Poker Tournaments in Cambodia

The two big poker festivals held at NagaWorld

If you are looking for big-field, big-prize tournament poker in Cambodia, your destination is almost certainly NagaWorld. The complex sits in Phnom Penh and is the only integrated hotel and casino resort in the capital⁶. It is Cambodia's largest and most prestigious casino and entertainment complex⁷, and it has built a reputation as a premier poker tournament destination in Southeast Asia⁸.

On the tournament side, NagaWorld runs two kinds of poker. The first is its own program: weekly low-stakes tournaments that anyone can turn up and play. The second is the big stuff. NagaWorld serves as host for international poker festivals throughout the year, in partnership with global brands¹. The two festivals that dominate the calendar are the Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT) stop and the World Poker Tour (WPT) stop, both held in the resort's ballroom space. The APPT edition that put the venue on the tournament map returned to NagaWorld's Grand Ballroom for its second edition on May 5 to 15, 2023⁴, and the festival has been a fixture since.

Between festivals, the poker room itself stays busy. The Arena Sports & Poker Bar at NagaWorld runs 8 games nightly with action 24/7⁴, so there is always something running whether or not a major tour is in town. For the wider picture of the venue, see our NagaWorld page, and for cash play specifically, see poker in Cambodia.

APPT Cambodia: more than 60 events and USD 1.5 million in guarantees

The 2025 edition of APPT Cambodia ran from May 2 to May 13 and took over the NagaWorld Integrated Resort in Phnom Penh². Across those twelve days the festival delivered more than 60 events and over USD 1.5 million in guaranteed prizes².

That schedule is not one tournament but a full festival. A typical APPT stop spreads its events across buy-in levels so that both recreational players and touring professionals find something to play: a headline Main Event with the largest guarantee, plus a spread of side events, turbos, and high-stakes tournaments filling every day of the schedule. With more than 60 events on the board, a visitor during the festival could realistically find a tournament to enter on any day of the week, at a range of price points.

The headline number, USD 1.5 million in guarantees across the festival, is what the organizer committed to paying out regardless of how many players entered. Guarantees matter to you as a player because if entries fall short of the promised prize pool, the organizer tops it up, which means overlay value for those who did buy in.

Main Event: $1,000,000 guaranteed across four Day 1 flights

The centerpiece of APPT Cambodia 2025 was the Main Event, which carried a $1,000,000 guaranteed prize pool². That is the single largest commitment of the festival and the number that draws the field.

The Main Event was spread across four Day 1 flights². If you have never played a multi-flight tournament, the idea is simple: the casino runs the first day four times. You pick one flight (or enter more than one, if you want multiple shots), play until the end of the flight or until you bust, and if you survive with chips, you carry them forward to Day 2, where all the flights combine into one field.

The practical effect of four flights is flexibility. You do not have to rearrange your whole trip around a single starting day. If you arrive in Phnom Penh mid-festival, a later flight is still open to you. It also builds the field: players who bust one flight can re-enter another, which is how the event reached its final entry count.

How the Main Event played out: 643 entries, 95 paid spots

The 2025 APPT Cambodia Main Event drew a total of 643 entries across its four Day 1 flights². From all of those entries, only 121 players advanced to Day 2². That is the shape of a big live tournament: hundreds of entries, but the field compresses fast once the survivors merge.

From the 121 who started Day 2, the field kept shrinking until just 95 spots made the money². In other words, roughly one in every seven entries ended up with a payout, and more than a quarter of the Day 2 field went home with nothing. That is normal for a live Main Event, but it is worth knowing before you sit down: surviving Day 1 is only the first step, and even reaching Day 2 does not guarantee a cash.

The tournament played down to a final table, where the last players contested the champion's prize of $191,000². The title itself went to Hai Ha Tran of Vietnam, who was crowned champion of the APPT Cambodia Main Event².

Payouts: from $2,700 min-cash to $191,000 for first place

The payout structure of the 2025 Main Event ran from a minimum cash of $2,700 to $191,000 set aside for the champion². The remaining 95 players were each guaranteed at least $2,700 once the money bubble burst².

A few things stand out if you are weighing up a trip. The min-cash of $2,700 is a serious return relative to typical Main Event buy-ins at regional stops, and it means that squeaking into the money is a genuinely profitable result, not a token refund. At the other end, the jump from a min-cash to the top of the table is enormous: first place paid roughly seventy times the minimum.

The final hand of the story is worth knowing too. When play reached heads-up, Hai Ha Tran and Somashekar Kurkheppally Nahadeva struck an ICM deal to grab an equal share of the final prize, taking $155,225 each². An ICM deal is a standard arrangement in tournament poker: with two players left, they agree to split the remaining prize money according to chip counts (or, as here, evenly) rather than playing on for the full published amounts. The champion's trophy and title still went to Tran, who also received a $3,500 APPT Championship Package on top of the deal money².

So the practical picture of payouts at this event:

Blind schedule and level lengths

Tournament structure details matter more the deeper you run, and the APPT Cambodia Main Event used a structure that lengthened as the field shrank. Early levels ran 60 minutes each. On Day 3, each level moved to 75 minutes rather than the previous 60-minute levels². Day 4 began at Level 28 with 90-minute levels².

What this means for you as a player: the deeper you go, the more time you have per level to make decisions, and the slower the blinds escalate relative to your stack. Shorter levels early keep the huge Day 1 fields moving, while the longer levels late give the final tables room for real poker rather than a shove-fest. If you are used to online play, where levels are often just a few minutes, a 90-minute level on Day 4 will feel almost leisurely.

For comparison, the weekly tournaments at other rooms around the region often run 20-minute or 25-minute levels throughout, which makes them quick one-evening events rather than multi-day marathons. The APPT Main Event structure is built for a four-day grind, and players who intend to run deep typically arrange their Phnom Penh schedule around that four-day shape.

WPT Cambodia: $11.52 million festival prize pool

The other big festival on the NagaWorld calendar is the World Poker Tour stop. The WPT 2025 festival at NagaWorld generated a total festival prize pool of $11.52 million³. That figure is the combined prize money across all of the festival's events, and it makes the WPT stop comfortably the richer of the two major festivals at the venue.

Where APPT Cambodia 2025 guaranteed over USD 1.5 million across its schedule, the WPT festival's actual prize pools added up to more than seven times that amount. That difference reflects both the size of the fields the WPT brand draws and the buy-in levels of its events. For a player choosing between festivals, the WPT stop is the one with the bigger money, while the APPT stop is the one with the longer established history at this specific venue.

Both festivals run in the same resort, in the same city, with the same practical setup, so the choice between them comes down to schedule, buy-ins, and field size rather than logistics.

WPT championship event: 750 entries and a $2.4 million prize pool

The headline tournament of the WPT 2025 festival was its championship event, which drew 750 entries and built a prize pool of $2.4 million³.

Those numbers put the WPT championship event in a different class from anything else on the Cambodian calendar. At 750 entries, it was a bigger field than the APPT Main Event's 643, and its $2.4 million prize pool was more than double the APPT Main Event's $1 million guarantee. For context, the previous APPT stop at NagaWorld in November 2024 had a championship event prize pool of $746K⁹, so the WPT championship event represented a step change in scale for tournament poker in Phnom Penh.

If you are planning a trip around big-field tournament poker in Cambodia, the WPT championship event is the single richest tournament regularly held in the country, and one of the larger prize pools you will find anywhere in Southeast Asia's live poker scene.

Playing in a tournament at NagaWorld: practical tips

You do not have to wait for a festival to play tournament poker at NagaWorld. The venue runs affordable weekly tournaments every Saturday and Sunday at 1pm⁴. These are the natural entry point if you want to try a live tournament in Cambodia without committing a festival-sized buy-in, and the weekend 1pm start time means you finish with your evening free.

Outside of tournaments, the cash games run around the clock⁵, with 8 games running nightly in the poker room⁴. The stakes on offer cover the middle of the market: 1/3 and 2/5 mid and low limit games run regularly, and on most evenings there is one 5/10+NL game⁵. NagaWorld also claims the lowest rake in Cambodia and one of the most competitive rake structures in all of Southeast Asia⁵, which matters over a long session since rake is the house's cut of each pot.

A few practical points for a first visit:

• Timing. Tournament days start at 1pm on weekends; cash games run 24/7, so you can walk in at any hour and find a game⁴.
• Where to stay. NagaWorld is a full integrated resort with rooms and suites in Phnom Penh¹¹, so staying on-site puts you a short walk from the poker room, handy for late finishes.
• Entertainment beyond poker. The complex offers singers, bands, traditional Cambodian entertainment and other live options⁷, plus the wider casino floor, so a non-playing travel companion will not be stuck for something to do.
• During festivals. When APPT or WPT is in town, the ballroom takes over for the tour and the regular poker room keeps running alongside it, so cash games and weekly events continue even mid-festival¹.

For the venue's entry rules, games and how to get there, see our full NagaWorld page, and for the broader scene, casinos in Phnom Penh.

Who can actually play here

NagaWorld is the only luxury premium casino in Cambodia¹², and its casino floor and poker room are geared to foreign visitors and expats, which is the standard pattern for licensed casino gambling in the country. Cambodia's gambling rules treat Cambodian citizens differently from foreigners, and the details are covered on our gambling laws in Cambodia page; if you are visiting on a foreign passport, see gambling in Cambodia as a visitor. In practice, the poker room's international festival fields are made up overwhelmingly of players from across Asia and beyond, and the weekly tournaments are open to the same audience. The practical risk for anyone playing outside the licensed venue system is simply that unlicensed games carry no protection if a dispute arises, so the licensed room at NagaWorld is where Cambodia's tournament poker actually happens.