Casino Graz presents the Pokermania Big 50K — Austria's biggest summer 2026 poker series

The Casinos Austria branch in Graz has officially announced its summer poker series Pokermania Big 50K, running from 18 to 22 June 2026. At its centre sits a No-Limit Hold'em main event with a guaranteed €50,000 prize pool and a €350 buy-in (€300 prize pool + €50 fee). Re-entries are allowed during the first eight levels — a format that has become standard for live tournaments in Austria since the 2023 reform of the MERKUR-Spielbanken landscape. Graz thereby joins a growing list of Austrian casinos rolling out mid-stakes events with a clearly planned guarantee to attract players from Slovenia, Hungary and southern Germany.

Alongside the Big-50K main event, the series features three side events: a Bounty Hunter on Thursday evening (€150 buy-in, €50 bounty per eliminated player), a Ladies Event on Friday (€100 buy-in), and a Turbo Deepstack on Sunday morning (€220 buy-in, 30-minute levels). The casino expects 220 to 280 entries to the main event, meaning the €50,000 guarantee equates to roughly 70–80% of the expected natural prize pool — keeping the house's overlay risk in check while still making the event attractive for travelling players.

Casino Graz itself is a classic Casinos-Austria venue in a central location on Graz's main square (Hauptplatz), running a ten-table poker room — according to the house, one of the largest in Styria. Cash games are dealt daily from 7 pm at NL €1/€2 and NL €2/€5; tournaments traditionally run on Thursdays and Saturdays. To enter the Pokermania main event, you must be of legal age (18 in Austria), present a government-issued photo ID and register on site for a Casino card. Since 2022 the Casinos-Austria card is centrally linked to the Austrian player exclusion system — self-excluded players cannot even sign up.

For German poker fans, getting to Graz is relatively straightforward: Munich is about 4.5 hours away, Vienna roughly 2 hours by train. Important to know: Casinos-Austria venues are licensed in Austria and fall exclusively under Austrian gambling law — they do not hold a German GGL licence and don't need one for their land-based operations, since Germany's State Treaty on Gambling (GlüStV 2021) regulates only online gambling, not foreign land-based casinos. German players sitting down at Casino Graz are therefore inside a fully legal, Austrian-regulated framework.

On taxes: Austria generally exempts live tournament winnings from income tax as long as poker is not played „professionally” — the line is drawn by criteria such as frequency, level of winnings and whether other income sources exist. In Germany, current Federal Fiscal Court (BFH) case law treats occasional hobby tournament winnings as tax-free. Anyone playing major tournaments regularly and earning a substantial share of their living from poker has to declare those winnings as business income. We recommend consulting a tax adviser specialising in gambling law in case of any doubt.

The Pokermania series cannot be played online — Germany's GGL whitelist currently contains no live poker operator. In Germany, only virtual slot games and online sports betting are properly licensed; online casino table games and online poker are subject to state-specific licensing that, so far, only Schleswig-Holstein has implemented in a limited form. Anyone wanting to play live poker therefore has to visit either a German state casino (e.g. Spielbank Berlin, Spielbank Hamburg, Bavaria-Casinos) or a licensed foreign land-based venue such as Casino Graz, Casino Bregenz or Casino Innsbruck.

Registrations for the Pokermania Big 50K are open now via phone and through the Casinos-Austria reservation system. Anyone staying more than a day should book a Graz hotel room early — the dates overlap with the Styriarte festival, which traditionally fills city-centre hotel capacity.