Nick Schulman sat with fewer than ten big blinds at the final table and ended the day as champion of the $100,000 Triton Jeju Main Event: $3,854,888 and the biggest title of the festival. The event drew 196 entries and paid out $19,600,000, settled by a pair of kings on the last hand.
The facts: a six-handed final table with no settled leader
Schulman took his seat fourth in chips with 7,300,000, behind Xu Yang (15,100,000), Bernhard Binder (9,200,000) and Gytis Lazauninkas (7,900,000). Ryuta Nakai (5,500,000) and Isaac Haxton (3,500,000) completed the table. Before that, Wesley Fei had gone out eighth for $512,000 and Danilo Velasevic seventh for $700,000.
Level 25, with blinds of 125,000/250,000, carried almost the whole story. Schulman shoved the river with 7♥5♥ after pairing his five, Lazauninkas called with K♣Q♠, and the eventual champion was left with 2,375,000 — under ten big blinds. From there:
- He doubled with A♥K♠ against Haxton's A♦3♦, ahead the whole way.
- He doubled again with J♣J♠ against Nakai's 8♥7♣, this time as the short stack calling the all-in.
Those two hands handed him back the table. The Jeju II festival closes on September 17.
Why it matters: a short stack is not a verdict
Today's champion was, for twenty minutes, the player closest to going home. That is the most useful reminder this tournament leaves behind: under ten big blinds at an expensive final table, your job is not to invent a comeback, it is to pick the next all-in well. At that depth the game turns mechanical and gets studied beforehand, not in the chair — the maths of push or fold settles most of those spots and does not require you to feel sharp.
The part almost nobody copies is what happened right before. Schulman lost a big pot bluffing the river and was left on the brink. The next hand did not arrive carrying guilt: it came in as a fresh decision. A called bluff does not change the value of your next A-K, and a player who drags the previous hand along pays for it twice. It is worth reviewing, calmly, when a bluff actually makes sense — and accepting that when it fails, the job is to let it go.
The other side of the coin belonged to the middle stacks. At a final table with seven-figure pay jumps, whoever covers the short stack is obliged to pressure him and, at the same time, obliged not to hand out cheap doubles. Calling a marginal all-in against the one player who cannot bust you is precisely the error ICM punishes hardest, and it is the one that decided this title.
The tournament delivers a seven-figure headline, but the usable material is smaller and far more repeatable: check the stacks before the cards, and treat every hand as the first one. If you want to work through final-table spots with people who study, the door is open in the community.