Liverpool’s Paul Worsley had $2,098 in recorded live tournament cashes when he paid £200 to enter the 2025 Grosvenor Goliath. He left with £316,640. The final hand was as ordinary as they come: Thomas Clack moved all in from the button with nine-seven of spades, and Worsley called from the big blind with ten-nine of clubs. A nine on the flop gave both players a pair, and a ten on the river gave Worsley two pair and the title.
The same week, Antonio Vargas sealed an MSPT title in the Colorado mountains, and in Bangkok, India’s Nikhil Kedia was one of nine players still chasing the first World Poker Tour title decided under Thailand’s new rules.
A record Goliath in Coventry
The Goliath is the Grosvenor Poker festival built around a low buy-in and a huge field, and the 2025 edition broke its own attendance record. It drew 12,961 entries at £200 (listed as £160 plus a £40 fee), and the published prize pool came to £1,970,070. PokerNews counted it as the 16th largest live poker tournament ever held.
Fields that large are a different game from the high-roller events that make most headlines. You can play well for days and still need to survive dozens of all-in spots, and the last table is usually full of players who have never been that deep in anything. Worsley fit the profile exactly. Before the Goliath his entire recorded live tournament history was worth about two thousand dollars. One win later, his lifetime cashes had passed $400,000.
Clack, the runner-up, took £217,500, itself a life-changing score from a £200 entry. If you play your local room’s weekend tournament and have wondered what the structure of a 13,000-player event looks like from the inside, it is the same game with a lot more blind levels and a lot more patience.
Vargas takes the Colorado Gold Card
In Black Hawk, Colorado, the Major Series of Poker: The Tour (MSPT) held its Season 16 Colorado Poker State Championship at Bally’s Casino. The $1,110 Main Event drew 875 entries across three starting flights (167, 284 and 424 players) and built a prize pool of $847,250.
Antonio Vargas began the final day as chip leader and finished it as champion after 12 hours of play. Once Rich Dixon went out in third, flopping trip kings against Vargas’s flush with eight-six of spades, the last two players agreed a deal. Vargas took $141,255 and Zach Whitney $120,109. The title came with 1,800 MSPT Player of the Year points and an MSPT Gold Card.
It had been a long time coming.
“I came very close in this event last year,” Vargas said afterward, and in January 2025 he had also finished third in the MSPT Main Event at the same casino.
Black Hawk’s habit of headline winners
Bally’s in Black Hawk has become one of the MSPT’s busiest stops, and its winners make a decent trivia list. The January 2025 Main Event that Vargas finished third in was won by Faraz Jaka, the well-known tournament pro and coach, for about $127,000; it was his first cash of the year. A year before that, in January 2024, the same room’s Main Event went to Mo Nuwwarah, a former PokerNews reporter, for $155,189.
That mix of traveling professionals, poker media figures and local regulars is typical of the MSPT. Its state championships carry four-figure buy-ins, can draw fields close to a thousand, as Colorado’s did, and hand the winner a trophy that regional players chase for years. Anyone looking for poker near them in the American interior will find that regional tours of this kind are where most of the serious tournament action sits.
Swipe the table
| Event | Winner | Field | First prize |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grosvenor Goliath, £200 | Paul Worsley | 12,961 | £316,640 |
| MSPT Colorado, $1,110 | Antonio Vargas | 875 | $141,255 (deal) |
| WPT Prime Thailand | Haoran Sun | 2,337 | 11,477,000 THB |
Kedia’s run in Bangkok
The third result of the week came from a tournament that had only become legal a few days earlier. Thailand’s Interior Ministry lifted the country’s 1958 poker restrictions on July 30, 2025, and the WPT Prime Thailand Exhibition opened at UOB Live in Bangkok the next day, running through August 5. It drew 2,337 entries across four starting days and a prize pool of 75,488,000 baht, about $2.3 million, paid out in travel funds.
WPT Prime is the World Poker Tour’s regional series, with lower buy-ins than its flagship Main Tour events, and the Bangkok stop drew a strongly Asian field. Nikhil Kedia of India made the final table. Indian players had already been a strong presence on the WPT’s Asian stops that year, winning titles at the WPT Championship festival in Cambodia in February 2025.
Kedia’s hunt for the title ended in ninth place, worth 1,142,000 baht. The rest of the final table came from China, Canada, South Korea, Singapore, Japan, Denmark and Israel. China’s Haoran Sun won 11,477,000 baht, about $353,500, plus a $10,400 seat in the 2025 WPT World Championship at Wynn Las Vegas. Philipp Zukernik of Canada was second for 7,620,000 baht.
Three ways into the money
Put the three results side by side and you have a fair picture of where live poker money sits for most players. The Goliath is the pure mass-field model: a small buy-in, an enormous field and a top prize that dwarfs the entry. The MSPT runs regional state championships in American casinos at a four-figure buy-in, where local regulars and traveling pros meet. The WPT Prime series sits between the two, with international fields at stops in several countries.
None of the three is a high-roller event, and none of the winners was a household name before that week. For a breakdown of what tournament fees and rake actually take from fields like these, see this comparison of rake structures; for more results from the circuit, the tournament news desk collects them.
Thailand’s legal window turned out to be brief. The order that made the Bangkok event possible was revoked on October 22, 2025, less than three months after Kedia and the rest of the final table had played for the title at UOB Live.