Monetrey won Cambodia’s Finest Voice on 17 October 2026 and will represent Cambodia at the first Eurovision Song Contest Asia with “I Let You Go”. The win, at the AEON Mall Sen Sok Event Hall in Phnom Penh, closes the Bangkok field at eleven complete entries with 28 days to spare before the grand final on 14 November. Cambodia was the last of the eleven broadcasters to choose, and TV5 Cambodia was the last to be given a date at all.
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“I Let You Go” is a ballad performed in Khmer, English and French — the only entry in the Eurovision Asia field sung in three languages. Monetrey beat six other acts under the contest’s standard national-selection weighting, and the full Bangkok line-up is now settled.
How Monetrey Won Cambodia’s Finest Voice
Seven acts competed in the one-night final, hosted by MC Bonika and MC Davuth and streamed on the official Eurovision Song Contest YouTube channel rather than kept to domestic television. That choice matters more for Cambodia than for most of the field: TV5 has no history of staging large televised music selections, and putting the show on the contest’s own channel gave the international portion of the vote something to watch.
The result was decided under §8.1 of the official Voting Terms: 40% Cambodian public vote, 40% professional jury, 20% rest-of-world online vote. This is worth stating plainly because it is routinely got wrong. Several outlets paste “50% jury, 50% televote” into national-final coverage; that is §8.2, the rule for the Grand Final in Bangkok, and it does not apply to any of the eleven national selections.
The competing acts and songs were:
- Monetrey — “I Let You Go” — winner
- KESORRR — “Goddess” — top three
- Nov Dana — “Smoke on the Mekong” — top three
- GOOFY — “Fly” — unplaced
- Sam Rocker — “Angels” — unplaced
- Satiya — “Motherland” — unplaced
- MC PICH — “Nor Na Ke Nor (Who’s That)” — unplaced
One honest caveat on that order. TV5 Cambodia published no scoreboard, no points and no placings below third, and the outlets that did order the podium disagree with each other. Aussievision has KESORRR second and Nov Dana third; ESCBeat reverses them; Eurovoix marks both simply as “top three” and declines to rank them. Only first place is beyond dispute. We have listed KESORRR second because Aussievision is the source closest to the organisers, but we are not claiming to know.
Cambodia is now the eighth of eleven broadcasters to withhold a full result. That is not a Cambodian failing so much as a contest-wide habit: Vietnam published no top three at all, Thailand and Bangladesh stopped at third, and Nepal left eight of eleven placings unpublished.
Who Is Monetrey?
Less is known about Monetrey than about any other act heading to Bangkok, and we are not going to pad that out. Neither TV5 Cambodia nor the organisers have published his real name, age, hometown, label or discography. Aussievision describes him as a rising Cambodian pop artist blending contemporary pop with emotional melodies and Khmer influences, with a following that skews young and visual storytelling drawn from cinema, fashion and youth culture. That is the sum of the published biography as of 19 October.
Two small things are worth recording. His name is rendered “Monterey” by several outlets — including in Eurovoix’s own opening sentence, which then uses “Monetrey” everywhere else. The official Eurovision Song Contest Asia site and the contest’s photo captions use Monetrey, and so do we. And no verified first-party social account for him has been confirmed, so this site publishes none; the same caution applies that kept the Philippines’ Carmelle without a listed X handle, because two rival accounts exist in her name.
No studio recording of “I Let You Go” has been released. What exists is the national-final performance. The songwriters have not been published either.
What It Means for Bangkok
The practical consequence is a calendar one. Cambodia’s final was the last unresolved date in the season, and it ran six weeks later than the “early September” window TV5 had originally indicated. That left Monetrey with 28 days between winning his ticket and standing on the Bangkok stage — the shortest runway of any act in the contest, against Bhutan’s Nyendra, who has had since 11 August.
Short runways are not only a rehearsal problem. Several of this field’s entries are being revamped between selection and the final: Vietnam’s “Em Tiên” is being reworked for a more global sound, Laos’s Thinla has said the released “Bae” is only a demo, and Bhutan is adding traditional instrumentation to “Lhayi Semo”. Monetrey has four weeks to do anything of the kind, release a studio version and stage a three-language ballad in an arena. Our Eurovision Asia 2026 hub tracks every act and date in the field, and the Cambodia country page carries the full selection history.
It also leaves the contest with its first completed line-up — and, two days later, its first disqualification. On 18 October the organisers ruled Mongolia’s winning song ineligible because it had been released in 2018, and promoted the runner-up instead; we cover that in Mongolia’s song swap. A field can be complete and still not be final.
The Betting Position: There Is Still Almost Nothing to Bet On
No fixed-odds bookmaker prices Eurovision Asia 2026. Not one. If you are looking for a Cambodia price at a traditional sportsbook, there isn’t one, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. Our bookmaker coverage explains which firms price the European contest and why none has touched this one.
One venue does list it. Kalshi, the CFTC-regulated US exchange, opened an eleven-country Eurovision Asia 2026 winner market on 14 September 2026, closing 2 January 2027. Read it with care, because it is extremely thin. As at our 19 October read, the last trades across the eleven contracts summed to 264% of a one-winner field, nine of the eleven contracts had no bid at all, and Laos alone accounted for roughly 70% of the 3,538 contracts ever traded.
Cambodia’s own contract is among the most untouched on the board. It last printed at 4c, it has no bid, and the offer sits at 92c — which is not a spread so much as an absence of a market. Sixty-one contracts have ever traded. The result on 17 October did not move it, in either direction, and that is consistent with the rest of the board: Nepal completing its entry on 7 October produced no trade, and neither did Mongolia on 10 October. The two occasions this market has moved, it moved by somebody lifting an unbid offer — Vietnam from 10c to 84c on 5 October, the Philippines from 53c to 95c between 10 and 11 October — which left two countries simultaneously marked as near-certain winners of a contest only one can win.
The honest reading is that a 4c Cambodia mark tells you nothing about Monetrey’s chances. It tells you that nobody has traded the contract. Our winner odds page keeps the live board, and we restate the caveats every time we quote a price from it.
Polymarket, meanwhile, still lists no Eurovision Asia market at all — our eighteenth consecutive check found nothing, on 19 October 2026.
What Happens Next
With the field complete, the season moves from selection to production. The things worth watching for Cambodia specifically are a studio release of “I Let You Go”, confirmation of its writers, and whether the three-language structure survives into the staged version — multilingual entries tend to lose a language on the way to an arena, and the French section is the most exposed.
The Eurovision Song Contest Asia grand final is on 14 November 2026 at the One Bangkok Forum, decided 50/50 between public vote and jury under §8.2. Eleven countries, eleven songs, and for the first time since March, no empty slots.
Photo: Eurovision Song Contest Asia. Sources checked 19 October 2026.