The PokerStars.com European Poker Tour, Europe's richest and most popular poker tour, kicked off Season 5 in Barcelona in September, 2008. With more players than ever before, Season 5 featured 11 scheduled events including a new event in Budapest, Hungary, a welcome return to Deauville, France, the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure "Festival of Poker" in the Bahamas and the EPT Grand Final in Monte Carlo in April/May.

The season was a spectacular success with most existing events enjoying bigger fields than ever before. The season's show piece event - the €10,000 EPT Grand Final in Monte Carlo - attracted a record field of 935 players with a prize pool of €9.35 million, making it the richest tournament ever held outside of Las Vegas. The second EPT San Remo event in Italy was also a record-breaker - the biggest EPT ever held in Europe with a total of 1,178 players. The total prize pool for EPT Season 5 was €54 million with nearly 8,000 contestants.

The EPT is filmed by award winning TV production company Sunset+Vine, and the show is broadcast throughout the world. The series has been created and put together by a skilled team that includes:

John Duthie - CEO/Executive Producer

John Duthie is a successful director of primetime UK serial dramas, such as 'Silent Witness', 'As If' and the BAFTA award winning series 'Clocking Off'. He has been a high stakes poker player for many years, and his crowning achievement came when he won the 2000 Poker Million live on TV, a feat which earned him £1,000,000 and helped to popularise the game of poker in the UK. In 2004, John launched the televised European Poker Tour in association with PokerStars.com, and has seen his brainchild flourish into Europe's richest and most prestigious poker circuit, broadcast to over 40 countries around the world. He is an expert analyst on the EPT TV show, and made the final table of the $3,000 No Limit Hold'em event at the 2005 WSOP. John lives in London with his wife and two sons.

Thomas Kremser - EPT Tournament Director

A recognised and highly respected director of tournaments across Europe. Thomas, CEO of TK Poker Events International, has been responsible for establishing and running numerous festivals around the globe. He was tournament director of Channel 4's groundbreaking Late Night Poker and various other televised tournaments and is heavily involved with the promotion of poker as a recognized sport around the world.

Sunset & Vine

Sunset & Vine is a world leader in sports program production and international advertiser supplied programming, producing over 2,000 hours of television every year. The company produces Channel 4's cricket coverage in the UK and has been producing and distributing the Gillette World Sport magazine show for eighteen years.

PokerStars

PokerStars.com, PokerStars is the world's largest online poker site with more than 20 million players worldwide. PokerStars was the first site to introduce features that became the industry standard and offers the highest levels of security and customer support in the online poker world.
To date, PokerStars has dealt over 26 billion hands, has had over 265,000 simultaneous players, has run more than 150 million poker tournaments and continues to run more than 100,000 tournaments every day. PokerStars is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first and only poker website to reach the 200,000 simultaneous online players mark.

PokerStars is the title sponsor of the PokerStars European Poker Tour, the Asia Pacific Poker Tour (www.appt.com), the Latin American Poker Tour (www.lapt.com)and the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure. Each fall, PokerStars hosts the world's largest online tournament, the World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP).

PokerStars also sponsors major events around the globe, such as the World Cup of Poker and other exciting tournaments. WSOP Champions Peter Eastgate, Joe Hachem, Greg Raymer, and Chris Moneymaker and poker legend Daniel Negreanu are just some of the members of Team PokerStars Pro - a collective of pro poker players who all play at PokerStars and are sponsored by the site in international tournaments around the world.

EPT theme tune

The theme music for the European Poker Tour televison show, called "EPT Theme", was written by composer Simon Darlow who works regularly with the programme producers Sunset&Vine. Download "EPT Theme" (.mp3 format, 2.79MB)

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