Adrian Mateos spent half the 2026 Poker Masters finishing one place short of the money. Somehow, the Spaniard still walked away with the Purple Jacket.
Five stone bubbles, three cashes and one tournament victory were enough to win the ten-event series at the PokerGO Studio in Las Vegas. Mateos finished with 451 PGT points, $467,700 in tournament winnings and a $25,000 PGT Passport.
His fate was decided on Friday, October 23, when Jeremy Ausmus busted fourth in the $51,000 finale. Sean Winter went on to win that tournament for $620,000, but the series title belonged to Mateos.
Five Bubbles and Eight Deep Runs
Getting through a high-roller field only to bubble is expensive. Doing it five times in ten tournaments sounds like a particularly unpleasant trip to Las Vegas.
Mateos bubbled Events #1, #3, #4, #6 and #9. In the opening tournament, his pocket aces were cracked by Craig Mason’s nines, which flopped a set. Another bubble followed in Event #6 when Justin Vaysman’s pocket sevens held against Mateos’s A-Q and Robert Chorlian’s A-6. Yet the other results were good enough to carry him to the jacket. His three paid finishes came in Events #2, #5 and #7.
| Event | Finish | Prize | PGT points |
|---|---|---|---|
| #2: $10,500 NLH | 2nd | $151,200 | 151 |
| #5: $10,500 NLH | 1st | $229,500 | 230 |
| #7: $15,700 NLH | 4th | $87,000 | 70 |
| Total | 3 cashes | $467,700 | 451 |
There is a remarkable statistic hiding in those results. Mateos either cashed or finished as the last unpaid player in eight of the ten tournaments. His Event #5 victory alone supplied 230 points, just over 51% of his final tally.
Poker Type previously covered Mateos’s $229,500 victory, when he beat Nick Schulman heads-up. At that stage, he had already suffered three bubbles, and his results barely began to tell the full story.
Ausmus Needed Second Place, Then Ran Into Sean Winter
Mateos entered the $51,000 finale with 451 points but failed to make the money. Nick Palma, sitting second in the series standings on 407, also missed out. That left Ausmus as the only player capable of catching him.
Ausmus began the final event on 321 points. A runner-up finish would have added 155 points, lifting him to 476 and giving him the Purple Jacket. Third place would have left him on 420. He had to make the final two.
With four players remaining, Ausmus picked up pocket fives in the big blind against Winter’s A-K of diamonds in the small blind.
The J-9-3 flop kept Ausmus ahead, but an ace on the turn flipped the race. Another ace on the river ended his tournament. He collected $170,500 for fourth place and finished the series on 389 points.
Mateos had won the jacket without playing a hand on the final day.
Winter eventually beat Sam Laskowitz heads-up for $620,000. Laskowitz received a career-best $387,500, while Igor Yaroshevskyy finished third for $248,000. The 31-entry event generated a $1.55 million prize pool.
Why a $229,500 Win Was Almost Worth a $620,000 Win
One of the more interesting aspects of the result concerns how PokerGO awards leaderboard points.
The PGT points system adjusts the value of tournament cashes according to buy-in levels. A larger payout does not automatically produce a proportionately larger points award.
Compare these two victories:
| Statistic | Mateos Event #5 | Winter Event #10 |
|---|---|---|
| Buy-in | $10,500 | $51,000 |
| Entries | 85 | 31 |
| Winner’s prize | $229,500 | $620,000 |
| PGT points | 230 | 248 |
Winter collected $390,500 more in prize money, but earned only 18 additional leaderboard points for his victory. That helps explain how Mateos could win the series despite four players among the eventual top ten collecting more prize money than him.
Winter earned $744,800 across his two cashes, or $277,100 more than Mateos, but finished fifth in the Purple Jacket race.
Final 2026 Poker Masters Leaderboard
| Position | Player | Cashes | Prize money | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Adrian Mateos | 3 | $467,700 | 451 |
| 2 | Nick Palma | 4 | $424,400 | 407 |
| 3 | Nick Seward | 4 | $578,500 | 397 |
| 4 | Jeremy Ausmus | 5 | $553,500 | 389 |
| 5 | Sean Winter | 2 | $744,800 | 373 |
| 6 | Vitalijs Zavorotnijs | 2 | $400,400 | 365 |
| =7 | Daniyal Gheba | 5 | $424,850 | 348 |
| =7 | Sam Laskowitz | 5 | $580,100 | 348 |
| 9 | Joey Weissman | 5 | $348,850 | 338 |
| 10 | Justin Vaysman | 3 | $348,600 | 325 |
Nick Seward’s third place came after he beat Daniel Negreanu for $412,500 in Event #9. Seward finished the festival with $110,800 more in tournament earnings than Mateos, but 54 fewer points. Justin Vaysman also produced one of the performances of the series. His comeback from a quarter of a big blind to win Event #6 for $192,000 helped him finish tenth overall.
Mateos Joins the Purple Jacket Winners
The Poker Masters began in 2017, when Steffen Sontheimer won the inaugural series. PokerGO’s historical winners list shows Mateos as the first Spaniard to claim the Purple Jacket.
Past champions include Michael Addamo, Stephen Chidwick, Sean Winter and Jim Collopy. Interestingly, Collopy won the 2024 series without winning an individual event, while David Coleman took the 2025 title with 492 points from three cashes.
Mateos’s 451 points were 41 fewer than Coleman’s previous winning total, although the two editions had different tournament structures. Winter, himself a Purple Jacket winner in 2022, now has another target. His latest victory extended his lead in the 2026 PGT Player of the Year standings to 2,223 points, 380 ahead of Eelis Parssinen.
The tour continues with the PGT Sprint beginning October 27, before the season concludes with the PGT Championship in January 2027.
