Stanley Choi

Stanley Choi has $8,183,074 in recorded live tournament earnings, fourth on Hong Kong's all-time money list and 264th in the world, read on 24 September 2026. Nearly 80 per cent of it comes from one tournament in Macau in 2012 — a result that is remembered less for what it paid him than for what it started.

The HK$2,000,000 that changed the buy-in ceiling

On 31 August 2012 Choi won the HK$2,000,000 No Limit Hold'em Super High Roller at the Macau High Stakes Challenge for $6,465,574. At the time it was among the largest single tournament prizes ever paid in Asia, and the buy-in itself was close to unprecedented.

The context is what makes it historically interesting. A HK$2 million buy-in in 2012 was a statement that there was enough money in Asian high-stakes poker to fill a field at a level the rest of the world was not yet offering. Within a few years the super high roller was a standard fixture of every major festival, and the tour that institutionalised it — Triton — came out of the same Macau and Hong Kong scene. Choi's win sits near the start of that line.

It also means his money list position rests on a single afternoon. $6,465,574 of $8,183,074 is 79 per cent. Read his total as the record of one enormous result plus a selective career, not as a running score.

Selective ever since

He has not chased volume. The rest of his recorded results are high rollers, entered sparingly, across four countries and twelve years.

He was runner-up in the HK$240,000 + 10,000 High Roller at the APPT Asia Championship of Poker in Macau on 7 November 2015, worth $401,482. He took eighth in the €50,000 Super High Roller at PokerStars Championship Barcelona on 19 August 2017 for $181,914, and ninth in the HK$500,000 6-Handed event at Triton Super High Roller Series Jeju on 4 March 2019 for $140,147. His most recent recorded cash is 18th in the $125,000 + 7,500 Triton Main Event in Budva, Montenegro, on 20 May 2024, for $256,000.

Four of those five results are in Asia, and the two biggest are both in Macau — the pattern that runs through the whole top of this list.

Macau, not Hong Kong

It is worth being exact about the geography, because the two get conflated constantly. Choi is ranked on Hong Kong's money list, and Hong Kong licenses no poker: as our Hong Kong page sets out from the Home and Youth Affairs Bureau's own policy, the Gambling Ordinance (Cap. 148) leaves only Jockey Club racing, authorised football betting and the Mark Six, officer-licensed premises such as mahjong parlours, and a narrow social-gambling exemption outside the general prohibition.

Macau is a separate jurisdiction with its own licensing regime, an hour away by ferry, and it is where the games were. Every Hong Kong player at the top of this list has a Macau chapter, and Choi's is the largest single entry in the territory's history by share of a career.

Reading the number

$8,183,074 is what his Hendon Mob profile showed on 24 September 2026, and it covers live tournament results only — no online play, no cash games, no adjustment for staking. A career this concentrated in one 2012 result is also unusually stable: unlike the players above him on the list, his figure has not moved much in years, which is why we hold it on a longer re-check interval.