Who Will Become the 2023 APPT Cambodia $1,500 Main Event Champion?

Out of a field of 476 entries, only nine players remain for the grand finale of the 2023 PokerStars Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT) Cambodia $1,500 Main Event and return to their seats on the feature stage of the grand ballroom at the five-star NagaWorld Integrated Resort in Phnom Penh at 1 p.m. local time. They are competing for the biggest portion of the $623,322 prize pool with $10,908 locked up so far, but the winner will walk away with $120,300 for the efforts and the golden shard trophy.

Junnie Pamplona leads the way with 3,015,000, closely followed by Ting-Yi "Eric" Tsai (2,960,000) and Jimmy Torres (2,725,000) as the trio atop the leaderboard is separated by a mere ten big blinds.

Pamplona will aim to go all the way and surpass his previous best score from the 2022 WPT Prime $1,100 Main Event right here at NagaWorld when he was part of a three-way deal and collected $106,482.

Final Table Seat Draw

Seat	Player	Country	Chip Count	Big Blinds
1	Eric Tsai	Taiwan	2,960,000	99
2	Evgenii Nekrasov	Russia	1,080,000	36
3	Curtis Lim	Singapore	850,000	28
4	Bien Mai	Vietnam	410,000	14
5	Chao-Ting Cheng	Taiwan	1,825,000	61
6	Kien Tat Heng	Singapore	795,000	27
7	Junnie Pamplona	Philippines	3,015,000	101
8	Hua-Wei Lin	Taiwan	600,000	20
9	Jimmy Torres	Colombia	2,725,000	91

Chao-Ting Cheng is the only player with a middling stack and the other five finalists have between 14 and 36 big blinds at their disposal. However, there are only 07:38 minutes left in level 24 at blinds of 15,000-30,000 and a big blind ante of 30,000.

This puts a lot of pressure on the short stacks Bien Mai (410,000) and Hua-Wei Lin (600,000). Mai has had two runner-up finishes in the last two months, one of which came right here in Phnom Penh in the 2023 WPT Prime Cambodia Main Event for $117,842.

Lin will be railed by her husband and fellow Taiwanese poker pro Yu-Chung "Nevan" Chang, both are known under their moniker "winpokercouple" on social media. Chang himself cashed in 38th place and had previously reached the final table of this very event in 2022, claiming $35,590 for his fourth place finish.

The levels on the final table continue with a duration of 60 minutes each with a break every two levels. As usual, the PokerNews live reporting team will be on the floor from start to finish in the Kingdom of Cambodia until a winner has been crowned.