Nick Schulman Wins the Triton Jeju Main Event Eight Years Later
Nick Schulman won the Triton Jeju Main Event in emphatic fashion, closing out the $100,000 buy-in championship at the Triton Poker Series Jeju II festival for a career-high $3,854,888. The win marks the 41-year-old American’s second Triton trophy, arriving exactly eight years after his first, and pushes his lifetime tournament earnings to roughly $31.7 million. For a player already enshrined in the Poker Hall of Fame, the victory is another reminder that Schulman’s game has aged remarkably well against a field stacked with some of the toughest high-stakes regulars in the world.
A Stacked Field Reduced to Two
The $100,000 no-limit hold’em Main Event drew 196 entries, building a total prize pool of $19,600,000 in a tournament that doubled as one of the marquee events of the Jeju II series. Schulman had to survive a final table that read like a high-stakes who’s who, including Bernhard Binder, Gytis Lazauninkas, Xu Yang, Ryuta Nakai, Isaac Haxton, Danilo Velasevic, Wesley Fei, and Roberto Perez. Binder, the Austrian former WSOP bracelet winner, ultimately emerged as Schulman’s final opponent, and the two negotiated a heads-up deal before playing it out for the trophy and the remaining difference. Binder’s runner-up finish was still worth $3,080,112, a reminder of just how deep the pool of money ran even for the player who fell just short.
Kings Hold Up in the Final Hand
The last hand of the tournament turned into a clean coin-flip-style cooler. Schulman limped on the button with king-king for 1,000,000, and Binder raised to 3,500,000 out of the big blind with king-jack. The flop came ace-eight-two with two hearts, and the money eventually went in on a board that never improved Binder’s king-high holding. Schulman’s pair of kings held, ending the tournament and sealing the biggest single cash of his career. It was a fitting way to close out a marathon final table, decided not by a bad beat but by one of poker’s classic premium-pair confrontations.
A Career Full Circle
Schulman’s first Triton title came in 2018, and the eight-year gap between trophies says as much about the strength of the Triton lineup as it does about variance at the top of the game. In the years between those two wins, Schulman built a resume that includes eight WSOP bracelets, a World Poker Tour Main Event title, and a long run as one of the most recognizable faces in televised high-stakes poker thanks to his commentary work. Notably, this Main Event win came just two days after Schulman finished runner-up in a $50,000 high roller at the same Jeju II festival for $810,279, meaning he banked well over $4.6 million across two events in a single week. After the win, Schulman said he was ready to head home to his wife, joking that “the champ is coming home soon,” a light touch after one of the most lucrative stretches of his career.
What the Win Means for the 2026 Season
Beyond the prize money, the victory carries real weight in the season-long Card Player Player of the Year race. Schulman picked up 1,680 POY points for the win, enough to move him into the outright lead in the 2026 standings. With Triton’s Super High Roller Series continuing to hand out some of the largest POY point allocations of any tour due to its buy-in levels and field strength, a result like this can reshape the leaderboard in a single week. It also reinforces Triton’s status as the preferred stage for the game’s best players to test themselves against one another for stakes that dwarf most other tournament series on the calendar.
Jeju II Continues to Deliver Fireworks
The Main Event was only one storyline from a Jeju II festival that produced multiple seven-figure scores across its schedule, underlining why Triton has become appointment viewing for high-stakes poker fans regardless of nationality. Fields at this level rarely include recreational money; nearly every entry belongs to a professional with the bankroll and skill to compete at $100,000 and up, which makes final tables like this one especially instructive for students of the modern game. Watching how players like Schulman balance limping with premium hands, sizing three-bets, and negotiating deals at the top of a payout structure offers real lessons, even for recreational players who will never buy into an event at this level themselves.
For readers looking to understand how tournament strategy shifts as stacks get shallower and pay jumps get larger, which is exactly the dynamic that shaped the closing stages of this Main Event, Poker Pro Academy’s WSOP guide breaks down bracelet and championship-level tournament structures in more approachable terms.
Looking Ahead
With the Jeju II Main Event now behind him, Schulman heads into the rest of the 2026 season atop the Player of the Year race and with a career-best cash to his name. For Triton, the result adds another marquee champion to a series that has increasingly become the sport’s premier stage for the highest of high rollers, and for fans it offers one more reminder that even at 41, with a Hall of Fame plaque and eight bracelets already secured, Nick Schulman is still finding new peaks to reach.
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