Park Yu Cheung Sets New Record For Tournament Cashes with 62 in 2017

With seven cashes at the 2017 Asia Championship of Poker (ACOP) in Macau last month, Park Yu 'Sparrow' Cheung has recorded a whopping 62 cashes in 2017, breaking the record for most cashes in a year.

Live tournament records kept by the Hendon Mob database show the previous record of most cashes to be 56, accomplished by John Zentner III in 2013. Cheung trailed Zentner by only one cash prior to joining ACOP action in October, then commenced to shatter the old record and establish a new mark with almost two months left in the year.

Also of note is that Cheung's cashes at ACOP that included a 3rd place finish in the HK$11,000 Six-Handed Championship for HK$109,200 ($13,987) pushed him over $1 million in live tournament winnings with $1,029,442.

From Accountant to HKPPA Chairman

Cheung is a former CPA who left his 9-5 gig behind when his winnings at poker began outperforming his salary as an accountant. The Hong Kong native has been a poker pro for the past seven years and enjoyed his largest ever cash in February at the HK$50,000 ($6,434) Macau Poker Cup 26 where he topped 101 entries to win HK$981,500 ($126,503).     

Sparrow is the chairman of the Hong Kong Poker Players Association (HKPPA), a group he founded a few years ago with Alan King Lun Lau, Ray Chiu, Stephen Lai, and Jason Lo. HKPPA has over 1,000 members who share poker strategies and information among themselves. Players of all nationalities are accepted for membership.

One of the aims of the HKPPA is to promote poker in Hong Kong, where it is still illegal to play for money. The association hosts free tournaments and provides instruction to newbies as a means to achieve that goal.

Cashing Machines

Cheung's earnings from the 62 cashes this year total more than $300,000. More than half of those cashes were achieved in Macau, with another large chunk of them from tournament action in Manila. Sparrow also recorded cashes in Australia, South Korea and Las Vegas.

Trailing Cheung in cashes this year is Taiwan's Pete Yen Han Chen with 54. It looks like Chen has a good chance of breaking Zentner's old record of 56 before the year is up. Both of them were knocking on the door of that record in 2016, Cheung with 48 last year and Chen with 51.

The tournament ranking cash list recorded by the Hendon Mob database does not include results from recurring events such as tournaments scheduled daily, weekly and monthly. Zentner had three such cashes in his previous record-setting year.

Zentner's 56 cashes in 2013 produced earnings of slightly more than $100,000, the largest of which was a 5th place finish in the $225 California State Poker Championship for $27,110. He has lifetime winnings of $611,664.