Three players were left in the $10,000 GGMillion$ Championship at WSOP Paradise in December 2024 when Johannes Straver turned a straight. The player it eliminated was Fabian Niederreiter, a German most of the Bahamas field had never heard of a few years earlier. Third place paid $479,890, the largest score of his career, from a 532-entry field and a $5.32 million prize pool. Straver took the bracelet and $807,430; Spain’s Jon Vallinas was second; Phil Hellmuth went out eighth.
WSOP Paradise is the December festival the World Series of Poker runs in the Bahamas with GGPoker, first held in 2023, and its big-guarantee events draw a mix of high-stakes regulars and online qualifiers. The GGMillion$ Championship is one of its marquee no-limit hold’em tournaments. A nine-handed final table with Hellmuth on it is about as public as tournament poker gets, and the run put Niederreiter’s name in front of an audience well beyond the German-speaking circuit.
For a player who had started out in low-stakes sit-and-gos, it was the kind of final table he used to watch on a stream.
Bavaria, maths and a laptop
Niederreiter was born and raised in Bavaria in southern Germany. At school he was the student who liked numbers, and outside school it was sport that kept him busy, not cards. He found poker the way many players of his generation did: on television in high school. At 18 he started following the game through PokerNews coverage and Twitch streams and began playing low-stakes sit-and-gos.
He finished school and took a degree in business administration while poker stayed on the side. The turning point came during the pandemic-era boom in online play, when two tournament results brought in about $18,000 combined. That money paid for a move to Vienna and a full-time attempt at the game. He plays online as Taurus.
If you learned the game the same way, at micro stakes with a stream open in another tab, his path will look familiar up to that point. Few players who start there get as far as the next part.
The EPT years
The European Poker Tour became his regular circuit. At EPT Paris in February 2023 he reached a side-event final table, and he was back in Paris a year later with a memorable start in the FPS Main Event. He finished Day 1a as chip leader, helped by one hand that PokerNews picked out in its hands of the week: on a board of jack, five, four, nine, four, he held pocket fours for quads, bet 65,000 on the river, and was called by an opponent with ace-ten trying to catch a bluff.
The cashes kept coming through 2025. He finished ninth in a €2,700 event at EPT Malta in October and cashed in the €10,300 event at EPT Barcelona in August. In February 2026 he was back at EPT Paris, reaching the final day of the €1,100 Single Re-Entry event, a 710-entry field, with the strongest stack among the German-speaking players left.
Coaching and the Pokercode connection
Away from the tables, Niederreiter coaches at Pokercode, the training site associated with Fedor Holz, and works closely with Holz himself. He was one of the featured players in the site’s Grindhouse 3 series.
Coaching at that level means spending as many hours on study software as at the tables. If you want to see what that study looks like in practice, this site’s guide to poker solvers for beginners covers the software most tournament coaches start students on, and the piece on big and short stack play in early levels deals with the stack-depth decisions that decide a deep run.
2025 to 2026: from Malta to Montenegro
His recent run spans the major circuits. It began in Las Vegas in June 2025, when he finished seventh in the $3,000 No-Limit Hold’em Six Max at the World Series of Poker for $74,146. Six-handed tables put a premium on the aggressive, study-heavy style that solver-trained players bring, with more hands played per orbit and far fewer spots to wait for a premium holding. A seventh place in a $3,000 field at the Horseshoe and Paris Las Vegas was a strong first marker for the summer.
Swipe the table
| Date | Event | Finish | Prize |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 2024 | WSOP Paradise $10K GGMillion$ | 3rd | $479,890 |
| Jun 2025 | WSOP $3,000 NLH Six Max | 7th | $74,146 |
| Oct 2025 | EPT Malta €2,700 NLH | 9th | $34,585 |
| Dec 2025 | WPT Rock ‘n’ Roll Poker Open $1,100 Triple Stack | 3rd | $14,100 |
| May 2026 | Triton Montenegro $25K Golden Decade | 6th | $195,000 |
| Jul 2026 | WSOP $800 NLH | 8th | $63,000 |
The Montenegro result was the one that moved him into a new tier. It was his first Triton Poker Series event, and he went deep in a field of the circuit’s regular high rollers. He finished sixth when his king-four of spades ran into Ding Biao’s king-queen and the board brought four hearts, giving Ding a flush. Daniel Dvoress won the event for $849,000, with Dejan Kaladjurdjevic second and Paul Phua third.
A few weeks later he was in Las Vegas for the 2026 World Series of Poker, where he made the final table of the $800 Summer Celebration no-limit hold’em event and finished eighth for $63,000. WSOP records still show him without a bracelet.
Where the numbers stand
As of September 2026, The Hendon Mob listed about $1.47 million in live tournament earnings for Niederreiter, with his most recent recorded cash in late August. The Global Poker Index has ranked him inside Germany’s top 15. Card Player’s results database, which tracks a slightly different set of events, records 65 cashes.
Those totals still do not include an outright win at a major festival. His three biggest live scores are a third, a sixth and an eighth, and his EPT record so far is a string of final tables and final days without the last hand going his way.