Short deck champ in Montenegro to earn $3.35m

The headline news on a fine May afternoon on the Adriatic Coast is that deep inside the Maestral Resort and Casino, Budva, Montenegro, a poker player will tomorrow win HKD 26.3 million ($3.35 million).

Registration closed at around 2.30pm today on the Triton Series Montenegro short deck main event, with 47 players contributing 98 HKD 1 million ($127,000) entries. It built a prize pool of HKD 92.12 million ($11.74 million), from which the top man will earn that staggering payout.

POSHKDUSD
1$26,300,000$3,350,725
2$17,100,000$2,178,608
3$11,800,000$1,503,367
4$9,070,000$1,155,554
5$7,200,000$917,309
6$5,620,000$716,010
7$4,400,000$560,578
8$3,400,000$433,174
9$2,630,000$335,073
10$2,300,000$293,029
11$2,300,000$293,029

Barring something miraculous in the smaller buy-in events next week, this will be the single biggest prize-pool of the 11-event series and will determine yet another major winner on the richest and most prestigious tournament series in the world.

Eleven players will be paid, with a “min-cash” redefining that term. The smallest payout is HKD 2.3 million ($293,000).

Players celebrated news of the enormous prize pool with a visit to an exclusive buffet — replete with goldfish and bubbling cauldrons of red liquid (not for consumption) — before settling back to play into the money tonight.

Buffet time!

They’ll play the final table tomorrow, at the same time as the first Pot-Limit Omaha event gets started on the Triton Series.