Richard Yong Net Worth 2026: Triton Co-Founder & $18.7M Live Earnings

Richard Yong’s net worth is estimated at $30M to $100M, built on Macau VIP junket operations and an IT career rather than on poker. The Malaysian businessman co-founded Triton Poker and has won three titles on his own tour, the latest at Jeju in 2025 for $705,000.

His tracked live tournament earnings stand at $18.7 million across 35 cashes, 88th on the all-time money list and 4th in Malaysia. Every one of those figures is a gross payout; what he keeps after buy-ins at $100,000 and above is a different number that nobody outside his circle knows.

This profile separates verified results from estimates, and it corrects the line most bios get wrong: the 2014 Las Vegas case ended for Yong in a guilty plea and a half-million-dollar bill, not in the dismissal his partner won.

Richard Yong’s net worth is estimated between $30M and $100M. The range rests on a business base that predates poker: Macau VIP junket operations described in US court papers, and a career in information technology and data mining before that.

The poker side is the smaller part. His gross live earnings look large until they are set against fourteen years of buy-ins at $25,000 to $200,000, plus a single $1,000,000 entry in 2012.

What is Richard Yong’s net worth?

Four components feed the range: the liquidity of a man who, with Paul Phua, negotiated a US$60 million casino credit line in 2014; fourteen years of six-figure entries; the junket and IT businesses; and the earnings themselves, net of unknown buy-ins.

The offsets are real too. The 2014 fine and forfeiture, half a million dollars between them, legal costs, taxes and whatever his Macau cash game sessions have cost or returned all sit outside the public record.

Why do Richard Yong net worth estimates vary so much?

Two kinds of published figure exist and neither holds up. One aggregator prints “over $50 million” with no basis, and elsewhere mentions a billion-dollar tech fortune without a source. Another lists a “net worth” of about $1.5M, which is only a sum of his recent Asia-Pacific results.

Neither approach touches the junket business, which is where the money actually comes from. Nobody outside Yong’s circle knows the real number, so this profile publishes a range and the basis for it rather than borrowing someone else’s guess.

What we can verify: tracked live tournament earnings

The Hendon Mob records $18,691,842 across 35 live cashes, with a best cash of $2,130,848 and a career-high all-time ranking of 48th. That is a thin cash count for the money: his average in-the-money finish is worth more than $530,000, a product of playing almost nothing below $25,000.

Gross payouts are not profit. Short deck fields at Triton routinely draw 40 to 60 entries with re-entries, and a recreational who fires at every stop will spend seven figures a year on entries alone.

Those five items explain why the range is wide. Each one could move the figure by tens of millions and none of them will ever appear in a public ledger.

Seng Chen Yong was born on 25 December 1957 in Malaysia. He built a career in information technology and data mining before poker entered the picture, and he lives in Kuala Lumpur.

The business that matters most to his poker story is the junket trade. US court papers filed in 2014 describe him as organising trips that bring high-rollers to the VIP rooms of casinos in Macau and elsewhere, and the South China Morning Post called him a Macau junket operator outright.

A junket operator recruits wealthy gamblers for casinos, arranges their credit and takes a commission on the turnover they generate. During the Macau boom of the 2000s that was among the most lucrative trades in Asian gaming, and it put Yong at the same tables as the best players alive.

How did Richard Yong get into poker?

By his own account, the passion arrived in Macau in 2006. He knew Chinese poker, not Texas hold’em, and he lost a lot of money the first time he played, then spent about half a year in the Macau cash games learning the game.

The turning point was a tournament that drew Tom Dwan, Phil Ivey and John Juanda to Macau. Yong got to know them and started playing tournaments himself. Tom Dwan’s debts and durrrr legacy ran through those same Macau years, where many later Triton regulars first met.

His first recorded live cash did not come until July 2012, and it came at the top of the game: eighth in the $1,000,000 Big One for One Drop in Las Vegas.

Richard Yong’s tournament record is short on volume and long on size. Thirty-five cashes since 2012 have produced five seven-figure scores, five titles and a best year of $3,865,073 in 2018.

The Hendon Mob lists every one of those results. The ten largest are below.

Eight of the ten came at buy-ins of $100,000 or more. Three Malaysians sit above him on the national money list, and one of them is his business partner.

Does Richard Yong have a WSOP bracelet?

No. His three WSOP-branded cashes are all high rollers: 8th in the 2012 Big One for One Drop for $1,237,333, 3rd in the €50,000 Majestic Roller at WSOP Europe in Cannes that October for $521,859, and 14th in the €100,000 Super High Roller at WSOP Europe 2018 for $184,107.

The One Drop result was his tournament debut on record. He made the final table in which Antonio Esfandiari’s $18.3M One Drop win set a record for the largest prize in poker history.

What is Richard Yong’s biggest poker win?

The biggest cash is the $2,130,848 for third in the HK$2,000,000 Triton Jeju Main Event in July 2018. The biggest first-place prize is the $1,477,560 from the 2015 Aussie Millions $100,000 Challenge, which was also his first live title.

That Melbourne win came at a final table holding Erik Seidel, Scott Seiver and Ole Schemion. The series itself only came back after a six-year gap: the Aussie Millions return to Crown Melbourne is covered in our preview.

His 2017 and 2018 Triton run produced the bulk of the career total: second in the Montenegro Main Event for $1,441,797, then third in both the Jeju Main Event and the Jeju Short Deck Ante-Only within three days of each other. That 2018 fortnight alone was worth $3,292,942.

The first title on his own tour arrived in May 2018, in the HK$250,000 6-Max at Triton Montenegro against 35 entries. He held off Steve O’Dwyer, and Isaac Haxton’s path from Brown to Triton also ended at that final table.

Three Triton titles, all against full fields

Yong’s second and third Triton wins were both short deck. In May 2023 he beat 38 entries in the $25,000 Short Deck Ante-Only in North Cyprus for $323,000, surviving a heads-up battle with Chris Brewer that ran past two hours. It was his eighth short deck final table.

The third came at Triton Jeju in September 2025, in the $50,000 Short Deck Ante-Only PLPF that opened the Super High Roller Series. He topped 47 entries and a $2,350,000 prize pool, beating Michael Zhang heads-up; Richard Yong’s $705K short deck win in Jeju has the hands.

“I want to play poker until I’m 80 years old,” he said in Jeju, calling it very difficult to become a Triton champion with so many super pros in the room. “I was very lucky. Gamble, gamble, gamble.”

Outside Triton, the one other title is the $50,000 event at partypoker MILLIONS World Bahamas in November 2019 for $850,000. He has also recorded podiums in short deck at Triton London 2019, Madrid 2022 and Vietnam 2023.

Richard Yong’s cash game career runs on two tracks, and only one of them is visible. The invisible track is Macau, where he has played the biggest private games since 2006 and where no result has ever been published.

The pots ran into seven figures, and the players who travelled east for them, Dwan, Ivey, Phua and a cast of professionals, became the core of Triton’s first fields. Hands from that era sit among the biggest cash game pots ever played, though Yong’s own ledger has never surfaced.

The visible track is Triton’s own televised cash games, which give the public its only window on the games Yong plays in. Triton itself has described him as less prominent at those tables than his partner, so the broadcast record tells you more about the games than about his results.

When the cameras are on, the swings are the story: Tony G’s $1.5M Triton cash game loss in Montenegro shows the size of the games. No session result for Yong is treated here as evidence of profit or loss.

Richard Yong co-founded Triton Poker with Paul Phua, and the tour staged its first series in 2016. A decade on it runs buy-ins from $15,000 to the £1,000,000 Triton Million of 2019, with festivals in Jeju, Montenegro and Monte Carlo.

The idea came from the players, not from a promoter. Yong and Phua had spent years flying to other people’s high roller events and wanted a tour built around the structures and stakes they preferred.

“When we learned poker, me and Paul liked to play tournaments everywhere,” he said after his 2023 win. “So we started Triton and we are very happy that Triton has grown so much.” Paul Phua’s net worth and Triton story covers the founding from the other chair.

Who founded Triton Poker?

Paul Phua and Richard Yong, two Malaysian businessmen who had learned the game in Macau’s cash games and wanted a tour built for the way they liked to play. Triton’s own history now runs under chief executive Andy Wong, with the founders still competing in the fields.

Short deck was Yong’s cause from the start, and he argued in 2019 that the compressed deck made the pros less of a lock. The format is now the tour’s signature, and the reason the Jeju schedule opens with three short deck events.

The two founders still play their own events side by side, and Phua’s 2026 win in Jeju came in the tenth-anniversary special.

How many Triton titles has Richard Yong won?

Three: Montenegro 2018, Cyprus 2023 and Jeju 2025. That is a rare count for a recreational on a tour whose fields are built from the strongest tournament players alive, and it puts him on the honours board his company prints.

The board is topped by Jason Koon’s record Triton title haul, and Koon was among the first to congratulate Yong in Cyprus. The tour now anchors the biggest Asian high roller poker events alongside the APT, with the Jeju stops drawing more than 200 unique players to a single tournament.

Richard Yong plays like a man who knows exactly which game he can beat. He enters the full-deck Main Events and the short deck events alike, but his titles, his best short deck results and his own explanation all point the same way.

“Short deck is easy for me to play, because full deck has a lot of super players and it’s difficult for me to beat them,” he said in Cyprus. “They’re so good and so young, I’m the old man, I can just play this gamble game, very fast.”

Why does Richard Yong prefer short deck?

Because the format narrows the gap between a professional and a recreational. With the twos through fives removed, flushes beat full houses, straights arrive constantly, and equities run so close that aggression is rewarded over patience.

That is a game built for a player who is happy to get his chips in. His Jeju win was sealed with queens holding against a flush draw and ace-king beating kings; our guide to short deck poker strategy explains why those spots play out the way they do.

The professionals who play him treat him as a friend first and an opponent second, which is its own edge. Mikita Badziakouski’s reaction to losing with king-queen against Yong’s queens in Jeju (“How many outs!?”) was exasperation at the deck, not at the player.

That goodwill does not make the fields soft. His three titles came through Badziakouski, Brewer, Haxton, O’Dwyer, Zhang and Nielsen, and every one of them was trying to win.

Richard Yong’s record carries one criminal case, and most profiles get it wrong. In 2014 he was arrested in Las Vegas alongside Paul Phua, and while Phua’s charges were later dismissed, Yong’s ended in a guilty plea to a misdemeanour.

What happened to Richard Yong in Las Vegas in 2014?

On 9 July 2014, during the FIFA World Cup, FBI agents raided three villas at Caesars Palace and arrested eight people, among them Phua, Yong and both men’s sons. Prosecutors alleged an illegal betting operation run from the suites; court papers said Yong had planned the trip.

Bail came from the poker world. Phil Ivey put up US$500,000 each for Yong and his son, per court documents in the South China Morning Post, citing “the utmost respect and trust”. Phil Ivey’s edge-sorting cases and career ran through the courts in the same years for different reasons.

On 10 December 2014 Yong, then 56, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour accessory-after-the-fact charge before US District Judge Andrew Gordon. He was fined $100,000, ordered to forfeit $400,000 and ordered out of the country, as the Associated Press reported from the courtroom. All charges against Wai Kin Yong were dropped.

Phua and his son fought on. Their US case was dismissed in 2015 after a judge found the FBI’s entry unlawful, which is why so many bios call the whole affair “dismissed”. For Yong the record is a plea, a fine and a forfeiture, and the distinction matters.

He returned to the tables within weeks. The Aussie Millions title in Melbourne came on 25 January 2015, six weeks after the plea, and it remains his biggest first-place prize.

Richard Yong keeps his private life private. What is on the record is a son who plays, a home in Kuala Lumpur and a nickname that his own tour uses in print.

Who is Richard Yong’s son?

Wai Kin Yong is a high-stakes player in his own right and a familiar face at Triton stops. He was arrested with his father in Las Vegas in July 2014 and walked away with every charge dropped that December.

Which Yong has the better Triton record is a question for the official tour pages, since the son’s results are not tracked here. What the record does show is that both were in the same Las Vegas villa in 2014 and both were back at the tables within a year.

Everyone at Triton calls him Mr Richard. The name appears in the tour’s own headlines, and it captures how the staff and the professionals treat a founder who plays for the fun of it and celebrated his Jeju title with a lollipop and a packed rail.

Ninth place in the $30,000 NLH Turbo at Triton Jeju in March, worth $75,000, is Yong’s only recorded cash of 2026. It came during the tenth-anniversary season on the tour he co-founded, at a festival that stretched from March 5 to April 1.

The headline of the 31-event Triton Jeju 2026 festival belonged to his partner. Paul Phua won the $150,000 10th Anniversary Special for $3,226,000, and the Triton 10th anniversary special in Jeju was the event the whole anniversary season was built around.

The 2025 line is the one to read. Three cashes in a single Jeju fortnight brought $1,450,000: the short deck title, an eighth in the $200,000 Short Deck and a 17th in the Main Event. A 29th in Montenegro took the year to $1,609,000, 8.6% of his career total.

Malaysia’s short deck form now runs through a younger name. Kiat Lee, who sat at Yong’s 2025 final table, won again in Jeju in March, and Kiat Lee’s $840K Triton short deck hat-trick came by beating Phua heads-up.

No cash is recorded for Yong at the Montenegro stop in May or at Jeju II in September. He remains a fixture of every festival regardless, as host, as rail and as the player who told Jeju he wants to play until he is 80.

The next stop is where the record moves. Every Triton winner and payout on record is tracked on our results page, updated after each stop, and the latest high stakes poker news carries each Triton recap as it lands.

This player profile separates verifiable facts from estimates and public claims. We cannot accurately calculate any player’s net worth, but we aim to publish transparent, verifiable information.

How we handle ‘net worth’

We do not treat any net worth figure as fact. Third-party estimates are reported with their source and caveats. Where no credible methodology is disclosed, we say so.

Yong’s $30M to $100M range is our own construction from the components listed above, and it sits well below his partner’s. You can compare it against our poker player net worth profiles for other private-game regulars.

How we report earnings

Tournament earnings figures come from The Hendon Mob, which tracks live results only. Databases that also fold in online results publish higher totals, and we say so rather than blending the two.

All figures are gross payouts before buy-ins, staking splits, taxes and expenses. Yong’s Macau cash game results are untracked and are not included in any figure on this page.

How we cover controversies

We report what was alleged, what the player said in response, and where the matter stands. We do not take sides.

The 2014 outcome above is taken from Associated Press and Bloomberg wire reports of the court record, not from poker media. The untested triad allegation is reported once, with the defence response, and the difference between Yong’s plea and Phua’s dismissal is stated rather than blurred.

The sources below were used in researching this profile.