Outside Source
UFC fighter Antonio Trocoli won big in the 2025 World Series of Poker’s Colossus tournament earlier this week, earning $122,330 after a buy-in of just $500 among a field of 16,300 players. Trocoli said “it was a very difficult tournament” that required a lot of patience, but the private classes he’s had with former WSOP winners paid off.
“That was the biggest hit of my career,” Trocoli told MMA Fighting. “I’ve had other prizes before in Brazilian real, like R$48,000 (approx. $8,600 USD), but not that much in dollars, right? Especially in the Colossus, the biggest field in WSOP. … Who doesn’t want to turn $500 into $500,000? This tournament pays a lot for the value [of the buy-in]. I had the dream and made it to the final.. It was incredible. There are many Brazilians playing this for a long time and never made it to the final table at the Colossus. It’s a historic feat.”
Trocoli’s girlfriend Mackenzie Dern, a top-ranked strawweight in the UFC, was also in the tournament. She started enjoying poker watching Trocoli play online, and has had success in celebrity tournaments before, but lost early this time.
“I have to be more serious, like he does,” Dern told MMA Fighting. “He’s all focused in there, listening to his music, glasses. I go in there to win, but not that serious. He’s much more serious than I am.”
“She’s more loose in there,” Trocoli said. “You know, she’s a top 5 in the UFC, I’m not, so her money is 10 times higher [laughs]. I go in there with short money so I have to hold tight.”
Colossus paid a total of $542,540 to the winner, Courtenay Williams. Trocoli now focuses on entering the Millionaire Maker, a WSOP tournament scheduled for June 18. With a buy-in of $1,500, it pays the winner over $2 million—Trocoli will earn around $600,000 if he also finishes sixth in that tournament, for example.
Trocoli is getting better as a poker player, but that doesn’t mean he’s walking away from the UFC. The 34-year-old is 0-2 in the promotion with losses to Shara Magomedov—a match he took on less than a week’s notice—and Tresean Gore, and was forced out of a middleweight clash with Mansur Abdul-Malik this past February due to a back injury.
He hopes to be back inside the octagon in August, but sees a future where he’s a poker player—and Navy seal—after he’s done fighting.
“It doesn’t add up. When you compare the two, getting punched in the face or making money sitting on a chair?” Trocoli said. “I won’t stop training because I love staying in shape, I like to feel fine, but making money in a few hours, brother, there’s no comparison. We fight because we like it. Look, we fight 15 or 16 times in Brazil to make R$500, sometimes not even make anything, just to get to the UFC and start making something. We’re in this sport because we love this shit. We’re crazy, and we do love this.
“MMA is good, but you have to stop your life for two months and prepare to fight and break yourself for something that isn’t even that much. When you win a bonus, cool, but I don’t know. Today I don’t have that… It’s not because I won [at WSOP] or because I got to such a high prize, but I was already thinking about this. … I’m not that excited [about MMA] anymore. I had this injury and my back is kind of bad, fragile. I still want to be successful at both [MMA and poker] simultaneously. But I also have the desire to do only poker because like it or not, I’ve made more money in poker than fighting. It’s stupid if I don’t choose to live off poker after fighting.”
This article first appeared at MMA Fighting – All Posts
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