Italian grinder Luca Topazio claimed the first WSOP Circuit ring ever awarded in Malta, topping a field of 879 entries in the €1,500 Main Event at Casino Malta for €200,000 and a €5,000 WSOP Paradise package. The result, by far the biggest of Topazio’s career, capped a historic debut stop for the WSOP Circuit Malta series and underlined just how far the WSOP’s international ring circuit has expanded in 2026.
A Record Crowd for Casino Malta
The Main Event, run in partnership between the WSOP Circuit and tournament operator Texapoker, drew 879 entries across multiple starting flights, building a prize pool of €1,115,451. That turnout made the event the largest WSOP-branded tournament ever staged on the island, and it comfortably covered the guarantee organizers had set for the inaugural stop. Players from across Europe traveled in for the chance to pick up a ring that, until this month, simply did not exist in the WSOP Circuit’s map of countries.
Three days of play whittled the field down to a final table stacked with players from four different countries, a reminder of how the Mediterranean has become a magnet for the European tournament calendar outside the traditional stops in Barcelona, London and Prague.
Topazio Grinds Down the Field
Topazio described his approach at the final table as deliberately aggressive, saying he wanted to “make everyone short and to kill everyone” rather than wait for premium holdings. That style paid off as he worked through a final table that included fellow Italian Matteo Ricco, Dutch pro Lucas van den Belt and Bulgaria’s Aleksandar Georgiev before eventually closing out heads-up play against Poland’s Radoslaw Kopec.
“I am more mature now. I adapted my game to get this result,” Topazio said afterward, reflecting on a career that stretches back well over a decade. His last tournament score of this size came 16 years earlier, when he won an Italian Poker Tour Main Event for €190,000, meaning Sunday’s title did not just add another line to his résumé, it became the largest cash of his life. Topazio had also shown recent form with an 11th-place finish in the latest EPT Barcelona Mystery Bounty, a sign that his deep run in Malta was no fluke.
How the Money Broke Down
Kopec’s runner-up finish was worth €125,000, while Van den Belt took third for €85,000. Ricco’s run ended in fourth for €60,000, and Georgiev rounded out the top five with €43,000. The spread of payouts, with six figures changing hands among the top three alone, reflects how deep the prize pool ran once the field cracked 850 entries, far beyond what organizers had projected when the stop was first announced.
Why the First Malta Ring Matters
WSOP Circuit rings are the stepping stone beneath WSOP bracelets, awarded at regional stops around the world that feed into the season-ending Tournament of Champions and the WSOP Paradise festival in the Bahamas, the destination Topazio has now punched his ticket to. Malta’s addition to that rotation, alongside the Circuit’s newly announced stop in Madrid, shows WSOP organizers are actively chasing growth in markets where live poker tourism is rising but a WSOP-branded ring had never been on offer. Casino Malta, already a fixture on the European tournament trail thanks to its Battle of Malta festival, now adds a WSOP ring event to its calendar, likely cementing an annual return date.
For players still building toward their first major cash, understanding how a multi-day tournament structure like this one plays out, from early-stage stack preservation to final-table aggression, is part of the broader skill set covered in Poker Pro Academy’s WSOP guide. It breaks down how these ring and bracelet events are structured.
What Comes Next
With his WSOP Paradise package secured, Topazio will have the chance to test himself against a much deeper international field at the Bahamas festival later in the WSOP calendar, typically one of the richest overseas stops of the year. For the WSOP Circuit itself, Malta’s debut adds more momentum to an international expansion that already includes the brand’s first-ever Spanish stop in Madrid, suggesting more “first-ever” rings could be up for grabs in new countries before the year is out. Whether Topazio returns to defend his title or simply cashes his bracelet-adjacent hardware and moves on, Sunday’s final table gave Casino Malta a result it can promote for years: the first WSOP ring winner the island has ever produced.
A Final Table Built on Patience
What stood out about Topazio’s run was less the size of any single pot and more the consistency of his pressure across three days of play. Building toward a final table against players from four different countries requires surviving multiple stack swings without a single marquee elimination to lean on, and Topazio’s own description of his strategy, grinding opponents down rather than hunting for one big cooler, matches the profile of a player who had already lived through a long career of final tables before this one. The 16-year gap since his previous largest score is itself a reminder of how unevenly results can be distributed even for a skilled, experienced grinder, and why a single deep run, like his recent 11th-place finish at EPT Barcelona, can sometimes be the signal that a much bigger result is close behind. Malta’s organizers will no doubt be hoping his story, an experienced regular finally breaking through for a career-best score on home-continent soil, helps sell next year’s return stop to an even larger field.
