CHEN is in the N-1 Victory.

Info credit FIGHTFUL, CHEN and Singapore Wrestling Society

Pro Wrestling NOAH announced the full field for the LINE Yahoo! presents N-1 VICTORY 2026 this week, and the Singaporean is in A Block, marked on the key art with the 初出場 first-timer tag and billed as the "Southeast Asian Standout" with the flag behind him. No wrestler from this region has ever been placed in a tournament of this level in a major Japanese promotion.

The tournament opens on September 12 at Korakuen Hall and finals on October 4 at Yoyogi National Gymnasium 2nd Hall. The winner gets a shot at the GHC Heavyweight Title.

The Block He Has To Get Through

The N-1 is NOAH's annual heavyweight round-robin, two blocks of eight, everyone in your block once, block winners meet in the final. It is the company's G1, and NOAH does not hand out spots in it as a favour.

A Block: Kaito Kiyomiya, Yoshiki Inamura, Shane Haste, Yuki Iino, Kazuyuki Fujita, CHEN, Takashi Sugiura, Alpha Wolf.

B Block: KENTA, Kenoh, KOUGA, Manabu Soya, Tetsuya Endo, OZAWA, Masa Kitamiya, Titus Alexander.

Masa Kitamiya won the 2025 tournament, and GHC Heavyweight Champion Tetsuya Naito is not competing, only the third time the reigning champion has been left out.

A Block is a rough draw. Kiyomiya is the franchise. Sugiura and Fujita will make him earn every minute. Iino and Inamura are the heavyweight engine room NOAH is building around, and Haste hits like a truck. Seven singles matches at that level, across three weeks, is a different kind of test to anything CHEN has had in his career so far.

For those unaware CHEN started his career in Singapore Pro Wrestling SPW as Trexxus, one of the top stars in the company's life until the COVID ere, then he was signed to WWE as Dante Chen, the first Singaporean to hold a contract with the company who wrestled for the NXT and Evolve brands. Since being released earlier this year, things have been somewhat quiet for CHEN with a few US indy appearances. The NOAH announcement marks his

The Overdrive Question

Now, the bit Singaporean fans are already asking about.

SPW runs Overdrive on September 18. That lands six days after the N-1 opens, right in the thick of the round-robin. Singapore to Tokyo is about seven hours in the air and there is no time difference worth worrying about, so the geography is not the problem. Wrestlers have done far worse for far less.

The problem is the schedule. NOAH runs the N-1 in tight clusters, and a debut entrant in a block that stacked is not going to be given a weekend off in the middle of it. If CHEN has a block match on or around the 18th, the conversation is over before it starts. If there is a gap, it becomes a matter of what NOAH will allow and whether CHEN wants to spend two travel days in the middle of the most important tournament of his life.

And that is assuming he wants to be there at all, which is its own question right now.

Andruew Tang Has Been Saying Something

The Statement and CHEN were once as tight as anyone in that locker room. Same scene, same era, both carrying SPW.

That is clearly over. At SPW Reckoning, Tang cut an in-ring promo full of pointed references to somebody who left, somebody who got the opportunities, somebody who does not come back. He named nobody. The crowd did not need him to. Since then he has kept it running on Instagram, posting regularly with captions vague enough to deny and specific enough to land.

So the shape of it is obvious. A Singaporean who has just been placed in one of Japan's biggest tournaments, a former best friend building a public grievance one post at a time, and a home promotion with a show on September 18.

Nothing is announced. Tang has not said a name. SPW has not advertised CHEN for anything, and the calendar may well decide this before anybody gets a say. This is of course all just exciting speculation rather than built on any rumors on when or if CHEN will respond to his former ally.

But if the timing ever does line up, everyone knows exactly what that match is.

First things first. Korakuen Hall, September 12.