SINGAPORE, April 11 — Malaysian ‘human calculator’ Yaashwin Sarawanan finished second in the finals of Asia’s Got Talent 2019 competition tonight.

Taiwanese magician Eric Chien was crowned the winner of the talent show.

"It was beyond my expectations to be in the top two. From 200 acts, it narrowed down to nine, and today, I was left with Chien,” Yaashwin, 15, told Bernama and Harian Metro when met after the Results Show here.

As the top two, Yaashwin had to do a closing performance and chose a "Back to Skool” theme, in which he requested the involvement of all the three judges — David Foster, Anggun Cipta Sasmi and Jay Park — on the stage with him.

He improvised his grand finals act called "calendar problem” where he was able to identify the exact day of a particular event by "calculating” the date, month and year in the calendar.

Foster tested him to name the day he received his first Grammy Award, while Anggun made him backtracked the day her first daughter was born, and Jay Park, his father’s birthday. 

All of the judges got the right answers from Yaashwin, the student of SMK Bandar Tun Hussein Onn 2 who enrolled in an abacus and mental arithmetic class when he was seven years old and emerged as champion in the International Abacus and Mental Arithmetic Competition in 2017.

As the winner of Asia’s Got Talent, Eric Chien, who recently won the Close-up Magic category of Fédération Internationale des Sociétés Magiques, aka the World Championships of Magic, received a grand prize of US$100,000.

Meanwhile, Malaysian female group, NAMA, settled at the bottom three together with street dancers Junior Good Vibes from the Philippines and cry wheel dancer Yang Shih Hao of Taiwan.

All the nine acts solely relied on a week-long online public voting.

The other acts were acrobatic dancers Power Duo of the Philippines, Taiwanese dance crew Maniac Family, Indonesian singer Siti Saniyah, and shadow storyteller Shadow Ace from the Philippines.

Asia’s Got Talent is the 67th adaptation of the Guinness-World-Record-breaking hit "Got Talent” format, currently airs in 186 countries. — Bernama