If you want to catch up on poker news from August 10–16, 2026, this was the week the calendar pivoted from the Las Vegas summer toward online and European festivals. GGPoker's WSOP Online 2026 opened today, Brazilian players dominated a $10,000 GGMillion$ final table, EPT Barcelona 2026 kicked off in Spain, a Southern California regional crowned a five-time champion at the San Diego Poker Classic, and Japan's ABEMA POKER INVITATIONAL produced one of its most dramatic hands yet.

The sections below stick to reporting you can verify from sources dated in this window—chiefly PokerNews, Pokerfuse, GGPoker's own blog, and ABEMA TIMES. Where figures differ slightly across outlets, the more specific tournament-desk numbers are used, and remaining uncertainty is left as uncertainty rather than smoothed over.

WSOP Online 2026 Finally Kicks Off

According to PokerNews and Pokerfuse on August 11, 2026, GGPoker's WSOP Online 2026 launched today, August 16, and runs for about six weeks through September 29, awarding 33 official gold bracelets along the way. Day one opens with the $700 7th Annual WSOP Kick-Off, with the $300 Gladiators of Poker and the $2,500 Bounty NLH Championship following within the first few days. The schedule details covered in last week's roundup—including the $5,000 WSOP Online Main Event (Day 2 on September 21, $25,000,000 guaranteed)—are now moving from announcement to actual play.

Pokerfuse reports that GGPoker.tv streams will feature Jeff Gross on commentary, with Phil Hellmuth expected to join coverage of the Main Event and GGMillion$ High Roller final tables. GGPoker Global Ambassador Daniel Negreanu wrote in the official blog post that the series offers "33 WSOP gold bracelets up for grabs, massive guaranteed prize pools, and millions in extra value through Continental Flipouts and WSOP Paradise Super Passes," calling it "the ultimate series for poker players everywhere." Expect the early results to come from the lower- and mid-buy-in bracelet events before attention shifts toward the bigger guarantees later in the six-week run.

The series also carries roughly $5,000,000 in additional promotional value, including a $30,000 Super Pass into the WSOP Paradise Super Main Event for every bracelet winner. If you followed last week's preview of the schedule, this week is simply the moment that framework starts producing results instead of dates on a calendar.

Beyond the Kick-Off and the flagship Main Event, the schedule spreads marquee guarantees across the full six weeks: the $500 Mini Main Event ($5,000,000 GTD) plays out August 20–24, the ¥800 WSOP Asia Championship (¥25,000,000 GTD) runs into August 30, and the $1,500 Millionaire Maker guarantees at least $1,000,000 for first place when it finishes on August 31. The $10,000 GGMillion$ High Rollers slot remains on the calendar as well, keeping the weekly high-roller rhythm running in parallel with the bracelet chase. For scale, PokerNews notes that the 2025 edition of WSOP Online paid out more than $354 million across the full series, which is the kind of total that only becomes visible once results from all 33 events are added up over six weeks rather than a single opening weekend.

PokerNewsDaily also flags a detail worth knowing if you plan to play the Main Event rather than just follow it: the $5,000 buy-in event has 19 separate Day 1 flights, starting today and spread across the run-up to Day 2 on September 21. That structure mirrors how the live WSOP Main Event handles a huge field—multiple entry points feeding into one unified chip count—so players who miss the first flight still have weeks of alternate start dates before the field closes for good.

Carlos Ribeiro Wins $10K GGMillion$ on His First Final Table

According to GGPoker's own blog and PokerNews on August 12, 2026, Brazil's Carlos Ribeiro won the $10,000 GGMillion$ for $406,521. The tournament drew 197 entries for a prize pool of about $2,010,000, and six of the nine finalists were Brazilian—a group that combined to bank roughly $1,300,000 of the $1,670,000 still on the table when the final table began.

Ribeiro had played the GGMillion$ 14 times before this week with only two cashes to show for it, so reaching his first final table and winning it outright is a notable jump. Fellow Brazilian Alisson Piekazewicz started the final table as chip leader and ultimately finished runner-up for $318,747. The title hand saw Ribeiro limp with ace-five, Piekazewicz three-bet with pocket queens, and Ribeiro shove and get called. An ace on the flop gave Ribeiro the lead, a third spade on the turn gave Piekazewicz a flush draw, and a blank on the river sealed the win. First place also came with a $10,000 package to the live GGMillion$ at 2026 WSOP Paradise.

The rest of the final table read like a roll call of Brazilian online talent: Bernardo Soares finished third ($249,924), Max Buschmann of Germany was the lone non-Brazilian in the top five in fourth ($195,962), and Brunno Botteon rounded out the top five ($153,650). PokerNews's recap put particular emphasis on the fact that five Brazilians finished in the top six and combined to collect more than $1.3 million of the $1.67 million still in play once the final table began—an unusually lopsided nationality split even for a format that already skews toward a small pool of online regulars.

Weekly high-roller series like this one are easier to follow as an ongoing scoreboard than as one-off mega-mains. Last week it was Hannes Jeschka closing out a second title; this week a group of Brazilian regulars pushed one of their own—a player who had cashed only twice in fourteen prior attempts—to a breakthrough win. If you only check in on GGMillion$ occasionally, weeks like this are a reminder that the same buy-in level can produce wildly different final-table stories from one Friday to the next.

EPT Barcelona 2026 Opens, Main Event Starts August 22

PokerNews reported on August 12, 2026 that EPT Barcelona 2026 opened at Casino Barcelona on August 16 and runs through August 29. The twinned PokerStars Open Main Event (€1,650, August 16–22) leads things off, followed by the €100,000 EPT Super High Roller (August 21–23), the flagship EPT Main Event (€5,300, August 22–29), the €3,250 EPT Mystery Bounty (August 25–27), and the €10,300 EPT High Roller (August 27–29).

New this year is the €2,200 "In the Money at 180,000" event (August 17–27), which offers a different route to the cash desk than a standard freezeout structure. PokerStars plans seven days of live streaming on Twitch and Facebook starting August 23, so readers who can't make the trip to Spain will still be able to follow the closing stages of the Main Event.

Barcelona has long served as one of the European Poker Tour's highest-attendance stops, in part because the twinned PokerStars Open events give recreational players a lower-buy-in path into the same festival week as the EPT Main Event and the high-roller lineup. That structure repeats again this year: players who bust the €1,650 PokerStars Open Main Event can still chase the €5,300 EPT Main Event starting August 22, and the new €2,200 "In the Money at 180,000" format gives an additional mid-tier option for players who want a different prize-pool structure than a standard freezeout. The PokerStars Open Cup (€825, August 20–21) and PokerStars Open High Roller (€2,700, August 21–23) fill in the days between the two Main Events, so there is essentially a tournament running at every buy-in tier for the full two-week window rather than a handful of headline dates surrounded by dead time.

With the Las Vegas summer now closed out, Barcelona is the first major European stop to fully ramp up, and it effectively opens the run toward September's WCOOP and Triton festivals later in the fall calendar. For readers tracking the live circuit rather than online series, this is the one to watch over the next two weeks: the Main Event field size and the eventual champion will set the tone for how the rest of the European fall season gets covered.

Scott Aulds Avenges a Runner-Up Finish at San Diego Poker Classic

According to PokerNews on August 10, 2026, the $600 San Diego Poker Classic Main Event at Jamul Casino Resort in California crowned local player Scott Aulds as champion for $45,311. The field reached 434 entries for a $225,680 prize pool. Aulds had finished runner-up in the same event three years earlier, and this win marked his 12th title overall at the venue and his fifth SDPC Main Event title specifically.

Heads-up play saw Aulds fall behind nearly five-to-one in chips against Mexico's Ediberto Pilotin, but an early double-up got him back into contention. He then ground down Pilotin's stack over several hours before closing the match with an ace-high flush. Pilotin finished runner-up for $30,207. The final table itself lasted more than six hours before Aulds ever got to heads-up play, which goes some way toward explaining why a five-to-one chip deficit was still recoverable once the double-up gave him something to work with.

Aulds has been a fixture at Jamul Casino Resort for years, and this result gave him his fifth San Diego Poker Classic Main Event title on top of a broader collection of titles at the venue. Coming back from a runner-up finish three years prior adds a small narrative arc to what is otherwise a fairly typical mid-August regional result. Even with the bracelet series wrapped up in Las Vegas, regional festivals like this one keep producing title results across the country through mid-August, and Aulds's redemption story is a reminder of how deep the regional circuit talent pool runs outside the marquee online and European series covered elsewhere in this roundup.

ABEMA POKER INVITATIONAL: Ruiko's Monster Hand Buries Misawa

According to ABEMA TIMES on August 15, 2026, episode three of ABEMA POKER INVITATIONAL 2026, which aired August 8, featured a brutal hand for top Japanese pro Misawa, who has more than ¥1.3 billion in career earnings. Newcomer Ruiko raised to 2,000 points with eight-eight (hearts and diamonds), and Misawa three-bet to 7,000 with ace-king of spades, isolating the pot between the two of them heading to the flop.

Misawa ended up making a top-tier flush on the hand but still lost to Ruiko's monster, leaving Misawa with only 200 points in chips afterward, according to the report. Commentator Shohei Taguchi reacted live on air, and viewer response to the clip was reportedly significant. It is the kind of single-hand swing that the invitational's one-elimination format is built to produce—one misread and a career-earnings leader can be reduced to a short stack in a single street.

ABEMA POKER INVITATIONAL 2026 is an eight-player, single-elimination invitational broadcast free on ABEMA every Saturday night, with a ¥10,000,000 top prize and no re-entry once a player busts. Ruiko is one of three new additions to this year's lineup, alongside Hayato Kitajima and Reichaso, joining holdovers Misawa, Shina Okamoto, Shota Nakanishi, Amu, and Kei Nitta from the previous season. For readers who mainly follow English-language coverage, the format is worth knowing about: because it plays down to one table with permanent elimination, a single cooler like this one can decide who is still in contention heading into the closing episodes.

Taken together, the throughline across all five stories this week is the same: the center of gravity is shifting from Las Vegas's live summer toward online series and European festivals. With WSOP Online and EPT Barcelona both running for weeks at a time, and GGMillion$ continuing to crown a new champion almost every Friday, expect the next few roundups to stay anchored to those two tracks as results accumulate.