In February 2025, the World Poker Tour ran a 19-day festival at NagaWorld in Phnom Penh, the longest it had ever staged in Asia. Its $3,500 WPT Cambodia Championship carried a $1.5 million guarantee, half a million more than the year before. Three months later PokerStars brought the Asia Pacific Poker Tour to the same building. For a country where its own citizens are not allowed to gamble, Cambodia has become a busy stop on the international poker calendar.
Who can play: foreigners only
The first thing to know is the rule at the door.
Cambodia’s casinos are open to foreign passport holders only. Cambodian nationals have been barred from casino gambling for decades, and the Law on the Management of Integrated Resorts and Commercial Gaming, passed in 2020, kept that ban in place while setting up a new framework for licensing the industry.
The country also outlawed online gambling in 2019. The ban was aimed at the hundreds of online operations, many of them Chinese-run, that had sprung up in Sihanoukville and elsewhere, and it reshaped the gambling map of the country almost overnight.
What this means for you as a visitor: bring your passport, expect an identity check at the entrance, and be aware that the people you play against will be tourists, expatriates and traveling professionals. This is a general description as of mid-2026, not legal advice, and the rules for visitors can change.
NagaWorld, Phnom Penh
NagaWorld sits on the riverfront in central Phnom Penh. It is run by NagaCorp, a company listed in Hong Kong, which holds a long-term licence giving it exclusive casino rights in a wide area around the capital. That exclusivity is the main reason poker in Phnom Penh has a single center of gravity: there is no casino down the road competing for the same players.
The poker room runs No-Limit Hold’em cash games daily, with stakes from small games up to higher blinds when the high-stakes regulars are in town. Pot-Limit Omaha and short-deck games can appear as well. It depends on who is playing. Stakes and game selection change with the season, so check the room’s current schedule before you plan a trip around a particular game.
The festivals are what put NagaWorld on the map. The World Poker Tour held its first WPT Cambodia in 2024 and returned in February 2025 with a larger schedule that ran from February 6 to 24, adding a $1,100 WPT Prime Cambodia event with a $750,000 guarantee. The full schedule ran more than 60 tournaments and carried over $3 million in guarantees. In May 2025, PokerStars’ APPT Cambodia used the same room.
The festivals draw a field typical of Asian poker: players from China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines, alongside Western pros on an Asian swing. Several of the best players in the region are profiled in the site’s piece on the top Asian poker players.
Sihanoukville, Poipet and Bavet
Outside the capital, the picture is less stable. Sihanoukville, on the southern coast, went through an extraordinary boom in the late 2010s as casinos and online gambling operations opened along with hotels and condominiums, many funded by Chinese investors. When the online ban arrived in 2019, a large share of that business left. Construction stopped. Many venues closed, and the city’s casino scene has been rebuilding ever since.
Poker in Sihanoukville has come and gone with that cycle. Some casinos have dealt games and hosted series; others have opened and closed within a few years. If you plan to play there, confirm with the venue directly shortly before you go, because a listing from a year ago may no longer be accurate.
Poipet, on the Thai border, and Bavet, on the Vietnamese border, are casino towns built for visitors from the neighbouring countries, where casino gambling is restricted. They have hosted poker events over the years, but poker is a sideline to table games and slots there, and regular daily games are not something to count on.
What playing there is like
Games in Cambodia are played in U.S. dollars, which circulate alongside the Cambodian riel. Rake and fees vary by venue and game type, and in some rooms they run higher than a player from Las Vegas or Europe may be used to. If you are comparing costs, the general principles in the site’s guide to rake structures apply to live rooms too: look at the percentage, the cap, and whether there is a time charge instead.
The pace of the game can also surprise visitors. Asian cash games are often described as featuring larger preflop raises and more multi-way pots than a typical American $1/$3 game, and short deck, which is rare in most of the U.S., has a following among the region’s high-stakes players. Short deck rearranges some of the standard hand values, so the site’s poker hand rankings guide is a useful starting point before you learn what changes.
Cambodia within the Asian circuit
Cambodia’s role on the regional calendar comes from what its neighbours do not allow. Casino gambling is tightly restricted in Thailand, and the casinos behind poker in Vietnam are open mainly to foreigners, so Phnom Penh is one of the few places in mainland Southeast Asia where a large international festival can run.
The tours have taken note. After two WPT festivals and an APPT stop at NagaWorld by mid-2025, Phnom Penh sits alongside Manila, Macau and Taipei on the Asian poker map. Whether a second room in the capital or a revived Sihanoukville scene will ever challenge NagaWorld depends on licensing decisions that, as of mid-2026, had not been made public.