Ivelin Kolev's Stunning Short-Stack Comeback Wins WPT Prime Cyprus for $171,600

A Short Stack, a Cold Deck, and a Title

Sometimes the best final-table stories start from the bottom of the counts. At the WPT Prime Cyprus Championship, held at the Chamada Prestige Hotel & Spa, Bulgaria's Ivelin Kolev did exactly that — turning the shortest stack five-handed into a $171,600 title.

Ivelin Kolev went from the shortest stack five-handed to winning the WPT Prime Cyprus Championship, eliminating the final four players for $171,600. That's about as complete a final-table run as you'll see: no coasting into a payout, just outright eliminating everyone left in his path.

How the Final Day Unfolded

The championship wasn't a small-field affair. The championship drew 953 entries across five starting flights from October 15 to 19 and carried a $1 million guarantee. Eight players made it to the livestreamed final day, and Kolev wasn't anywhere near the top of the counts when it started.

Eight players returned for the livestreamed final day, with Kolev sitting fourth behind Tahar on 12,000,000, Andreas Christodoulo on 7,750,000, and Bora Kurtulus on 5,425,000. By the time the field thinned to five, the picture had gotten worse before it got better — El Khoury led with 11,250,000 and Kolev was the shortest stack on 5,500,000, around 18 big blinds.

The turning point came on a classic short-stack cooler setup. A dozen hands later, Kolev picked up pocket aces; Tahar opened with king-ten, Kolev called in the cutoff, Johan Storakers shoved pocket nines, Tahar folded, and the aces held to put Kolev on 11,600,000. From there the dominoes fell quickly, and heads-up against France's Said Tahar lasted only 13 hands before Kolev closed it out.

The Payouts

Kolev earned $171,600 in the $1,100 event, while Said Tahar finished runner-up and got $100,000. Joseph El Khoury rounded out the top three, collecting $74,000 after bowing out in third place. The rest of the final table — Andreas Christodoulo, Johan Storakers, Bora Kurtulus, Sergiu Cornea, and Ismail Yagci — all cashed for five figures, a strong result for a $1,100 buy-in with 953 entries against a $1 million guarantee.

Beyond the money, the win carries real Tour weight: Kolev's victory secured him a seat at the WPT World Championship at Wynn Las Vegas in December, folding this win directly into the season's biggest stop.

What It Means for Players

You don't need a live buy-in to care about this result. WPT Prime events like Cyprus are exactly the kind of mid-stakes festival that online rooms use as satellite fodder — small buy-in qualifiers that turn a few dollars into a flight and a Main Event seat. If you grind those satellite paths on ClubGG, a final table like Kolev's is a useful reminder of two things: stack preservation matters less than decision quality when you're short, and variance at 18 big blinds is part of the game, not a reason to panic-fold your equity away.

It's also a good nudge to look at your own short-stack play. If you're not sure how you perform once you dip under 20 big blinds — whether you're shoving too wide, too tight, or folding spots you should be defending — that's a pattern worth digging into rather than guessing at. Running your sessions through a ClubGG tracker and reviewing hands by stack-depth filters is a far more reliable way to find that leak than trusting your memory of a tough beat three weeks ago. American Hand Converter feeds those hands straight into DriveHUD, so the filtering and graphing work is already done for you.

If you're newer to building that kind of database, the setup guide walks through getting hand histories flowing in under ten minutes. Either way, Kolev's run is a nice case study: the stack size on the clock means nothing until the cards and the decisions catch up to it.