Editor
Nick Schulman won his seventh career WSOP bracelet late on Wednesday, but it took eight hours of heads-up play to secure the win. Schulman battled Darren Elias late into the night at single-draw lowball, in one of the most epic heads-up duels you will ever see in poker.
The action started quickly enough on the final day of the 10k No-Limit 2-7 Lowball Draw Championship. Four quick eliminations to get from six-handed to heads-up suggested that it might be an early night for all involved. But Elias had other plans, forcing Shulman to battle back and forth with him through five blind levels determine the winner of the bracelet and the $542,540.
On top of all of the accolades that come with a seventh bracelet, Schulman also adds some critical points for his $25k Fantasy team. It also puts him firmly in the conversation for the WSOP Hall of Fame, for which he recently became eligible, having turned 40 last year.
Where Does This Heads-up Match Rank in Poker History?
The eight-hour war was unfortunately not streamed for poker fans to follow, as most video coverage of the series focuses on No-Limit Hold’em. Mixed game fans had to rely on posted updates to follow the dramatic swings between two of the best to have played the game. By the end of the night, it had become a war of attrition and fatigue as much as a poker match. 2-7 Lowball Single draw is a type of poker game unfamiliar to many players, but it’s a game of low information and big bluffs.
Long heads-up battles are not rare at the WSOP or at other tournament events with big cash prizes and prestigious titles on the line. However, even longer heads-up duels typically take maybe four, five or even six hours to determine a winner.
Stretching past the six-hour mark in these type of battles is far more rare. In a no-limit format, every hand has the potential to end things, and players can only dodge the likelihood of a big collision for so long. Schulman and Elias’s showdown isn’t a record, but it’s only of only a very few heads up battles in poker history to have exceeded eight hours.
To understand just how long it was, consider the WSOP Main Event, which has an extremely slow structure and a lot of pressure to play carefully due to the amount of money on the line. Even so, there has only been one instance in the 56-year history of the Main Event that its final heads-up duel has lasted longer than this Schulman vs Elias showdown.
That occasion was the 2018 Main Event, where John Cynn defeated Tony Miles over the course of 199 hands and 10 hours. In doing so, Cynn took home $8.8 million, a jump of $3.8 million from the $5 million runner-up prize claimed by Miles. The second-longest WSOP Main Event heads-up match was just north of seven hours between Qui Nguyen and Gordon Vayo in 2016.
But Cynn-Miles isn’t the all-time record either. Based on PokerScout’s research of other tournaments over the years, there may have been only one other heads-up match that took longer. That was the 2017 Macau PokerStars Championship, which ended in a 10 hour and 50 minute heads-up battle between Elliot Smith and Tianyuan Tang. Smith eventually emerged victorious, but what makes that epic slog all the more astonishing is that the players were effectively playing for pride. They had already reached a deal to chop up the prize money before embarking on that record-setting journey.
Both those other tournaments were No-Limit Hold’em, so Cynn and Miles may well be the holders of a new record for the longest heads-up battle in a non-Hold’em format.
