Austria's autumn: a €1 million Main Event, four festivals in three weeks, and a tournament where everyone cashes the same
Casinos Austria has stacked its heaviest poker calendar of the year into September, October and November 2026 — topped by the €1,000,000-guaranteed CAPT Million at Casino Baden, with qualifying flights running at rooms across the country.
Austria is a small poker market with an unusually dense calendar, and the autumn of 2026 is the clearest illustration of it. Between mid-September and the end of November, nine of the twelve Casinos Austria venues that spread poker are running a festival, a series leg or a qualifying flight.
The headline: CAPT Million
The Casinos Austria Poker Tour's biggest event returns to Casino Baden from 19 to 30 November with a guaranteed prize pool of one million euros. What makes it reachable rather than just large is the qualifying structure: Day 1 flights run at rooms across the country from September onwards, so a player never has to buy in directly at the Main Event price. Casino Baden itself runs start days every Saturday and satellites every Tuesday; Casino Linz begins its flights on 5 November; Casino Velden runs one on 7 November at €500 + €50 with a 100,000 stack and thirty-minute levels.
Casino Linz has gone a step further and folded tickets into its own festival — the CAPT Million Cup on 15–17 October carries a €20,000 guarantee, and the prize money for the top three places includes a €550 CAPT Million ticket each.
Four festivals in three weeks
The run starts in Tyrol. Pokermania Hüttengaudi at Casino Seefeld, 16–19 September, guarantees €37,000 across four days and runs a different alpine side game each day — a buzzer game, hut pong, a nail-driving contest, an estimation game. Pokermania at Casino Linz follows on 17–19 September with €25,000 guaranteed across three single-day events, and CAPT Graz runs 22–27 September.
Then Carinthia: Pokermania XL at Casino Velden, 29 September to 4 October, is the biggest of the Pokermania festivals at €50,000 guaranteed, and its Main Event uses a best-stack-forward structure — players may qualify for Day 2 more than once and carry only their largest stack through, with each extra qualification paid separately and a €500 minimum cash.
October brings the October leg of the Poker Cup Salzburg (1–3 October, €15,000 guaranteed, €165 + €25), CAPT Bregenz II on Lake Constance (13–25 October, €1,100 Main Event, Bodensee Hold'em Trophy with €30,000 guaranteed), and the Poker Festspiele Salzburg (27–31 October). CAPT Innsbruck follows 2–8 November as the tour's mixed-game stop — Open Face Chinese, Torse, Omaha Hi-Lo and Seven Card Stud — with the NLH Main Event at €1,000 + €100 for the first time in the festival's history.
Halloween, nationwide
On 31 October the network runs a single co-ordinated cash-game promotion across the country: more than €5,000 in prizes for high hands and bad beats Austria-wide, plus a €550 CAPT Million ticket drawn among all the winners. At Casino Wien the local pot is €1,000 between 16:00 and 01:00, with the three highest winning and three highest losing hands going to a flip at 01:00 — €500 in chips for first, €100 each for second through sixth.
The odd one out
The most interesting thing on the Austrian calendar this autumn is not one of the big guarantees. From 30 September, Casino Baden runs a Surrender Turnier every Wednesday in which every player who reaches the money receives an identical payout. Around 15 per cent of the physical entrants are paid, and there is no ladder above that.
It is a genuine change to how the game plays. Nearly all late-stage tournament strategy is shaped by pay jumps: survival has value because the next elimination is worth money to everyone still in. Remove the ladder and that pressure disappears the moment the bubble bursts — before it, chips are worth more than ever, and after it, nothing you do changes your payout. Whether that makes for better poker is arguable. It certainly makes for different poker, and it is rare to see a casino experiment with the payout structure rather than the format.