Fabrod Nazari won the WPT Cyprus Championship this week, topping a 520-entry field in the $3,500 buy-in Main Tour event at the Chamada Prestige Hotel & Casino to secure a $368,900 first-place prize and a $10,400 seat into the WPT World Championship. The result more than tripled Nazari’s recorded lifetime tournament earnings, which stood at just over $100,000 before the win and now sit at $474,991, turning an under-the-radar grinder into a Main Tour champion in a single week.
The 520-entry field built a $2,000,000 prize pool, a strong number for a WPT stop outside the tour’s flagship North American events and a sign of how much traction the World Poker Tour continues to generate in Europe and the Mediterranean. Cyprus has become a increasingly popular stop for the international grinding circuit, and this year’s Championship field reflected that, drawing players from across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia to compete for the biggest prize pool of the week.
A Final Table Spanning Three Continents
The unofficial final table that set up Day 4 was as international as they come. Moldova’s Mihai Trofim arrived as chip leader with 6,225,000, trailed closely by Lebanon’s Chadi Rizk with 5,650,000 and Nazari himself in third with 5,275,000. China’s Weiran Pu, Jordan’s Sami Ayyoub, and Romania’s Sergiu Cornea rounded out the group, and the eventual payouts showed just how competitive that final stretch was. Ayyoub was the first to fall among that group, busting in sixth for $73,000, with Cornea following in fifth for $97,000. Trofim, despite arriving as the outright chip leader, could not convert his overnight advantage into the title and finished fourth for $130,000, while Pu went one better in third for $175,000.
That left Nazari and Rizk to battle it out heads-up, with Rizk ultimately settling for $238,000 as the runner-up. The final hand was a clean, decisive one: Rizk limped in with king-five, Nazari raised with six-five of hearts, and the flop gave Nazari a six-high straight outright. Rizk moved all-in with an open-ended straight draw, a reasonable enough shove given the stack sizes and the pressure of a heads-up battle, but the turn and river both missed, and Nazari’s flopped straight held to seal the title.
From Modest Earnings to a Career-Defining Score
Nazari’s path to the title is exactly the kind of story the WPT’s expanding international schedule is designed to produce. Before this week, his recorded live tournament earnings sat at a modest total, the profile of a player who grinds mid-stakes events without previously breaking through on the biggest stages. The $368,900 score does not just change his bank balance, it changes his career trajectory entirely, and the accompanying $10,400 seat into the WPT World Championship guarantees him another shot at a career-best score against an even deeper and more decorated field.
That kind of leap, from a five-figure career total to a title that alone is worth more than three times his prior earnings combined, is a reminder of why buy-ins in the $3,000 to $5,000 range remain some of the most competitive on the tournament calendar. The fields are large enough to build life-changing prize pools, but the price point is still accessible enough that grinders without seven-figure bankrolls can take their shot, and every so often one of them breaks through in exactly the way Nazari did this week.
The event itself ran across four full days of play, a structure typical of a Main Tour Championship at this buy-in level, with the starting fields whittled down through a series of Day 1 flights before the survivors regrouped for Days 2 and 3 and the unofficial final table set up on the morning of Day 4. That kind of grind, day after day of stack preservation and table changes before a single hand of the actual final table is dealt, is easy to overlook in a recap that focuses on the closing moments, but it is exactly the kind of endurance test that separates a $3,500 Main Tour title from a smaller regional event. Nazari’s straight on the final hand made for a clean, telegenic finish, but getting to that heads-up moment in the first place required surviving three prior days against a field that, by the time it reached Day 4, had already eliminated hundreds of entries.
What the Win Means for the WPT Cyprus Stop
The WPT Cyprus Championship is part of the World Poker Tour’s Season 2026 calendar, and a $2,000,000 prize pool from a 520-entry field at a $3,500 buy-in underscores how far the tour’s international footprint has grown beyond its traditional North American base. Stops like Cyprus give the WPT direct access to a player pool that regularly travels between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia for high-value tournament series, and a diverse final table like this one, with players representing Moldova, Lebanon, China, Jordan, Romania, and Iran, is becoming the norm rather than the exception on the modern Main Tour.
For players following the broader tournament calendar, a win of this size is also a useful case study in how modern buy-in structures work, from the guarantee that shapes the prize pool to the seat packages that now routinely accompany a title. Readers who want to understand payout structures, staking considerations, and how buy-ins translate into guaranteed prize pools can find more detail in our tournament strategy guide. As for Nazari, he now heads into the WPT World Championship not as an unknown grinder chasing a score, but as a reigning Main Tour champion with the game to back it up.
