If the question “Who’s the best poker player never to win a WSOP bracelet?” is a tough one to answer definitively, “Who’s the best Triton regular never to win a title?” is much easier — it’s Isaac Haxton.
He had another shot to get the monkey off his back today at Triton Jeju, in the $100K Short Deck event, navigating a field of 58 players to bag the chip lead when play was down to nine. Haxton couldn’t convert that lead into a title, ending up as the short stack with seven left.
He rallied, riding the swings of the Short Deck game, but that elusive Triton win remained out of reach, as he finished third for $792,000.
He took a brutal beat three-handed — his pocket kings cracked by Elton Tsang’s jacks in a pot that would have given him a 4:1 chip lead heads-up.
Tsang went on to claim his second Triton title and $1,697,000, adding to the $4,210,000 he won in Jeju last year in a $150K event. Wang Ye finished runner-up.
Haxton doing just fine
You don’t need to feel too sorry for Haxton. He’s earned over $15 million on the Triton tour, with 56 cashes, and $55,624,096 across all tournaments. But he’s definitely been on the wrong side of variance, with six runner-up spots and 35 top-10 finishes.
Jason Koon is a player who’s acknowledged he’s on the other end of that Triton variance. He’s won an incredible 12 Triton titles and sits second on the tour’s all-time money list with over $33 million in earnings.
Talking to PokerOrg recently, Koon said, “You look at someone like Ike Haxton, who's one of the greatest heads-up players of all time and he hasn't won a Triton and he’s been heads-up six times.
“There are a ton of these statistics that look cool, and I can really lean into and brand myself as ‘The Closer’ if I wanted to. But, really, I'm playing small fields and I'm probably running really well when I do.”
Monarch on his way to Jeju
Elsewhere at Triton Jeju, poker’s leading all-time money winner Bryn Kenney was eliminated on the final-table bubble of the $25K NLH WPT Global Slam in brutal fashion, getting it in with 
against Xue Song’s 
with two very short stacks looking on from the sidelines.
Kenney had a 13BB stack but came unstuck on the 
runout. “Good game guys,” he said as the rest of the field bagged up for the final table that will play out on Thursday. Alex Foxen is leading the way.
And there could be some major excitement ahead if Ossi ‘Monarch’ Ketola follows through on his promise to drop in on Triton Jeju.
After famously losing $19 million in a day playing high-stakes heads-up matches against Dan ‘Jungleman’ Cates, Ketola told PokerOrg he is heading to Jeju to play some Triton events — and potentially some more high-stakes side action if the logistics can be worked out.
There’s no big-money Invitational on the slate this time, but there are two big events that might have caught Ketola’s eye — the $150K NLH event playing out September 14-16, and the $100K Triton Main Event that runs September 16-18.
Read our exclusive interview with Ketola below.
