Luca Topazio Wins Inaugural WSOP Circuit Malta Main Event
Topazio turned a 5:1 heads-up lead over Radoslaw Kopec into a €200,000 career-best score at Casino Malta.
Luca Topazio has won the inaugural €1,500 WSOP Circuit Malta Main Event at Casino Malta, beating Radoslaw Kopec heads-up for €200,000 from a field of 879 entries.
The three-day tournament, organized by Texapoker, generated a prize pool of about €1.12 million. Topazio also received a €5,000 package for WSOP Paradise, while the result became the largest recorded cash of his career.
Kopec collected €125,000 as runner-up, having entered the final table as chip leader. As our earlier coverage noted, he had 8.2 million chips at the nine-handed table, ahead of Matteo Ricco’s 6.9 million and Topazio’s 6.7 million.
The final table began with no player below 20 big blinds, and all nine had locked up at least €14,191. Italy supplied four of the nine finalists.
Topazio eliminated Aleksandar Georgiev in fifth place and later knocked out Lucas van den Belt in third for €85,000. Kopec had dispatched Ricco in fourth place for €60,000, but Topazio took a 5:1 advantage into heads-up play after eliminating Van den Belt.
The match ended two hands later, when Topazio made a full house. PokerNews characterized his approach as aggressive, and Topazio said his chip-leading strategy was to put pressure on the table: “My strategy as the chip leader was to make everyone short and to kill everyone.”
The win surpassed Topazio’s previous career-best €190,000 score, earned when he won an Italian Poker Tour Main Event 16 years earlier. He said he was now “more mature” and had adapted his game to get the result.
For Kopec, it was another close call after a runner-up finish at the 2025 WSOP Circuit event in Middelkerke, Belgium. Topazio said he planned to use his new package to travel to The Bahamas for WSOP Paradise, alongside planned appearances at the Battle of Malta later this month and EPT Prague in December.
