The World Poker Tour opens WPT Cambodia Passport to the World Championship at NagaWorld in Phnom Penh today, starting a 13-day run of 70 trophy events with $1 million in combined guarantees and a direct route to the season-ending WPT World Championship at Wynn Las Vegas.
The festival runs August 12-24. Most of the schedule sits in the $100 to $500 range, which is why this particular stop has quietly become a fixture on Southeast Asian calendars: it is one of the few WPT-branded festivals where a recreational player can win a trophy without a four-figure buy-in. Satellites are attached to every guaranteed event on the schedule.
Inside the Passport Main Event
The headline tournament plays out August 20-24 for a $1,300 buy-in with $500,000 guaranteed — half of the entire festival’s guarantee sitting in one event. Its winner also collects a WPT World Championship package valued at $10,400, and the satellite structure hands out additional Wynn qualification spots along the way, so the Vegas seat is not locked behind a single result.
That framing explains the name. Instead of selling Phnom Penh as a standalone festival, WPT is running it as a feeder into its Las Vegas finale, where a $10,400 package is worth roughly eight times the Main Event buy-in that produced it. For players based in Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Kuala Lumpur or Manila, a short-haul flight and a $1,300 entry is a considerably cheaper on-ramp to a WPT World Championship seat than qualifying at home.
Seventy Trophies in Thirteen Days
Seventy events in under two weeks means five-plus trophies handed out on an average day, spread across the low buy-in bracket rather than concentrated at the top. High Roller entrants get complimentary accommodation, there is VIP lounge access for the bigger events, and cash games run alongside the tournament schedule for the full 13 days — relevant here, because NagaWorld’s cash tables are one of the reasons players extend their trips rather than fly home after busting.
The low end of the schedule is also where the field size will come from. A $100 event in Phnom Penh draws locals, expats and the Vietnamese and Chinese regulars who treat NagaWorld as a home game, and those players tend to fire multiple bullets across a fortnight rather than one entry at one event.
The Room and the Number to Beat
NagaWorld carries 55 poker tables, 1,658 suites and deluxe rooms, more than 20 food and beverage outlets, two spas and the 2,000-seat NABA Theatre, with hotel rooms from $55 a night. That scale is the practical argument for the venue: the poker room, the beds and the food are in one building, which matters when a festival asks players to stay for 13 days.
The benchmark is 2024, when WPT Cambodia’s Main Event drew 913 entries for a $1,040,592 prize pool. Sha Chengchun won it for $175,542 plus his World Championship seat, and that prize pool doubled the guarantee attached to the same event this year. Whether the 2026 field clears 913 is the number worth watching when the Main Event kicks off on August 20 — and with $500,000 guaranteed against a $1,300 buy-in, roughly 430 entries covers it.