Nick Schulman Wins Poker Masters Event #1: $50,000 NLHE for $918,000
The first event of the inaugural Poker Masters is in the books, and Nick Schulman finished as the first winner in this five-event series.
By claiming a $918,000 prize, Schulman takes the early lead in the Poker Masters competition, which will see the player with the best results (highest total earnings) throughout all five tournaments (four $50,000 buy-in tournaments capped by a $100,000 freeze out finale) – win The Poker Masters Purple Jacket™.
Schulman, who has been lauded for prior commentary on PokerGO, has been on a heater this year. Back in August, he won the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open $50,000 Super High Roller for $440,000, meaning he’s now won two $50K events in five weeks.
With the second-largest score of his career, Schulman, a World Poker Tour champ and two-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner, vaulted to over $10 million in lifetime earnings,
Event #1: $50,000 NLHE Final Results
| Place | Winner | Country | Prize |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | Nick Schulman | USA | $918,000 |
| 2nd | Matt Hyman | USA | $561,000 |
| 3rd | Stefan Schillhabel | Germany | $306,000 |
| 4th | Steffen Sontheimer | Germany | $204,000 |
| 5th | Dominik Nitsche | Germany | $178,500 |
| 6th | Koray Aldemir | Germany | $153,000 |
| 7th | Adrian Mateos | Spain | $127,500 |
| 8th | Daniel Negreanu | Canada | $102,000 |
Event #1: $50,000 NLHE began with 51 entries, but after Day 1 the field was whittled down to the final table of seven. They returned on Thursday to play down to a winner, and it didn’t take long for things to heat up.
Early on Spain’s Adrian Mateos fell to the short stack and jammed from the hijack holding queen-jack. Dominik Nitsche called from the small blind with pocket sixes, and while Mateos paired his jack on the flop, a six on the turn put the final nail in his coffin.
In the very next hand, Koray Aldemir tried to squeeze with a three-bet shove holding nine-eight of spades in the big blind, but Steffen Sontheimer sniffed it out and called with the queen-ten of spades out of the small blind. Aldemir flopped a pair, but Sontheimer had an open-ended straight draw, which he hit with an ace on the river.
It took a while for the next elimination to occur, but it happened when a short-stacked Nitsche moved all in holding five-six suited and failed to get there against the ace-three suited of Sontheimer. Not long after that, Schulman and Sontheimer played a big pot where the latter bluffed the river on a four-diamond board but Schulman sniffed it out and called off with the 
, a call that vaulted him into the chip lead.
Not long after, Schulman finished off Sontheimer, and in the very next hand dispatched the last German in the field, Stefan Schillhabel. It happened in a cooler hand when Schillhabel picked up pocket queens only to run them smack dab into the kings of Schulman.
That allowed Schulman to take 4.2 million chips into heads-up play against Matt Hyman, who had a stack of 2.295 million. The match proved to be a back-and-forth affair with both players swapping the chip lead on multiple occasions.
Eventually, the blinds and antes put pressure on both players, and with Schulman in the lead he got it in with ace-king against Hyman’s ace-eight suited. Hyman flopped a flush draw, but he missed it to give Schulman the win.
The first event of the Poker Masters has come to an end, but already Event #2: $50,000 NLHE is underway. The PokerNews Live Reporting Team is providing complete coverage from that tournament, which you canfollow by clicking here.