The World Poker Tour is returning to Cambodia for the third year in a row, upping the event to a Main Tour stop.
The fully-fledged $3,500 buy-in event kicks off on January 25th and will end with the induction of a player into the WPT Champions Club.
The move is also the first to break the WPT out of Australian and American borders, at least in regards to its Main Tour stops, with the event taking place at NagaWorld, in Phnom Penh.
Plans were in the making to utilize Cambodia as a stomping ground, but were waylaid by COVID.
“Actually, after our very successful first Cambodian WPT festival under the WPTDeepStacks banner in November 2019, we already had plans for NagaWorld to be a Main Tour stop for the WPT, but unfortunately, COVID put that idea to bed for a very long time,” notes WPT Live Events Specialist Danny McDonagh.
Local punters are not allowed to participate in the event, with the company representative noting that “That’s what makes the poker festival there fascinating as there is no dominant country represented”.
Pre-pandemic, Singapore held the highest representation in the WPTDeepStacks event in 2019, at 13 percent, while recent years have seen large growth in participation from Korea, Vietnam, and India, as well as long-haul countries such as Australia, the US and the UK.
The event is set to be the biggest buy-in event since large-scale tournament poker in Macau.
