The final hand took one card to decide and two players to pay for it. Three-handed at Olympic Park Casino in Tallinn on August 3, 2025, Krzysztof Chmielowski moved in with pocket queens, Igor Pihela Sr. called with ace-six, and Jenny Westerlund called both with ace-jack. The flop came three diamonds, 2-9-3, giving nobody a flush. The turn was the ace of spades.
That card did most of the work. Chmielowski’s queens were now behind two aces, and Westerlund’s jack outkicked Pihela’s six. The five of hearts on the river changed nothing. In one pot, the WSOP Circuit Tallinn Main Event went from three players to one, and Westerlund, a Swedish player whose previous career earnings sat at roughly $88,000, collected €200,200 and the gold ring.
“The ring was most important,” she said afterwards, as reported by PokerNews. “The money is amazing, but the ring is most important.”
The field and the money
The €1,500 No-Limit Hold’em Main Event was the flagship of a festival that ran from July 25 to August 3 at Olympic Park Casino and the Hilton Tallinn Park hotel, hosted with Estonian operator OlyBet. The organisers put a €1 million guarantee on the prize pool and spread the entries over five starting flights between July 29 and July 31.
The tournament cleared the guarantee. It recorded 888 entries, 514 of them first bullets and 374 re-entries, and built a prize pool of €1,138,860. A year earlier, Lithuanian professional Aurimas Stanevicius had won the 2024 edition for €167,900 after a heads-up deal, in a field that the organisers counted at 1,130 entrants.
The two editions show how a Circuit field is built. A €1,500 buy-in sits in the range many regular players in the Baltic and Nordic countries can afford, and re-entries let a player who busts an early flight come back the next day. The result is a field drawn from across the region: the final nine in 2025 came from eight different countries, with Finland the only one represented twice. Estonia had one player left, Igor Pihela Sr., who reached the last three and went out on the final hand.
Westerlund’s prize also came with a $5,000 Ticket to Paradise package, the WSOP’s December trip to its Paradise festival in the Bahamas. The final table paid out as follows.
Swipe the table
| Place | Player | Country | Prize |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jenny Westerlund | Sweden | €200,200 |
| 2 | Krzysztof Chmielowski | Poland | €128,500 |
| 3 | Igor Pihela Sr. | Estonia | €90,200 |
| 4 | Martin Surovec | Czech Republic | €62,500 |
| 5 | Elias Vääräniemi | Finland | €46,000 |
| 6 | David Vinaya | Norway | €33,100 |
| 7 | Jari-Pekka Juhola | Finland | €25,060 |
| 8 | Stephen Groom | England | €19,500 |
| 9 | Karolis Kutkauskas | Lithuania | €14,200 |
How the final table broke
Martin Surovec of the Czech Republic came into the last day with the chip lead, 7,715,000 at 77 big blinds. The first two eliminations both came on premium hands running into bigger ones: Karolis Kutkauskas lost pocket jacks to Jari-Pekka Juhola’s pocket aces, and Stephen Groom’s ace-king ran into Surovec’s pocket kings.
Juhola went out in seventh against Pihela’s pocket fours. David Vinaya, who would win the festival’s €4,800 No-Limit Hold’em ring a little later, fell in sixth with ten-nine suited against Chmielowski’s king-queen. Chmielowski then won a coin flip with king-jack against Elias Vääräniemi’s pocket fours to send the second Finn home in fifth.
The hand that moved Westerlund in front of the leader came four-handed. Surovec got his chips in with ace-ten and Westerlund held ace-nine suited in spades, a dominated hand that came from behind on the run-out and sent the overnight chip leader out in fourth. Three players were left, and the next hand was the last.
If you follow tournament reporting, you will notice how seldom a major event closes on a double knockout. Most finals still need a heads-up match, or end in a deal like the one in Tallinn a year earlier. This one ended on the first hand of three-handed play, and the chips never had to be counted twice. For the vocabulary behind phrases like “outkicked” and “dominated”, the site’s glossary of poker terms covers them, and the hand rankings guide explains why a pair of aces with a jack beats the same pair with a six.
A first for the Tallinn stop
Westerlund became the first woman to win the WSOP Circuit Main Event in Tallinn, and one of only a handful of women to win a Main Event anywhere on the global Circuit. Her record before the summer was regional. Her best previous cash was a fourth-place finish in the Nordic Masters of Poker Main Event in Stockholm in 2024, worth $42,451, and she had won ladies’ tournaments in Tallinn and in Slovakia.
The Tallinn win multiplied her lifetime tournament earnings several times over in one night. It also gave her the one thing she said mattered more than the cash. WSOP Circuit rings are awarded only for official ring events, and at each stop the Main Event ring is the one the series is named around.
Eleven rings across ten days
The Main Event was one of 11 ring events decided over the festival, according to PokerNews’ results round-up. Nordic players took most of them. Simon Persson of Sweden won the Mini Main Event, Drea Karlsen of Norway took the women-only Queens event, and Finland collected three rings: Toni Niinivaara in a No-Limit Hold’em event, Mathias Siljander in Pot-Limit Omaha and Jarkko Suokas in the inaugural Sviten Special. Andria Gogelidze of Georgia won the first Pot-Limit Omaha ring of the series.
Siljander’s ring carried a second milestone: it took his career tournament earnings past $1 million. Krzysztof Budka of Poland won the 8-Game ring, Fabian Bartuschk of Germany the Mystery Bounty and Enrique Sanchez of Spain the closing No-Limit Hold’em event. More results from the Circuit and the main WSOP schedule are collected on the tournament news desk.
Three weeks after the final hand, the women’s series Queens of Tallinn was scheduled to return to the city, from August 21 to 24, 2025.