Asia Pickleball Open grows in Phuket with bigger international field
Phuket's Asia Pickleball Open reached its fifth edition in 2026 with 450-plus players from 29 countries, turning a post-COVID restart into a regional showcase.
The Asia Pickleball Open series reached its fifth edition in 2026, drawing more than 450 players from 29 countries and confirming Phuket’s place as the event’s launchpad. What began at Thanyapura Sports Resort from April 13-17, 2022, under Tyson McGuffin’s hosting and AFP sanction, filled 15 courts with more than 660 entries from eight countries over five days after registration opened on Aug. 31, 2021.
The next year, the field got more international and more commercial. The March 14-18, 2023 edition at Thanyapura Sports & Health Resort carried US$15,000 in prize money, and participation climbed into the high hundreds: Singapore pickleball organizers listed 359 competitors from 19 countries, while AFP’s recap counted 359 competitors from 18 countries. AFP called Phuket one of Asia’s premier pickleball destinations, and the event’s cross-border pairings showed the tournament was no longer just collecting entries but building regional connections.
The 2024 stop made the post-COVID identity explicit. The WPC Series Asia Pickleball Open ran Feb. 13-19, 2024 in Phuket, and the event page described it as the first tournament in Asia after the COVID-19 lockdown and the third edition. AFP then pushed the calendar outward with the Asia Open Pickleball Championships 2024 in Ho Chi Minh City from April 30-May 4, after chairman Hogan Lai accepted Vietnam’s proposal following a Jan. 19-21 visit. Entry fees were set at US$40 for Intermediate and Advanced players, US$50 for Open, and US$200 per team for the Team Challenge, a sign that organizers were building a deeper competition ladder rather than staging a one-off stop.
By 2026, that ladder had become a regional circuit. Vietnam News said the Asia Open Pickleball Championships 2026 in Ho Chi Minh City drew more than 1,000 athletes for US$55,000 in prizes, while Thai Rath said the WPC Asia Pickleball Open 2026 in Bangkok attracted more than 530 players from 29 countries. With AFP now led by Arvind Ramesh Prabhoo after Hogan Lai, and with the federation defining itself as a non-profit built to promote and integrate Asian nations through pickleball, the next growth centers look set to be the cities that can offer scale, prize money and multi-country access, especially Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok and Phuket.
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