Vietnamese Pros Shine as PPA Tour Asia Kicks Off in Ho Chi Minh City

Vietnam’s best pickleball players are no longer just filling out the draw on the PPA Tour Asia circuit. At the MB Hanoi Cup at My Dinh Indoor Athletics Arena, they forced the imported names to sweat, and in one of the day’s sharpest results, Hoang Nam Ly knocked off No. 2 seed Christian Alshon 12-10, 0-11, 12-10.

That match had all the ingredients of a statement win and a controversy, too. The deciding game turned on a match-point line call on Grandstand Court, where no video replay was available, but the larger point was harder to miss: local players were winning enough meaningful points to change the conversation around the tour. PPA Tour Asia reported that all four men’s singles qualifying spots on opening day went to Vietnamese players, a clean snapshot of how deep the home field has become.

The backdrop matters. PPA Tour Asia and MLP Asia were launched in November 2024 to build world-class pickleball across Asia, and the 2026 schedule has already grown into a 10-stop calendar across seven markets. It will end with the Hong Kong Slam, which the tour bills as the biggest professional pickleball tournament ever staged in Asia, with up to US$1.1 million in prize money. That kind of prize pool can pull in the sport’s biggest names, and Hanoi did exactly that, drawing the largest traveling group of US-based pros the tour has brought to the region so far, including Anna Leigh Waters and Ben Johns.

The results still said a lot about the region’s direction. Todd Boss noted that Hong Kit Wong, Hoang Nam Ly and Hien Truong all made deep runs, while the men’s singles field had already been softened up by the qualifying surge from Vietnamese players. That is not what a developmental circuit looks like. That is what a credible tour looks like when the locals stop acting like guests.

Vietnam’s next test will come even closer to the country’s center of gravity. The Ho Chi Minh City Open is scheduled for August 6-9, 2026, with US$70,000 in prize money and 500 ranking points, and the city already has a recent history of producing champions. At the 2025 MB Vietnam Open in Ho Chi Minh City, Meghan Dizon and Alix Truong won women’s doubles gold, while AJ Koller and Jonathan Truong took men’s doubles gold. If that pattern holds, the question in Asia is no longer whether local players can keep up. It is whether the imported stars can keep pace with them.