Eleven final tables. That is how long it took Fabiano Kovalski to win GGPoker’s $10,000 GGMillion$, and the eleventh ended on Tuesday with $464,794, a $10,000 ticket to next week’s event and a $10,000 entry to GGMillion$ Live Paradise. The ten before it, by PokerNews’ count, had all finished short of the title.
The field was 237 entries for a prize pool of $2,308,900, shared by the top 25. Nine players reached the Tuesday final with $58,099 locked up for each of them, which is the GGMillion$ structure: the money is guaranteed at the close of Day 1, and the final table plays for the gap between that floor and the top prize. This week the gap was $406,695.
The final table
Jon Vallinas of Andorra finished second for $358,405. Hannes Jeschka of Austria took third for $276,368, Laszlo Bujtas of Lithuania fourth for $213,109 and Dmitrii Kravchenko of the Netherlands fifth for $164,329. Andrii Derzhypilskyi of Ukraine was sixth ($126,715), Alisson Piekazewicz of Brazil seventh ($97,711), Jesse Cesar of Brazil eighth ($75,345) and Emilien Pitavy of France ninth ($58,099).
Three Brazilians at a nine-handed $10,000 final is not unusual for this event. The weekly GGMillion$ draws a repeating cast, and the ledger’s high roller pages read like a short list of the same two hundred names rotating through the seats. Kovalski’s eleven appearances put him near the top of that list on frequency before he had a win on it.
What the structure does to the story
A GGMillion$ final is played with the min-cash already banked, so the decisions on the last day are about the ladder, not survival. The difference between ninth and first was $406,695; between second and first, $106,389. On a $10,000 buy-in, a player who reaches the final ten times and loses heads-up twice has still cleared well over half a million dollars in ladder money, which is why the “ten final tables without a win” line is both true and a little misleading as a hard-luck story. The desk records the finishes; the reader can judge the luck.
Second place is where the week’s real money sits as well. Vallinas’s $358,405 is larger than the first prize of every GGMillion$ final in the sources on file except this one, and Andorra, with a population smaller than a mid-sized city, now has two players on the ledger’s $10,000 final tables this month: Vallinas here and Arthur “Higher Self” Thiriart, listed as Andorra in the WSOP Online Monster Stack payout table (the same report calls him Belgian).
The prizes beyond the prize
The ticket and the Live Paradise entry are listed in the record’s notes and not added to the $464,794, following the desk’s rule that only the position prize goes in the first-prize column. GGPoker attaches those extras to the weekly winner as a matter of course; they are worth $20,000 at face value and nothing at all if the winner does not use them, which is the reason they stay out of the ledger total.
The record on the ledger carries the full nine-handed payout, the entry count and the prize pool as PokerNews published them on October 29. The play date is recorded as Tuesday, October 27, from the report’s “this week’s GGMillion$” phrasing; the article did not state the date itself, and the record says so.
Next Tuesday’s final will add another row. Whether Kovalski is in it is the kind of thing this event tends to answer quickly.
- PokerNews, Oct 29, 2026