago, he moved to Malta to work in the sports betting industry.

For the past seven years, Brzezinski has competed in local series with buy-ins no higher than €1,000 and has never won more than €40,000. Everything changed in the summer of 2025: at the EPT Barcelona event, he finished fourth in the Main Event and won €493,250.

Now, after his victory in Malta, Tomasz has become the 11th player in EPT history to reach the final tables of two Main Events in a row.

He attributes his success to constant work on his game:

"I have a lot of friends who are great poker players. I try to learn from them and analyze difficult spots."

Final Table

A rare event for a tournament of this level occurred on the final table bubble.

Luis Faria (32 big blinds) opened up with AQs from the cutoff, and Ben Heath, who had his stack covered, made a three-bet. Faria assumed his opponent was already all-in, called, and revealed his cards, even though the hand was still in play.

On the flop of 7♦2♠7♣, Heath moved all-in. After three time-bank cards, Faria decided to hold 12 big blinds and folded, leaving a pot of 65.7 big blinds for his opponent. Twenty minutes later, the Portuguese player was eliminated in 10th place, losing with AJo against QQ.

Ept Malta Main Event 2025 Final Day

Five players remained in the fray on Day Six. Aliaksei Boika of Belarus had a chance to become the fourth player in history with two EPT Main Event victories, but he lost his entire stack with pocket kings to Mykhailo Ostash's set of fives.

Ostash (m.o_4515) had been playing online tournaments with an average buy-in of $30 at the beginning of the year. In the summer, he won the Sunday Million for $83,987 and finished third in the WCOOP Low Main Event for $108,138. His EPT debut was no less successful.

When Brzezinski and Ostash's stacks were tied, the players agreed to split the prize money equally, leaving just under €30,000 for the playoffs.

From there, the real madness began: 14 consecutive all-ins were needed to determine the champion. Ostash went all-in in 12 of them, and miraculously survived each time. But in the deciding hand, his A♠T♦ lost to Brzezinski's A♥J♣, and Mykhailo gave up his remaining big blind to his opponent in the very next hand.