Andrei Cherkashin has taken down the Natural8 Open Super High Roller at PS Championship IV Taipei, banking TWD 669,100 (~$20,995) after outlasting a 41-entry field at the CTP Asia Poker Arena. The 8-handed event carried a TWD 55,000 buy-in and built a TWD 1,900,000 (~$59,560) prize pool — the biggest single payday of the festival’s opening week.
Hong Kong’s Tung Wing Wong finished runner-up for TWD 411,000 (~$12,895), with Taiwan’s Chung Tang Lin third for TWD 264,800 (~$8,310). The Russian’s win also pushed him to the top of the individual earnings board through day four, with $26,865 across two cashes.
Taiwan Is Cashing Everywhere, Just Not on Top
The country breakdown from the first four days tells a familiar Taipei story. Local players led all nationalities with $126,910 in combined earnings from 78 in-the-money finishes — volume, not headline scores. The accumulated prize pool across the series to that point stood at $306,755, meaning Taiwanese players had already claimed roughly 40% of everything paid out.
That pattern is what makes CTP’s series different from a visiting tour stop. The field is overwhelmingly domestic and recreational, the buy-ins run from freerolls upward, and the imports show up mainly for the high rollers. Cherkashin and Wong were the exception on this table, not the rule across the room.
Six Flights and NT$15M Still to Come
The Super High Roller was an appetiser. PS Championship IV runs August 19–31 with a NTD 39,000,000 (~$1.22M) series guarantee spread across 104 tournaments, 92 of them official trophy events. The Natural8 Open served as the preliminary Main Event with a NTD 5,000,000 guarantee and flights on August 20–22.
The headline act starts August 25. The PS Championship Main Event carries a NTD 15,000,000 (~$470,000) guarantee across six starting flights, A through F, running August 25–29, with the final table set for August 31. Anyone who missed the opening week still has five days of re-entry runway before the money is decided. The NTD 120,000 Superstar Challenge sits at the top of the buy-in ladder for players who want a shot at a smaller, sharper field.
Taipei’s August Is Getting Crowded
The timing is worth noting. Taiwan Millions wrapped its record TMT 20 earlier this season, ZSOP closed out its own Taipei run, and Poker Dream 23 Taiwan is sharing the same calendar window as this festival. For a market with no regulated online poker and a live scene built almost entirely around club-model venues, that is a remarkable amount of tournament supply inside a single month.
CTP Asia Poker Arena is the reason it holds together. It is the largest permanent poker room in Asia by table count, which lets a 104-event schedule with 44 starting flights actually fit into a 13-day window instead of sprawling across a month. Most APAC venues would need to cut the schedule in half.
Whether the Main Event beats its NT$15M guarantee will say more about the health of Taiwan’s live scene than the Super High Roller result did. Forty-one entries in a NT$55K event is respectable. Fifteen million New Taiwan dollars from six flights of a domestic field is a genuine test.