In 1988 Johnny Chan won the World Series of Poker Main Event for the second year running, beating Erik Seidel heads-up in the hand later shown in the film Rounders. No one has won back-to-back Main Events since. Chan’s two titles are the starting point for any list of Asian poker players, and they came decades before a tournament circuit built around Asia even existed.
That circuit exists now. Triton Poker, founded by Malaysian businessmen, runs the most expensive tournaments in the game, and players from Hong Kong, mainland China and Malaysia sit at its final tables next to the best professionals from Europe and the United States.
The six below are a mix of both eras.
Swipe the table
| Player | Background | Known for |
|---|---|---|
| Johnny Chan | Born in Guangzhou, raised in the US | WSOP Main Event 1987, 1988; ten bracelets |
| Scotty Nguyen | Born in Vietnam, Las Vegas pro | WSOP Main Event 1998 |
| Elton Tsang | Hong Kong | 2016 Big One for One Drop, Monte Carlo |
| Aaron Zang | China | 2019 Triton Million, London |
| Danny Tang | Hong Kong | Long-time Triton high roller |
| Paul Phua | Malaysia | Triton co-founder, high-stakes cash games |
Johnny Chan
Chan was born in 1957 in Guangzhou and grew up in Houston after his family emigrated. He moved to Las Vegas young and built his reputation in cash games before the tournament titles arrived.
Beyond the 1987 and 1988 wins, he reached the heads-up stage again in 1989 and lost to a 24-year-old Phil Hellmuth. A third straight title would have been unthinkable then and remains so now, when Main Event fields run into the thousands. Chan finished his bracelet count at ten, the tenth coming in 2005, and he entered the Poker Hall of Fame in 2002.
He was nicknamed “The Orient Express”, a name of its time. Players who learned the game in the 2000s often know him first as the champion Matt Damon’s character sits down against in Rounders.
Scotty Nguyen
Nguyen left Vietnam as a teenager, worked as a Las Vegas dealer and won the 1998 Main Event with a famous line to Kevin McBride: “You call, it’s gonna be all over, baby.” He added a fifth bracelet at the 2008 $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. Championship and went into the Hall of Fame in 2013. His full story is in the profile of Scotty Nguyen, the Prince of Poker.
He was not the only Vietnamese-born star of his era. Men “The Master” Nguyen, no relation, was among the most prolific bracelet winners of the 1990s and 2000s, and the Vietnamese-American poker community that grew around both men later produced players such as JC Tran. The game has since taken root in Vietnam itself, as the guide to poker rooms in Vietnam shows.
Elton Tsang
Tsang was little known in tournament poker when he entered the 2016 Big One for One Drop in Monte Carlo, a €1,000,000 buy-in event with a portion of every entry going to the One Drop water charity. He won it, and the first prize was €11,111,111.
The result put a Hong Kong businessman at the top of a field built for the richest players in the game, and it showed how the economics of high-roller poker work. Tournaments of that size need wealthy amateurs as much as professionals, and the line between the two is often blurry.
The One Drop format began at the 2012 World Series in Las Vegas, where Antonio Esfandiari won the first $1,000,000 buy-in event. The Monte Carlo edition four years later moved the idea to Europe and priced it in euros, and Tsang’s name joined a very short list of players who have won a seven-figure buy-in tournament outright.
Aaron Zang
The 2019 Triton Million for Charity in London had a buy-in of £1,050,000, the largest in poker history at the time. Aaron Zang, from China, won the title.
He did not win the most money. Heads-up against Bryn Kenney, the two agreed a deal that gave Kenney the bigger share, and Kenney’s payout from that event pushed him to the top of the all-time live earnings list. Zang kept the trophy and a prize that still ranks among the largest ever paid. If you have ever wondered why a winner’s listed prize can be smaller than the runner-up’s, that final is the clearest example.
Danny Tang
Tang, from Hong Kong, has been one of the steadiest names on the Triton tour since its early stops in Asia. He plays both no-limit hold’em and Short Deck, the six-plus variant that Triton helped bring to a wider audience. Short Deck strips out the deuces through fives, which changes hand values: a flush beats a full house in most rule sets.
Tang’s career shows what a modern Asian high roller looks like. Most of his biggest scores came in fields of a few dozen players, each with a six-figure buy-in, many of them at Asian stops of the series. The live poker scene in the region has grown in the same period, from Manila to the rooms covered in the guide to live poker in Cambodia.
Paul Phua
Phua is a Malaysian businessman who co-founded Triton Poker with his friend Richard Yong. He is known first as a high-stakes cash game player, and Triton grew out of the high-stakes games he and Yong played in, putting those games and leading professionals on camera.
Malaysia has produced several of Triton’s recurring faces. Ivan Leow is one of them, a regular in the series’ high-roller fields. Searches for his net worth have the same problem as those for Phua or Yong: the poker results are public, the business wealth behind them is not, and nobody has published a figure that could be checked. A comparison with other wealthy players is in the list of the richest poker players.
India’s biggest results have come in the same high-roller rooms. Santhosh Suvarna has won three WSOP bracelets: the €50,000 Diamond High Roller at WSOP Europe, the $250,000 Super High Roller at the 2024 WSOP for $5,415,152, and the $50,000 High Roller at the 2026 WSOP for $1,992,870. Nikita Luther, born in New Delhi in 1991, took the game to a mainstream Indian audience on The Traitors India.
The tournaments Phua helped start have changed where top poker is played. Triton stops now include European venues such as London and Cyprus, but the series began in Asia, with Asian money, and players from Hong Kong, China and Malaysia remain a large part of its fields.