What happened
Nick Schulman won the $100,000 buy-in Main Event at the Triton Super High Roller Series Jeju II on Wednesday at Les A Casino in Jeju, South Korea, taking $3,854,888 from a 196-entry field and a $19,600,000 prize pool. It is the largest score of his career and his second Triton title, the first having come in the same room in 2018. Heads-up began with Schulman holding a three-to-one lead over Bernhard Binder, and the two immediately made a deal worth $3,714,888 to Schulman and $3,080,112 to Binder, which left $140,000 and the trophy as the only things still in dispute. On the last hand Schulman limped the button for 1,000,000 with two kings, Binder raised to 3,500,000 with king-jack, and the board ran ace-eight-deuce, five, ten. Binder bet the flop and the turn, checked the river, called Schulman's shove for his last chips and was shown the kings. Binder took $3,080,112 for second. Two days earlier Schulman had finished second in a $50,000 event at the same festival for $810,279, at the time the sixth-largest cash of his career.
Why it matters
Poker's biggest final table now works like a labor negotiation with a ceremonial appendix. The money was settled before a card was dealt heads-up, and the part everybody watched was the two percent of it nobody had bothered to secure. Schulman's career total passed $31.7 million on the strength of a week in which he lost one tournament and won another.
