James Mendoza Net Worth 2026: The Filipino Triton Champion

James Mendoza is the highest-earning Filipino poker player of all time. His tracked live tournament earnings total $4,586,126 across 142 cashes, and his career best is the $1,515,000 he won at Triton Jeju in September 2025.

That win moved him from fourth on the Philippines all-time money list to first. He leads Mike Takayama by $31,888, a margin of under one percent, and Takayama has cashed 399 times to Mendoza’s 142.

He has never won a WSOP bracelet. Two third-place finishes, worth $640,478 between them, account for four fifths of everything he has earned across 28 tracked cashes at the series.

Every figure on this page carries a named source and the date it was checked. The earnings and rankings above come from The Hendon Mob and were checked on 2 August 2026. They move with every tracked event, so treat them as a snapshot.

His net worth is not publicly confirmed, and no third-party source has ever published a figure for him. The range on this page is ours, derived from his tracked record with the deductions shown in full.

Where the record is thin we say so rather than filling the gap. This profile sits alongside our poker player profiles and career stats.

James Mendoza’s net worth is estimated at $2 million to $3.5 million. No third-party source has ever published a figure for him. Not CelebrityNetWorth, not TheRichest, not the aggregator sites that carry ranges for most players at his level.

SoMuchPoker runs a page titled as a net worth profile for him, but it publishes no figure. The range below is ours, derived from his tracked record. He has never discussed his finances publicly beyond a single remark that the money mattered less to him than the title.

How much is James Mendoza worth?

Nobody outside his circle knows. Our estimate of $2 million to $3.5 million comes from his tracked record, and the reasoning follows.

His 142 cashes imply somewhere between 700 and 950 lifetime entries, depending on whether you assume a 20% or a 15% cash rate. Those entries span buy-ins from under $100 on the Manila and Cebu circuits to $25,000 at Triton, which puts career entry costs comfortably above $1 million.

Then deduct tax. His cashes span the United States, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Macau, the Bahamas, Spain, France, Australia and Cambodia, with fourteen years of travel on top.

What lifts the range at the top end is his own account of the Triton entry. He said he waited until he was ready bankroll-wise, which points to a player funding his own action rather than selling most of it.

Why has nobody published a James Mendoza net worth figure?

Because he was not a recognisable name until September 2025, and the sites that generate these numbers work from existing profiles rather than tournament databases.

That absence is worth stating plainly. Where other players have a recycled figure circulating with no disclosed method behind it, he has nothing at all, so there is no published estimate for us to assess or correct.

How much has James Mendoza won in his career?

His tracked live tournament earnings total $4,586,126 across 142 cashes, per The Hendon Mob, checked on 2 August 2026. That places him first among Filipino players and 577th worldwide.

One event accounts for a third of it.

The WSOP line is top-heavy in the same way. Two third-place finishes account for $640,478 of that $794,366, and neither produced a bracelet.

He sits among the players still chasing a first WSOP bracelet. Seven of his 142 results came at WSOP Online events and are worth $31,278, which the Hendon Mob lists but keeps outside its live earnings figure.

Every figure above is a gross payout. Five things sit outside them, and each one moves the real number downwards.

His gross record is auditable and his net position is not. Any figure, ours included, is an informed estimate rather than a disclosed number.

Mendoza was a Manila and Cebu circuit regular for eleven years. From 2012 to the end of 2022 he banked $491,113 across 60 results, with a single breakout year at the end of that run.

Close to 90 percent of his career earnings have arrived since, and 2025 alone produced $2,761,987.

What are James Mendoza’s biggest tournament results?

The results below are his ten largest documented finishes. His full record runs to 142 cashes, so this is a selection rather than a complete ranking.

Five of his ten biggest results came in 2025, and the Wynn score is a $1,100 event that returned more than a hundred times its buy-in.

How many tournaments has James Mendoza won?

Seven, spread across ten years. Before Triton, only one of them had paid a six-figure first prize.

Five of the seven came in Manila or Taipei, on tours where he was a fixture long before anyone outside Asia knew the name.

What is James Mendoza’s WSOP record?

No bracelet, and no Circuit ring either. He has come third twice, in the 2023 $3,000 Freezeout and the 2025 $10,000 Mystery Bounty, and those two results are worth 81% of everything he has earned at the series.

The volume is thin next to his Asian circuit record. Twenty-one live cashes at the series against 114 elsewhere, and he has never played a full summer schedule in the way the bracelet chasers do.

Who has converted at those events is tracked in our every WSOP bracelet winner by event.

Mendoza describes his start as lower stakes in what he called his little city in the Philippines. The record backs that up. His first tracked result came at the APPT Cebu Cup in April 2012, tenth place in a PHP 10,000 event, worth about $234 at the time, for $598.

For the next decade he stayed a circuit regular rather than a name. What changed came fast and came late.

Who is James Mendoza?

He is a Filipino tournament professional who came up through the Manila and Cebu circuits and now lives in California. He plays a schedule split between Asian festivals and Las Vegas, and by his own account his buy-in comfort zone runs from $1,000 to $20,000.

No date of birth has ever been published for him, and no source records what he did before poker. Both gaps are worth stating rather than guessing at.

Where is James Mendoza from?

Cebu City in the Philippines. He competes under Filipino nationality and his early results cluster around APT and APPT stops in Cebu and Manila.

His results show him playing California cardrooms from 2015, in Los Angeles, Gardena, Bell Gardens and San Francisco, alongside the Manila schedule. Reporting on his Triton win describes him as California-based, though no source states when he relocated.

What was James Mendoza’s first tournament cash?

$598, for tenth in the Cebu Cup at APPT Cebu on 24 April 2012.

That first cash and the top of the Philippines all-time money list are fourteen years apart. For most of those years he was grinding PHP 4,400 Megastacks in Manila and $75 to $235 daily events in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

The inflection point is 2022. His first ten years produced $128,483 across 47 cashes. That single year produced $362,630, close to three times the decade before it.

On 9 September 2025 Mendoza won Event #1 of the Triton Super High Roller Series Jeju II, the $25,000 WPT Global Slam. It was his first event on that series and his first Triton final table.

The field drew 311 entries from 199 unique players and built a prize pool of $7,775,000. He had arrived four days earlier, finishing 65th in the $8,000 Triton ONE Main Event for $19,800.

How much did James Mendoza win at Triton Jeju?

The $1,515,000 first prize from that event, and it is not close. His previous best was $450,000 four months earlier in Jeju.

Triton’s own report put his documented winnings at $2.8 million going in, including six six-figure scores. Both of those figures check out against his tracked record.

How did James Mendoza win the WPT Global Slam?

He reached the final nine fifth in chips with 27 big blinds, at a table that included Thai high roller Punnat Punsri and six-time bracelet winner Alex Foxen.

Punsri went first, running into the top of Mendoza’s range in a blind versus blind pot. Four-handed the average stack was down to 16 big blinds, which is closer to a coin-flipping contest than a display of skill.

He took Pitavy out with king-queen against ace-king, then knocked out Foxen when king-six made runner-runner trips against ace-jack on an ace-high flop. That left him with 52 blinds against Xue Song’s 13, and queens finished it.

What is James Mendoza’s approach to big tournaments?

Preparation and patience, on his own account, and he has been unusually candid about the luck involved.

That last point is the one worth noticing. Two of his four final table knockouts came from behind, and he named both without being asked.

The WPT Global Slam had run four months earlier in Montenegro, where it was won by first female Triton champion Xuan Liu. She entered as a WPT Global ambassador and wore the patch. One was a contracted representative and the other bought in.

Mendoza sits first on the Philippines all-time money list. The Hendon Mob ranking generated on 1 August 2026 puts him at $4,585,313, ahead of Mike Takayama on $4,553,425.

He got there in one result, moving from fourth to first on the day of the Triton win.

Who is the highest-earning Filipino poker player?

James Mendoza, by $31,888. That is a lead of seven tenths of one percent, and the top three are separated by less than $171,000 in total.

How secure is the lead?

It is not. Takayama has 399 tracked cashes to Mendoza’s 142, so he adds to his total roughly three times as often. A single mid-sized score changes the order.

The figures above carry their check date for that reason.

Which Filipino players have won a WSOP bracelet?

One home-grown winner, and it is not Mendoza. Takayama took that bracelet at the 2018 WSOP, winning a $1,000 Super Turbo Bounty from 2,065 entries for $198,568.

Toto Leonidas won a Seven Card Stud bracelet in 2003, but he had already become a United States citizen by then, which is why Takayama is credited as the first home-grown winner.

The two men at the top of the list are missing opposite things. Mendoza has the bigger single score and no bracelet. Takayama has the bracelet and a career best under $200,000.

This section is updated as new results come in. Last reviewed: August 2026.

Mendoza has played a full schedule since the Triton win without changing much about it. He has banked $148,109 across nine cashes in 2026, and his most recent tracked result came on 12 July.

Did the Triton win change how James Mendoza plays?

Not by the record. Asked afterwards whether the money would push him into bigger games, he said he would keep playing where he felt comfortable.

Eight of his nine entries in 2026 sit inside the $1,000 to $20,000 band he described. The exception was a return to Triton in March, and even that was the same $25,000 buy-in he had already won.

Where does James Mendoza rank now?

He sits 189th on the Global Poker Index, and he is still playing a full schedule. He cashed nine times in the first seven months of 2026, across Las Vegas, Jeju, Taipei and Kuala Lumpur.

He has not won a title in 2026, but the November win in Taipei came only two months after Jeju, which suggests the Triton result was not an isolated peak.

For broader coverage of the circuit, see our latest poker news and tournament coverage.

Quick answers to the most searched questions about James Mendoza’s net worth, earnings, age and Triton win.

This profile separates verified facts from estimates and public claims. Where the record is incomplete we say so rather than filling the gap.

How we handle net worth

Net worth figures for poker players are not a matter of public record. We do not repeat estimates from celebrity net worth sites, because none of them disclose a methodology.

Where we publish a range, it is derived from tracked earnings with the deductions set out in full. For James Mendoza no third-party estimate exists at all, so the range on this page is entirely our own.

How we report earnings

Live tournament earnings come from The Hendon Mob and are gross payouts, not profit. Buy-ins, re-entries, staking splits, travel and tax all sit outside them.

Two details are worth knowing. His 142 results include seven online cashes, and the $31,278 they are worth sits outside the live earnings total. The WSOP-branded figure on this page is our own sum of every WSOP, WSOP Online and Circuit entry in his record, because WSOP.com’s headline total interleaves Triton and Asian Poker Tour events and is not a WSOP-only number.

Both databases update after every tracked event, so every figure on this page carries the date it was checked.

How we handle a contested ranking

His position at the top of the Philippines list is separated from second place by less than one percent. We publish the margin alongside the position, because a ranking that can change on one result is not the same kind of fact as a career total.

The ranking list and his profile page also carry slightly different totals, for the reason set out in that section. We show both rather than picking whichever suits the claim.

A note on what we can link

His own account of the Triton win comes from an interview published by a poker outlet we do not link to. That outlet is named in the text where its reporting is the source.

The References list below carries only primary databases and official tour sites.

What we could not establish

Five things are missing from the public record, and none of them have been filled with inference.