Winfred Yu on the Triton Super High Rollers Series Poker tournaments

With the top poker pros heading to Macau, Paul Phua introduces a video interview with the Triton Super High Roller Series organizer: Winfred Yu. https://www.paulphuapoker.com/winfred-yu-triton-super-high-roller-series/

What is your involvement with the Triton Super High Roller Series?

Winfred Yu: Why we built Triton is, as you know, Paul [Phua] and Richard [Yong] and the Chinese VIPs or the Chinese businessmen who created this noise about the nosebleed cash games in Macau. The mystery businessmen – I guess everybody heard about The Chairman, Shanghai [Wong] and all these mystery players who were coming in it, so it becomes very interesting for people to see them to be finally in the limelight in poker, or poker tournaments. Mostly people think they are in the back room in the cash game somewhere. And if there’s enough interest, now they think “Ooh, a tournament!” It’s fun, and it’s exciting. So we built this brand Triton specially for Paul and Richard to host the VIPs and we’re bringing them in to different exciting cities all over the world. Now this time we are in beautiful Montenegro, in the Maestral Resort and Aman; people love it over here and it’s very relaxing. So now we are building a very good structure or very consistent structures for the VIPs because they will be asking, like, “Okay, what’s the buy in? This buy in, what’s the structure, what’s the level?” They’re now starting to get into this.

What the importance of blind structures for those tournaments?

Winfred Yu: Before, in the first few years back they had no experience about poker tournaments so they won’t even know the blinds are going up, the structures and how important it is, how many big blinds I should shove my stack in. So now they are starting to ask me all these questions, looking for information. So not only smaller Chinese players or professional Chinese players are more and more serious about the tournaments, as you see, like, I guess like PokerStars, they combine I guess their APPT and the EPT into the Pokerfest [PokerStars Festival], some things are… from the beginning to the end of the festival they have different buy ins to fit every level of player. So everybody in Asia is very much gearing it up.

As we go back to Triton, it’s very unique. It’s mainly for businessmen, the top pros, because the buy in starts at a minimum of 250k Hong Kong dollars (HKD) which is around 32,000 US dollars. Our main events are always starting at 1 million HKD, and in Macau, the next one, the buys ins will be 300k HKD for the Six-Max, as we usually have as a warm-up event, and the Main Event will be a 2 million HKD buy in. So the prize pool is going to be huge, and more exciting.

Who plays in the Triton tournaments?

Winfred Yu: For this event we attract a lot of Chinese businessmen, entrepreneurs, finance specialists, and also of course if you guys look at our videos a lot of top pros like Tom Dwan, Ivey, John Juanda, now this time you’ll see Sam Trickett, Richard’s son Wai Kin [Yong], who took two Main Events. Of course, how can we say, Fedor Holz, the guy who took most of my trophies! I think when going to Macau it will be a much wider field, with a lot of mystery Chinese businessmen attacking the field. With the pros never knowing how they play, it might have a very different result than when we are hosting in major casinos out of Chinese areas.