PokerStars’ inaugural France Espania Hold’em Series (FRESH) smashes the €5m Guarantee, and Mike Takayama loses a Platinum Pass and then finds one again.

It’s not like PokerStars left the Spanish and French markets out in the cold like odds socks hung out to dry and forgotten. They were always coming back.

As Santa’s elves were whipping up a dervish of energy in his parcel room, the French gambling regulator Autorité de régulation des jeux en ligne (ARJEL) handed PokerStars an early Christmas present with delivery of the first online poker license that would allow the largest online poker room in the world to merge player pools in France and Spain.

Since then the PokerStars Europe Network has done rather well for itself, becoming one of the busiest cash game environments in the online realm, and it recently debuted the fruitful FRESH (France Espania Hold’em) Series.