Kenneth Kee is Singapore’s number 1 in the All-Time Money List for professional poker. He has reached the $4 Million milestone amassing a career live cash of $4,367,263. The curious case of Kee though is that he has achieved this by having played less than 10 tournaments. He is known mainly in Asia for his impressive win at the 2018 Triton Poker Super High Roller Series. Prior to that win, no one knew who Kenneth Kee was.

Kenneth Kee – Enters the Scene

Kenneth Kee’s first recorded win was in 2011 when he was only 17 years young and still in school. Kee won a local tournament, The Leisure World Poker Series VI, Cruise getting a paycheck of less than $ 2,000. More than a year later, Kee made a respectable run at the 2012 Asian Poker Tour Macau making a little over a thousand dollars. The young Singaporean then decided to drop out of polytechnic to pursue his professional poker career in 2013. Interestingly, while barely making a blip on the poker radar, Kenneth Kee, all but disappeared from the tournament scene. According to a feature article written in Yahoo News, prior to his breakout win in 2018, Kee spent nearly a decade honing his poker skills playing mostly in cash games overseas (outside Singapore). The gamble, pardon the pun, paid off.

Returns to Live Tournaments

In his return to tournament play in July 2018 Triton Poker Super High Roller Series Jeju, Kenneth Kee quickly turned heads placing second in the HK$ 100,000 No Limit Hold’em – Short Deck Ante-Only, cashing $168,072. Just as players were rubbernecking to see who was burning the felt, Kee went on to conquer the HK$ 1 Million Main Event topping a field that included grizzled veterans American Cary Katz and Malaysia’s Richard Yong. The win made Kee an instant millionaire with a mammoth prize money of nearly $2.9 million. To date, it is his biggest career live cash and had put him immediately in the spotlight. But the Singaporean continued his unorthodox calendar in the professional scene. He still rarely shows up at mainstream tournaments. If he does, it is the Triton High Stakes Poker Series as his competition of choice.

Singaporean pro Kenneth Kee guests in latest episode of I Am High Stakes Poker series

After Kenneth Kee’s life-changing win in Jeju, Kee laid low again from the tourney scene and resurfaced nearly a year later in May 2019 at the Triton Poker Super High Roller Series Montenegro, making deep runs with a 5th place finish at the Short Deck Main Event and 4th at the Ante Only Event. His take home cash for the two finishes totaled over $1,000,000. True to form, after the big win, the Singaporean went off the live poker table grid and popped back in 3 years later on May 2022, again at a Triton Poker Series in Madrid where he finished 3rd in the Short Deck Hold’em Ante Only Event banking $241,719.

Kee’s last recorded tournament was in the Poker Dream Vietnam, Hoi An on October 2022. It looks to be a pattern that Kenneth Kee is keeping, focusing on the high-stakes and short deck game while sharpening his skills in cash games. Kenneth Kee nor his game isn’t broke, so why fix it?

*Profile by Mike Alcazaren

Kenneth Kee Wee Kiang