WPT Cambodia 2025 Festival Awards More Than $11 Million in Prize Money

It was one of the most highly-anticipated live poker tournaments for the mid-stakes grinders in the Asia-Pacific region and the WPT Cambodia 2025 festival certainly lived up to these expectations. From February 6 to 24, 2025, the series generated more than $11 million in prize money and reached five figures in terms of total entries.

WPT Cambodia 2025 Final Wrap

For the first time, the WPT Cambodia festival hosted the WPT Championship Main Tour stop and the WPT Prime Championship under the same umbrella outside of Las Vegas and that may have very well played a significant role to attract an even bigger international player pool than usual.

WPT Cambodia Championship

The entire schedule included 73 trophy events and these awarded $11,202,500 in prize money, generated by a total of 10,218 entries. On top of that, the various satellites added another 873 entries to the resume for the largest World Poker Tour festival on Asian soil so far. It comes as no surprise that the biggest prize pool emerged in the 2025 WPT Cambodia $3,500 Championship Event,which easily sailed past the $1.5 million guarantee.

Thanks to 750 total entries, the crown jewel of the series paid out $2,400,750 in prize money and Russian online grinder Artem “veeea” Vezhenkovclaimed the top prize of $390,650, which includes a seat for the season-ending WPT World Championships in Las Vegas worth $10,400. Vezhenkov had to overcome a stacked final table which also included Ankit Ahuja and WPT Champion's Club member Dominik Nitsche. The attendance equals the field size of the 2019 WPTDeepStacks $1,100 Main Event, which also attracted 750 entries.

WPT Prime Championship

Many eyes were also set on the WPT Prime $1,100 Championship Event, which previously had its own standalone festival at the world class NagaWorld Integrated Resort in Phnom Penh. The previous record stood at 1,050 entries that was obliterated thanks to 1,484 entries across three starting days. Canada's Alexander Puchalski had already won the APPT Cambodia Main Event and earned his second-ever title on the live poker circuit for a payday of $233,680.

Other WPT Cambodia Highlights

The High Roller tournaments all attracted very solid field sizes and higher stakes action kicked off with Event #19 SHR Warm-Up, which reeled in 92 entries for a prize pool of $419,428. Spain's Valeriano Toledanodefeated Manuel Carvalho in heads-up to earn the top prize of $114,767 while his opponent from Portugal reached the final table in the Prime Championship.

In Event $5,000 High Roller, Belgian top pro and poker coach Thomas Boivin came out on top of a big field of 162 entries, which crushed the $200,000 guarantee and paid $738,558 across 21 spots. Boivin took home the top prize of $196,315 while runner-up Michel Molenaar had to settle for $128,620.

Australia had reason to celebrate in the $10k Single Day Challenge with Daniel Neilson and Yongjia “Gary” Lin going heads-up, the former earning the trophy and top prize worth $127,255. Lin also narrowly missed out on a trophy in the $20k Super High Roller after he came third in a field of 52 entries. The top eight finishers earned a slice of $988,624 in prize money and Roman Hrabec (277,779) had the bigger share of a deal with Dominik Nitsche ($261,000).

Nitsche himself already had a trophy by then, as he took down Event #34 Deepstack Turbo High Roller with a buy-in of $3,000. His victory came with a payday of $48,942 and runner-up Sho Homma earned $32,628 for his efforts. Homma later went deep in the Championship Event, nearly joining Nitsche on the final table but coming up just short of that feat in tenth place.

These three deep runs by Nitsche were quite impressive, yet he didn't come close to the top three spots on the Player of the Festival leaderboard. Amin Riyazati cashed in nine tournaments, won two of them and reached the final two tables in the $3,500 Championship Event to rack up a tally of 1,715 points. Another two-time champion finished behind him inErik Rozhynskyi, who took down two Bounty Events for 1,615 leaderboard points. Last but not least, aforementioned Carvalho remained ahead of Thomas Boivin to claim the last podium spot for extra prizes.

All three top finishers received cash and a seat for the WPT Prime Championship 2025 in Las Vegas as follows:

• Amin Riyazati (Australia) $1,100 seat and $3,900 in cash

• Erik Rozhynskyi (Ukraine) $1,100 seat and $1,900 in cash

• Manuel Carvalho (Portugal) $1,100 seat and $900 in cash

Another seven players earned two trophies with four-card specialist Fabian Rolli from Switzerland sealing that feat on the final day of the series. He won the Mini Championship for $79,000 and the Superstack 6-Max for another $10,650. Chun Ping Lo locked up his two victories in the first half of the series and the same also applied for Tom Maguire as well, the latter of which also reached the final table in the Prime Championship, too.

Further notable winners during WPT Cambodia include Martin Sedlak, Hongru Zhang, Nino Pansier, Nikesh Chawla, 2024 WPT Prime Paris champion Hugues Girard, as well as Portuguese top online grinder Rui Bouquet. Australia's Graham Cowan recently won the Manila Megastack 21 Main Event for PHP 3.2 Million (~ USD 54,749) and claimed one of the last trophies of the series after defeating Jon Kyte in Event #60 $1k Re-Entry.

The Asia-Pacific region won't have to wait long for the next stop of the World Poker Tour, as the WPT Prime Gold Coast Championship is less than a month away. Only the first half of the schedule for 2025 has been announced by the brand with WPT Prime Taiwan to follow in August, as announced during the stop in the Asia Poker Arena last year.