Raoul Kanme has won the biggest prize of his poker career, taking down the $25,500 Onyx Main Event for $1,250,000 in a final table that turned on one gutsy river jam. The Dutch player outlasted a stacked 255-entry field at the Onyx Club inside the Merit Royal Diamond Hotel Casino & Spa to claim the marquee title of the Onyx High Roller Series.
A Field Built for Drama
The $25,500 buy-in event drew 255 entries, building a prize pool of $6,120,000, comfortably the richest of the entire Onyx High Roller Series stop. That kind of field size at a five-figure buy-in signals just how deep the modern high roller scene has become, with regulars flying in from across Europe to chase a title that has quickly built a reputation among the game’s toughest lineups.
Nine players made the money on the final day, and the payouts reflected how top-heavy the structure was. Fahredin Mustafov of Bulgaria was the first to fall in the money, collecting $143,000 for ninth, while Anze Smajd of Slovenia banked $171,000 in eighth. Italo Modena of Italy took $200,000 for seventh, and Daniel Rezaei of Austria earned $250,000 in sixth. Manuel Fritz, also of Austria, cashed for $320,000 in fifth, and Aliaksandr Shylko of Belarus rounded out the top four with $420,000.
The nationality spread at that final table, players arriving from the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Belarus, Italy, Slovenia and Bulgaria, underlines just how international the Onyx circuit has become. Cyprus has turned into a convenient meeting point for European high stakes regulars, offering a warm-weather alternative to the winter festivals in Prague or the summer grind in Las Vegas, and fields like this one are the clearest evidence that the format is working as intended.
Kanme Takes Control Three-Handed
With the money bubble long gone, the tournament tightened into a three-way battle before Jordan Woodall of Germany fell in third for $600,000, leaving Kanme heads up against Austria’s Matthias Lipp, who had built a reputation as one of the toughest grinders left in the field. Lipp eventually settled for $800,000 as the runner-up, but not before the two traded chip leads in a heads-up match that stretched on for well over an hour.
The hand that swung the match, and effectively sealed the title, came when Kanme was holding a suited king with only backdoor draws to work with against Lipp’s range. Rather than play passively with a thin holding, Kanme check-raised the flop, committing himself to the pot with a plan already in mind. “Once he bets, I had in my mind, I’m going to check-raise him and just go all the way, no matter what,” Kanme said afterward, describing the decision as premeditated rather than a spur-of-the-moment read. He followed through by jamming the river with what little was left of his stack, and Lipp ultimately let his hand go, handing Kanme the chip lead he would not relinquish.
A Career-Best Score
The $1,250,000 first prize instantly becomes the largest single cash of Kanme’s career, and it arrives on one of the sport’s most demanding stages. The Onyx High Roller Series has, in a short span, established itself as a fixture on the high stakes calendar, drawing a recurring cast of European specialists willing to fire five-figure buy-ins multiple times in a single trip. Winning the Main Event, as opposed to one of the shorter-format side events on the schedule, carries extra weight among peers precisely because of the depth of the 255-entry field and the number of proven crushers it had to survive.
Players who study hand histories from events like this one often lean on a solid grasp of starting hand strength to know when a marginal holding, like the suited king Kanme held on that decisive flop, is worth representing aggressively rather than folding. Our poker hand rankings guide breaks down exactly where those hands sit relative to premium holdings, which is useful context for understanding why a check-raise with backdoor equity can make sense against the right opponent and stack depth.
What It Means for the Series
With the Main Event now in the books, the Onyx High Roller Series adds another marquee winner to a growing list of champions who have come through Cyprus this year. The series has increasingly become a proving ground where cash game specialists and tournament regulars collide, and results like Kanme’s, built on a willingness to apply pressure rather than wait for premium cards, tend to define how these high roller fields are remembered.
For Kanme, the win caps a run through a brutal final table that included multiple players with significant career earnings of their own. Turning a thin holding into the tournament’s biggest pot, at the moment it mattered most, is the kind of result that separates a deep run from a title, and on this occasion it was enough to make him the newest champion of one of poker’s most talked-about high stakes series.
