Bin Weng Poker Journey: A Rising Star on the Tournament Circuit
9 minutes
Last Updated: January 11, 2024
For many years now, we have seen new players come out of nowhere and take the poker world by storm, but few have done it the way Bin Weng has.
Unlike many of the tournament phenoms who are in their early 20s or 30s, Bin Weng only really made it in the poker tournament scene at the age of 40, showing that it’s never too late to take poker seriously and learn how to compete with the very best players in the world.
Despite his recent success and fame, Bin Weng remains a fairly obscure name to many poker fans, which may well be the reason you have come to this page.
If you too have been wondering who Bin Weng is, where he comes from, and how his success in poker came about, keep reading and find out all there is to know about the hottest tournament player in the world right now and the reigning GPI and 2023 WPT player of the year.
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Bin Weng Early Life and Path to Poker
Bin Weng was born in China, and unlike many poker players whose families moved to the USA at a very early age, Weng only made it to America when he was already 18.
He may have been brought up in China, but he got accustomed to American lifestyle fairly quickly and fell in love with the game of poker along the way.
Weng has been a poker player for over 15 years, but he spent most of that time sticking to cash games and working a “regular” job along the way.
He was doing quite well for himself, working as a manager of a restaurant in Long Island, New York, which he was also a partial owner of. Weng worked shifts as a waiter as well and helped make sure the place ran smoothly, but poker was always his true calling.
The cash game specialist never played many tournaments in his poker career, but seeing the likes of his personal hero Daniel Negreanu on TV led him to believe that he too could someday become a famous tournament poker player.
Bin watched a tournament stream where Anthony Zinno came out on top, and decided that he had to give it a shot and try to follow in the footsteps of the likes of Zinno and Negreanu.
Despite his wife not being too in love with the idea of Weng pursuing tournament poker, he went for it anyway, and entered his first poker tournaments along the East Coast in 2017.
It took a few years for Weng to get some serious results, but it was in 2023 that he truly took the poker world by storm and showed everyone what he could do.
Bin Weng Professional Poker Career
Technically speaking, Bin Weng recorded his first tournament cash back in 2015, but it was not before 2017 that he would start playing a significant number of tournaments.
That year, Weng focused on playing on the East Coast, entering events in Atlantic City, Bensalem, and the world-famous Foxwoods Casino.
He had moderate success right off the bat and came close to scoring his first six-figure score in August that year, winning $28,380 for his fifth place finish in Parx Casino Big Stax XXII, an event that awarded $120k to the champion.
Image courtesy of WPT
Despite falling short of the top prize, this deep run certainly encouraged Weng, who went on to play even more live events in the following years.
Over the course of 2018 and 2019, Weng kept playing as many events as he could in the East Coast casinos, once again running deep in the Parx Casino Big Stax XXXI and coming third for just under $40k in September 2019.
Weng’s first final table appearance in a major poker event came in early 2020, when he came fifth in the $3,500 WPT Borgata Winter Poker Open for $187,900. This was also his first six-figure score, which showed him he has what it takes to compete against the toughest competitors and for big money.
Weng went back to the grind after this event and made a deep run in the 2021 $10,000 Wynn Millions event, finishing 23rd and sharing the spotlight with the likes of Maria Ho, Jesse Sylvia, and eventual champion Andrew Moreno.
In late 2021, Bin was playing a mix of high roller events and low stakes tournaments, demonstrating his willingness to grind out a bankroll but also play against the very best players out there.
Bin Weng at the World Series of Poker
A handful of wins in smaller events leading into the 2021 WSOP gave him the confidence and desire to compete in Las Vegas as well, regardless of the opposition.
That year, Weng made two WSOP final tables, coming 5th in a $5k Short-Handed event as well as 6th in the $50k High Roller, both very tough events with elite playing fields.
In March 2022, he came out on top in a stacked field of a PGT Wynn High Rollers Series event, winning $189k and once again proving he had what it takes to play against the most skillful tournament players out there.
For the rest of the year, he would go on to get to the final table of many events with varying buy-ins, but could not quite close the deal or make that big breakthrough.
The breakthrough he was waiting for came in the very first days of 2023, as he entered the $5,300 “The Return” at Borgata in Atlantic City, and won the whole thing for a cool $1,000,000.
Bin Weng now finally had that major tournament title to his name, along with a million dollar score, which only set the pace for the rest of an amazing year.
2023 – The Year of Bin Weng
After making several deep runs in tournaments along the East Coast, Weng travelled out to Las Vegas in February and took down a $1,700 WSOPC Las Vegas Main Event for another $227k in cash, and his first WSOPC ring.
For most players, these two titles alone would have been enough to say they had an amazing year, and for the China-born pro it was certainly a pinnacle of his poker career.
Yet, things were only getting started for Weng, who kept going hard over the course of 2023 and made it one of the best years anyone has had in tournament poker since its earliest days.
In the spring, Weng achieved something few players would have thought possible, as he simultaneously made final tables of two separate WPT events, which were set to be played with a delay.
What’s even more, Weng was the chip leader going into both, and this is about the time his name started appearing in all the headlines of poker media around the world.
Sure enough, Weng closed the deal in the WPT Seminole Hard Rock Showdown in Hollywood, taking home $1.13 million in the process, his new biggest career score.
Just a week later, he came fourth in the other WPT event at Choctaw, Durant, this time winning “just” $143k.
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It was a big summer for Bin as well, as he travelled out to Las Vegas to play the WSOP and managed to record seven cashes, including a 14th place out of 7,300 players in the Lucky 7s event.
Yet, the highlight of his summer came in a WPT event he played in the midst of the Series, the $10,500 EveryOne for One Drop, where he took down the title and $2.23 million in cash, once again beating his own record.
The Grind Never Ends
Weng could have called it a day and not play a single tournament for the rest of the year, but the grinder he is, he just kept on going.
After a series of cashes over the next few months, he once again came on top in a $1,600 Wynn Fall Classic event in October and won just over $147k for this one.
A couple of small cashes in the remaining WPT events of the year were enough to ensure he would capture the WPT Player of the Year title, while a victory in the $25k WPT High Roller at the Wynn would net him another $958k in cold hard cash.
In the end, Bin won over $6.5 million in cash in 2023, without playing most of the biggest buy-in events out there or any of the Triton Poker Tour events.
Instead, his millions came mostly from events with buy-ins of $10k and under, making it probably one of the biggest years any player has ever had in terms of sheer ROI in the high stakes tournament scene.
At the start of 2024, the champion was honored with the titles of WPT Player of the Year and GPI Player of the Year, both of which he earned with his incredible and nearly unprecedented year.
Weng’s run mimicked the likes of Phil Ivey and Daniel Negreanu, who were among the few players to score winnings in the high millions over a single year in the era before all the ultra-high buy-in events.
All that remains now is for us to see how far Weng can take it and whether or not he has the stamina and desire to keep the grind going and remain a big factor in the tournament circuit for years to come.
Bin Weng Net Worth
Image courtesy of PokerGO
The net worth of big name poker players is something fans are always interested in, but that is not always made very public.
In the case of Bin Weng net worth, we can make some decent guesses, considering the fact he has not been in the poker world for too long and that his career before poker was one that likely did not yield him a massive net worth.
We could speculate that Bin Weng’s net worth before turning to tournament poker was in the vicinity of $1 million, taking into account his career as a restaurant co-owner and his winnings in the low stakes cash games he was playing.
Beyond that, we now know that Weng has won some $8.5 million playing tournaments, a good half of which is probably profit (if not more), considering the fact he does not play the ultra-high roller events.
All that said, we can estimate that Bin Weng net worth, after all the expenses, living costs, and taxes comes close to $3 million, a good chunk of which might be invested in various ways.
Whether Bin plays 100% of his own action or has investors who buy pieces of his equity in every event he plays remains a mystery, but one thing that is for sure is that he is doing a lot better after 2023 than he was when the year had just started.
Where Is Bin Weng Today?
If you are wondering where Bin Weng is today, all you need to do is look up the tournament poker schedule and find the biggest poker festival running in the US. It is very likely Weng can be found there!
Despite all the big scores he had over the course of 2023, Bin Weng remains as dedicated to the grind as ever, playing events across all buy-in levels but the highest ones, and continually making deep runs and winning big.
The discipline Bin Weng has shown throughout his tournament poker career is one of the hallmarks of a great poker player, and one that will likely take him to even greater heights if he can keep on paddling and doing what he does best.
Should his form and his momentum continue, Bin Weng has all the makings of a poker Hall of Famer, so it remains to be seen whether or not he will keep on coming back and going for glory for enough years to actually make it into that elite club of the very best poker players in the world.
