Jeremy Chan finally has the trophy to match his resume. The Malaysian pro captured the biggest prize of the entire APT Incheon 2026 festival by winning the APT Super High Roller 8-Max for $169,650, closing out a run of near-misses that had followed him around Asia’s high-stakes circuit for more than three years.
A Deep Field at a Steep Price
The Super High Roller 8-Max carried a buy-in of KRW 15 million, roughly $10,700, and drew 58 entries to South Korea’s Paradise City resort in Incheon. That turnout built a prize pool of KRW 801,705,000, about $575,525, more than enough to make the event the single richest tournament on the APT Incheon schedule this year. With only the top finishers getting paid in a field of that size, the tournament played out as a genuine gauntlet of the region’s toughest short-handed specialists.
Chan outlasted that field to reach heads-up against Michel Molenaar of the Netherlands, ultimately closing out the win and locking up a payday that included not just the $169,650 but also a $10,000 seat into the APT Championship, the tour’s season-ending flagship event. Molenaar settled for $122,720 as runner-up, still a significant score but well short of the title he was chasing.
Redemption a Year in the Making
The victory carried extra weight because of how close Chan had come to winning this exact event before. Almost exactly twelve months earlier, he reached the final table of the same Super High Roller 8-Max at APT Incheon and finished second, losing that title to Michael Foo. Getting back to the winner’s seat in the same tournament a year later, against a different final table but the same stakes and the same pressure, gave the win a full-circle quality that few tournament victories carry.
That near-miss last year was far from an isolated case. Between April 2023 and August 2026, Chan compiled an extraordinary run of 26 final tables on the Asian high-stakes circuit, a number that would represent a career highlight for most players even without a single win attached. Instead, five of those 26 final tables ended in runner-up finishes, a pattern that started to look less like bad luck and more like a stubborn habit. Poker’s short-term variance can make even the most skilled players look snakebitten over a small enough sample, and Chan’s stretch of final tables without breakthroughs had become a talking point among high-stakes regulars who tracked his results.
From Almost $850,000 to His Second Career Title
Chan arrived at APT Incheon 2026 with close to $850,000 in career live tournament earnings spread across 66 recorded results, a body of work that reflected genuine consistency rather than one big score propping up the totals. Yet remarkably, this win was only his second tournament title. His first came in a far smaller setting, a £250 buy-in event in London back in July 2023 that paid out £12,430, a result that barely registers next to the six-figure score he just banked in Incheon.
The gap between Chan’s career earnings and his title count says something about how tournament poker actually rewards skill over time. Deep runs and final tables build a bankroll steadily even without a trophy attached, but they rarely satisfy a competitor the way an outright win does. For a player with Chan’s volume of final tables, the $169,650 score in Incheon likely means as much for validation as it does for the bankroll itself. Players working on their own tournament game can find a primer on the format’s fundamentals in Poker Pro Academy’s WSOP guidewhich breaks down how these knockout stage structures reward patience as much as aggression.
A Loaded Festival Overall
Chan’s win headlined a packed APT Incheon 2026 schedule that ran more than 45 events across the festival. The Main Event itself went to Taizo Kumagai for $33,000, a smaller score than the Super High Roller but still a marquee result given the Main Event’s typically larger and more varied field. Elsewhere on the schedule, Pakorn Duangtrakan took down the Mystery Bounty Hunter event for $43,059, and three separate women’s tournaments crowned their own champions, part of an increasingly standard practice on major Asian tours to run dedicated events alongside the open schedule.
Taken together, the festival reinforced Incheon’s growing status as one of the region’s premier stops, with Paradise City continuing to draw the kind of high-stakes traffic that makes events like the Super High Roller 8-Max worth running in the first place.
What Comes Next for Chan
With his APT Championship seat already secured as part of the Super High Roller prize, Chan now heads toward the tour’s season finale with a fresh title in hand and, presumably, a lighter mental load after finally converting one of his many deep runs into a win. Whether this breakthrough turns into a sustained run of titles or simply resets the clock on his next stretch of final-table near-misses remains to be seen, but for now, the streak of runner-up finishes has been broken in the most fitting way possible: in the very event that handed him one of those losses a year ago.
