Nick Schulman has won the biggest tournament of his life. The Poker Hall of Famer took down the $100,000 No-Limit Hold'em Main Event at the Triton Super High Roller Series Jeju II for $3,854,888, beating Austria's Bernhard Binder heads-up at LES A Casino to close out one of the most productive weeks any player has had on the Triton circuit this year.
It is Schulman's second Triton title. The first came in 2018, in a short-deck event at this same Jeju stop — a symmetry that is hard to ignore for a player whose career has looped back on itself more than once.
The numbers behind the win
The Main Event drew 196 entries at $100,000 a seat, building a prize pool deep enough to make the top three payouts life-changing even by super high roller standards. Schulman's $3,854,888 first-place figure surpasses his previous career-high score and pushes his lifetime live tournament earnings past $31.7 million.
What makes the week remarkable is that the Main Event was not his only deep run. Just two days earlier, on September 14, Schulman finished second in a $50,000 buy-in high roller at the same festival for $810,279 — losing heads-up to his close friend Matthew Wantman after the two agreed a deal that left barely $26,000 between the finishing positions.
Add the two together and Schulman banked close to $4.7 million in a single festival. That is the kind of run that reshapes a year.
A second act that keeps extending
Schulman's story does not follow the usual arc of a high roller regular. He first broke through in 2009, winning a World Series of Poker bracelet in $10,000 2-7 Triple Draw, and built his reputation as much on the commentary booth as on the felt. For years he was the voice of the WSOP and the World Poker Tour to millions of viewers, a broadcaster whose technical explanations set the standard that most modern poker coverage still copies.
Players who spend that much time in the booth often find their live results stall. Schulman's have done the opposite. He has now added a Triton Main Event to a bracelet collection that includes multiple mixed-game titles, and he did it in no-limit hold'em — the format where the field is deepest and the edges thinnest.
Binder, the runner-up, has been building a reputation in the European high roller circuit and now has his most significant international result to show for it. Heads-up against a player of Schulman's experience, at that buy-in level, is an education regardless of the outcome.
Why the $100K Main Event matters more than the number
Triton's Main Events have quietly become the most competitive no-limit hold'em fields in the world. The $100,000 buy-in filters out recreational entries almost entirely except for the businessmen and investors the tour deliberately courts, and the professional contingent is the top hundred or so players alive.
A 196-entry field at that price point is also a statement about the health of the high-stakes circuit. For comparison, the Jeju festival in March 2026 saw Ben Tollerene win the $100K NLH Main Event for $3,766,000 — a similar figure, suggesting the demand for these events has held steady rather than contracting. Two Jeju stops in one calendar year, both producing near-$4 million first prizes, is not something the circuit could have supported five years ago.
Jeju itself has become central to that. The South Korean island's casino infrastructure, combined with its visa-free access for most Asian travellers, has made it Triton's most reliable venue. The tour has now run multiple festivals there in a single year, something it has done nowhere else.
What this means for players
Most readers will never buy into a $100,000 event. The lessons still travel down.
Deep runs cluster. Schulman's second-place finish and his Main Event win came 48 hours apart. That is not a coincidence so much as a consequence of volume plus form — being in a good seat, in a good frame of mind, playing a lot of hands against the same opponent pool. If you are running well in a festival, the correct response is usually to play more of it, not to bank the win and go home.
Deals are a tool, not a weakness. Schulman took a deal in the $50K and did not need one in the Main Event. Both were correct decisions given the situations. Understanding the chip-to-money conversion that drives those conversations is one of the highest-value skills in tournament poker, and it applies at $50 buy-ins as much as $50,000 ones. Our guide to ICM explains the framework, and our tournaments hub covers the structures where it bites hardest.
Career longevity beats career peaks. Schulman's biggest score came 17 years after his first bracelet. Poker rewards players who stay in the game and keep adapting far more than it rewards anyone who has one hot year. That means bankroll discipline above everything — see our bankroll management guide for the arithmetic that keeps players in action long enough for the big score to arrive.
Where the circuit goes next
Triton Jeju II produced a series of firsts alongside Schulman's win — maiden titles for Wantman, Pedro Padilha and Alex Anton among them, plus Joao Simao's $7.25 million Invitational victory from a two-big-blind stack. For a festival to deliver that many distinct storylines in a fortnight is unusual even for Triton.
For players tracking the high roller calendar, the autumn schedule now turns toward the Poker Masters in Las Vegas in October and the WPT World Championship at Wynn in late November, before WSOP Paradise closes the year in the Bahamas in December with $120 million in guarantees across 20 bracelet events.
Schulman will be at some of them. On this form, that should worry the rest of the field.
If you want to follow the high-stakes circuit more closely, our high stakes section tracks the major festivals, and the poker on TV guide lists where the Triton livestreams and other broadcasts air. Players looking to build toward bigger buy-ins through online satellites can compare structures across our real money poker rankings and check the tournament schedules at Americas Cardroom and BetOnline.
Results are as reported by the Triton Poker Series and contemporaneous tournament coverage. Prize figures are in US dollars.