Moussa Ahmad’s million-dollar hand was eight-three of clubs. Heads-up against Canada’s Jamil Wakil in the first event of the Onyx Super High Roller Series in Cyprus, he was up against pocket tens, and the river brought the club he needed for a flush. The win was worth $1,000,000, the first seven-figure score of the Lebanese player’s career.
On the other side of the Atlantic, in the same month of August 2025, the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open in Florida was handing out its own big titles: the $5,300 Championship to Britain’s Jake Cody and the $25,500 High Roller to Shannon Shorr.
Four days in Cyprus
The Onyx Super High Roller Series ran from August 9 to 21, 2025, at the Onyx Club in Kyrenia, on the north coast of Cyprus. Its opener was a $10,400 GG Million$ no-limit hold’em tournament with a $5 million guarantee. It drew 510 entries across two starting flights, generating a prize pool of $4,794,000, and took four days to play down to a winner on August 12.
The final table was as international as the series. Behind the top three came Bulgaria’s Krasimir Yankov in fourth for $292,000, China’s Peng Chen in fifth for $212,000, Israel’s Ohad Geiger in sixth for $160,000 and Turkey’s Orhan Ates in seventh for $127,000. Two more Chinese players, Weiran Pu and Hao Tian, finished eighth and ninth.
Ahmad’s win earned him 2,100 Card Player Player of the Year points, his first score to count in that race, and was enough on its own to lift him toward the top 100 of the 2025 standings. It also put him top of the Onyx Player of the Series leaderboard, where the eventual winner was promised a $110,000 package to Triton Poker’s stop in Jeju. Wakil, who had never had a bigger cash, took $650,000 for second. Austria’s Stefan Kiwisch finished third for $415,000.
Swipe the table
| Place | Player | Prize |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Moussa Ahmad (Lebanon) | $1,000,000 |
| 2 | Jamil Wakil (Canada) | $650,000 |
| 3 | Stefan Kiwisch (Austria) | $415,000 |
The field around them was full of familiar names. Christopher Puetz went out in 11th and Boris Kolev in 14th. Michael Mizrachi, a few weeks removed from winning the 2025 WSOP Main Event, cashed in 38th. You can read more about his summer in this profile of Michael Mizrachi.
Cody’s Hollywood comeback
The SHRPO Championship at Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood drew 889 entries at $5,300 each, creating a prize pool of $4,311,650. Three players were left when the talk turned to a deal: Jake Cody, Jeremy Wien and Stephen Song. They agreed a three-way deal, and Cody went on to take the title and $510,850. Wien received $450,000 and Song $438,000.
Andjelko Andrejevic finished fourth for $240,000. Chris Hunichen went out in ninth for $65,000.
Fifteen years after the Triple Crown
For Cody, the win added a fresh chapter to a résumé that was already complete in one sense. Born in Rochdale, England, in 1988, he won the €5,000 EPT Deauville Main Event in January 2010, beating 768 runners for €857,000. In August of the same year he won the £5,000 WPT London event, beating Sweden’s Nichlas Mattsson heads-up for £273,783. On June 4, 2011, he beat Yevgeniy Timoshenko to win the WSOP $25,000 Heads-Up Championship for $851,192.
That sequence, inside roughly 17 months, made him one of the few players to hold the so-called Triple Crown of an EPT title, a WPT title and a WSOP bracelet. He was named European Poker Player of the Year for 2010. The SHRPO trophy is not part of that set, but it showed the Rochdale pro still beating fields of close to 900 players fifteen years after his first big title.
Shorr’s high roller
The series’ most expensive event, the $25,500 High Roller, went to Shannon Shorr, who agreed a heads-up deal with Cherish Andrews and was credited with $352,873 for the win.
Shorr has been on the tournament circuit for most of his adult life. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1985, he played abroad before he turned 21 and later finished a civil engineering degree at the University of Alabama in 2010. The Global Poker Index ranked him seventh on its list of players of the decade in 2013, and his live tournament earnings run well into eight figures. His Main Event record includes a 39th-place finish at the 2018 WSOP, and he has made more than a dozen WSOP final tables over his career.
He also has history in Hollywood. At the 2021 SHRPO he won the $2,650 no-limit hold’em event for $186,261, again after a three-way deal, and spoke afterward about working on his game during the pandemic with a child on the way.
The rest of the SHRPO
The August 2025 SHRPO ran 63 events with buy-ins from $200 to $25,500 and produced more than $14.3 million in combined prize pools. Landon Tice, the high-stakes cash game and tournament regular, won the $3,000 Deep Stack for $124,023.
Swipe the table
| Event | Winner | Prize |
|---|---|---|
| $5,300 Championship | Jake Cody | $510,850 (deal) |
| $25,500 High Roller | Shannon Shorr | $352,873 (deal) |
| $3,000 Deep Stack | Landon Tice | $124,023 |
If you follow the series, you will notice that deals decided both of its biggest events. That is routine at the end of large tournaments, where the gap between pay jumps is wide and the blinds are high enough that a single all-in can swing hundreds of thousands of dollars. For more tournament results, the news desk collects them, and the poker terms glossary covers words like chop and deal.
The 2025 Championship field was smaller than the 2021 edition, which drew 1,180 players at $5,250 and paid Haiti’s Dimitri Vorbe, a recreational player, $929,365 for the title after he beat AP Louis Garza heads-up. Vorbe said at the time that the trophy meant more to him than the money, because he was not a professional. Four years on, the same trophy went to a Triple Crown winner who has made the game his career.