Trial By Fire: Nick Schulman Learning While Winning at Short Deck Hold'em
The 2018 Triton Super High Roller Series Jeju is in full swing in South Korea with the PokerNews Live Reporting team on hand over the next week to deliver all the action from five different events, culminating with the HK$2,000,000 Main Event starting next Monday, July 30.
The first event of the series just completed yesterday, with Nick Schulman managing to top a 61-entry field in the HK$100,000 Short-Deck Ante-Only Event to earn a HK$2,135,000 first prize (worth about $272,000 USD).
The feat was all the more remarkable given the fact that Schulman was playing his very first short-deck hold'em tournament, proving that having familiarity with a variety of variants as well as tournament strategy can position a player well when encountering something new.
Schulman spoke with PokerNews earlier in the week about finding his way in a new format, showing characteristic humility about the inevitablity of making mistakes when learning something new.
"Playing with people I've never seen is great, playing a new game is great, and I'm having a lot of fun," says Schulman.
In short-deck hold'em (a.k.a. "six-plus hold'em") the deuces through fives are tossed out, which obviously skews hand values considerably. Also of note is the fact that the hand rankings differ from regular hold'em, with three of kind ranked higher than a straight and a flush beating a full house.
Schulman was involved in a number of intriguing hands on his way to the victory, including this one in which he flopped a set of sixes, improved to a full house on the turn, then made a thin value bet on the river that got called. Take a look and listen to Lex Veldhuis's commentary, and hear Schulman humorously express some confusion of his own once the hand is complete:
Schulman spoke further with PokerNews about short-deck hold'em, the Triton Series in general, and other topics including his role as a poker commentator in "Nick Schulman Hops Onto the Felt for His First Short Deck Event at Triton Poker Jeju."
