Adam Wilkinson Wins GUKPT Blackpool Main Event for £55,035

Adam Wilkinson played his first GUKPT Main Event when the tour was barely a month old. Nineteen years and nearly 200 GUKPT tournaments later, he finally has the glass trophy. On Sunday in Blackpool, Wilkinson beat a 190-entry field to win the £1,250 Main Event and £55,035, finishing it off with a river flush against Michael Whitehead heads-up.

He didn’t pretend it was all skill. Talking to Grosvenor’s Phil “The Tower” Heald afterwards, Wilkinson admitted “I ran like God,” and said that kind of run doesn’t come along very often. Looking at how the final table played out, he isn’t exaggerating. But after nearly two decades on the tour, nobody in Blackpool was going to say he hadn’t earned one good run.

GUKPT Blackpool 2026 Main Event Results

The Blackpool stop was the eighth leg of the 2026 Grosvenor UK Poker Tour, the tour’s 20th season and its 21st visit to the seaside town. The Main Event had three starting flights: Day 1a on Thursday, November 5, then Day 1b and a Day 1c Turbo on Friday, November 6. Day 2 played on Saturday and the title was decided on Day 3, Sunday, November 8.

Here’s the full final table. We’ve added each player’s share of the prize pool and how many buy-ins they turned their £1,250 into.

Place	Player	Prize	% of pool	Buy-ins won
1	Adam Wilkinson	£55,035	23.2%	44.0×
2	Michael Whitehead	£42,435	17.9%	33.9×
3	Chris Guertin	£26,580	11.2%	21.3×
4	Christopher Wood	£17,790	7.5%	14.2×
5	Jon Kalmar	£12,210	5.1%	9.8×
6	Chris Cox	£8,880	3.7%	7.1×
7	Benjamin Hill	£6,980	2.9%	5.6×
8	Trevor Reardon	£5,920	2.5%	4.7×
9	Peter Charalambous	£5,200	2.2%	4.2×

1st and 2nd reflect a heads-up deal. Percentages and buy-in multiples are PokerClubGames calculations, rounded.

The nine finalists shared £181,030, roughly 76% of the prize pool. That’s a top-heavy payout, which is normal when a field is under 200 players. Only 25 places were paid, about 13% of the field, so simply making the money in Blackpool was a real achievement.

How the final table fell

• 9th – Peter Charalambous was the first to go.
• 8th – Trevor Reardon flopped trip kings, but Christopher Wood also flopped trips and filled up with a ten on the river.
• 7th – Benjamin Hill got his last 15 big blinds in with pocket queens against Jon Kalmar’s ace-nine, and Kalmar made a flush.
• 6th – Chris Cox followed shortly after, still banking the biggest live cash of his career. His previous best was £3,635 for second in a £110 side event at UKIPT Bristol in 2012.
• 5th – Jon Kalmar shoved ace-king for 20 big blinds into Wilkinson’s pocket eights, and Wilkinson made a full house. Kalmar is no ordinary fifth-place finisher: he came fifth in the 2007 WSOP Main Event for $1,255,069.
• 4th – Christopher Wood jammed pocket nines for 12 big blinds into a three-way pot. Whitehead’s pocket fours made a set, and Chris Guertin’s ace-king missed.
• 3rd – Chris Guertin shoved with second pair and was called by Wilkinson’s top pair.

Adam Wilkinson Ends 19-Year Wait

To understand why this win matters, you have to go back to the very start of the GUKPT. The first Main Event was played in Bolton in January 2007. The second took place in Walsall a month later, and Wilkinson finished 11th out of 360 players. In July that year he reached the final table in Newcastle and finished 7th. Until Sunday, that was his deepest GUKPT Main Event run.

In the years since, Wilkinson has played nearly 200 GUKPT events. He’s picked up several side-event wins along the way, but the Main Event trophy never came. That will feel familiar to a lot of live regulars. You can cash often, make side-event final tables and earn respect in the card room, and still go years without the one result you really want.

There’s a practical lesson here for newer players. Tournament poker has huge variance. A player can make good decisions for years and still not convert a Main Event, because winning requires surviving several coin flips and running well at exactly the right time. Wilkinson’s story shows why bankroll management and patience matter more than any single result.

Heads-Up Battle and River Decision

When play reached heads-up, Wilkinson held about a two-to-one chip lead over Whitehead. The pair agreed a deal, leaving £9,747 to play for, which slightly reduced the gap between first and second place.

Whitehead had plenty to be happy about either way. He had won his seat in an online satellite for just £5, so second place still meant the biggest live score of his career, a return of more than 8,000 times his original outlay.

By the final hand, Wilkinson had pulled ahead by about four-to-one. Whitehead moved all in with ace-queen on a queen-high flop that had two diamonds. Wilkinson called with 8♦4♦, a flush draw with no pair.

Was it a good call? With about a four-to-one chip lead, Wilkinson was risking a much smaller part of his stack. A flush draw has around 35% equity against top pair with two cards to come, and that’s before you count the chance that Whitehead was bluffing or semi-bluffing. With deal money already locked up, calling to end the match was a reasonable decision. The turn was a black king, which didn’t help. Then the 9♦ landed on the river, completing the flush and ending the tournament.

GUKPT Blackpool Main Event Prize Pool

The 190 entries created a reported prize pool of £237,500. The event was advertised with a £250,000 guarantee, but the published pool figure is £12,500 lower than that, and the coverage doesn’t say whether Grosvenor added an overlay. Either way, turnout was well down on recent years.

Year	Entries	Prize pool	Champion	Winner’s prize
Nov 2026	190	£237,500	Adam Wilkinson	£55,035
Nov 2025	279	£289,560	Kostas Patsourakis	£67,990
Nov 2024	299	£314,250	Ravi Sheth	£68,580
Nov 2023	347	£360,430	Ian Gascoigne	£62,198
Nov 2022	543	£597,300	Jamie Clossick	£109,000

Entries were down about 32% on 2025 and roughly a third of the 2022 peak. It was the smallest Blackpool Main Event field since 2014, when 171 players entered. The festival as a whole was still busy, though. The £250 Mini Main drew 687 entries, with Sheffield’s Fraser Bellamy winning £27,945, which suggests many local players chose the cheaper events this year.

The 2026 Main Event most similar to Blackpool was Luton in May, which also drew 190 entries. Yucel “Mad Turk” Eminoglu won that one for £57,640 from a £236,250 pool. At the other end of the season, the Goliath’s GUKPT Main Event drew 876 entries and paid Dean Hutchison £163,280.

The GGPoker bonus explained

Wilkinson’s extra £5,504 came from a promotion between Grosvenor and GGPoker. Anyone who won their Blackpool Main Event seat on GGPoker, or used their GGPoker account to buy in, received a 10% cash bonus on their winnings. If you play GUKPT events, check whether this promotion applies before you buy in, because on a deep run it adds up quickly.

What’s Next: GUKPT Grand Final 2026

The 2026 season ends at The Victoria Casino in London, where the GUKPT Grand Final runs from November 19 to 29, with £1.2 million guaranteed across the festival.

Event	Buy-in	Guarantee	Dates
#1 GUKPT Midi	£1,250	£250,000	Nov 19–22
PLO High Roller	£1,000	£50,000	Nov 21
Mini Main	£340	£150,000	From Nov 22
High Roller	£2,500	£150,000	Nov 25–26
GUKPT Grand Final Main Event	£2,000	£500,000	Nov 26–29
GUKPT Cup	£560	£50,000	Nov 28–29

The Main Event has three starting flights: Day 1A on November 26, then Day 1B and a Day 1C Turbo on November 27. Day 2 is on November 28 and the final day is November 29. Alan Stearn is the defending champion, having won £125,645 from a £569,640 prize pool last year. Benjamin Winsor remains the only player to win the Grand Final Main Event twice, in 2015 and 2019.

If you don’t want to pay £2,000 up front, online satellites on Grosvenor Poker and GGPoker start from £1. Live Event Credit can also be won in amounts of £200, £300, £500 and £1,250 and used for any GUKPT event. Whitehead’s £5 route to a £42,435 payday in Blackpool shows why that’s worth considering.

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