Victor Chong came two eliminations away from becoming Malaysia’s newest World Series of Poker champion. Instead, the Kuala Lumpur grinder banked $278,000 for third place in the $500 Colossus — proof that one of the cheapest seats in Las Vegas can still put an Asian player on the brink of gold.
Event #34 drew a staggering 16,269 entries, building a $6,751,635 prize pool from a buy-in most weekend players would not blink at. Quality engineer Justin Smith of Yakima, Washington eventually won his first bracelet and the $550,000 top prize, but the road there ran straight through Chong and a final table that refused to behave.
A final table that would not end
Chong arrived at the last three as the most seasoned player left, having ground the Asian circuit since its earliest days. He committed with king-queen and ran into Smith’s ace-six on a queen-jack-seven flop. An ace on the turn flipped the hand, a nine on the river sealed it, and Chong was gone in third — close enough to taste the bracelet, far enough to sting.
The man who beat him had no business surviving. Smith fell to four big blinds with four players remaining before a double through Yuefan Wang’s ace-six sparked the comeback. His heads-up match against Myles German lasted a single hand, a Smith flush burying German’s pocket eights and leaving $367,000 on the table for second.
The final nine was a genuine cross-section of the poker world — Mexico’s Jose Orozco Gomez, the UK’s Min Ji and a row of American regulars all cashed for six figures — but it was Chong who carried the flag for Asia deepest into the night.
Why the Colossus matters to Asian players
Strip away the Vegas glamour and the Colossus is the most realistic shot a recreational APAC player has at a life-changing WSOP score. At $500 a bullet with unlimited re-entries across multiple flights, it rewards volume and nerve over a deep bankroll — exactly the profile of the players grinding satellites out of Manila, Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh City.
Chong’s run is no regional fluke either. He has already finished third in a Triton $10,000 event stacked with Daniel Dvoress, Wiktor Malinowski and Joao Vieira, and this deep run nudges Malaysia further up a leaderboard Asian players have quietly owned all summer. Naoya Kihara’s back-to-back championships, Santhosh Suvarna’s third bracelet and a steady stream of final-table cashes have made 2026 one of the strongest WSOP showings the region has ever posted.
With 45 of 100 bracelets now awarded and the $10,000 Main Event still three weeks out, the runway for an Asian champion is long. Chong leaves Las Vegas $278,000 richer and squarely on the list of names worth watching the next time the Colossus rolls around.