Dongli Shen Wins the First-Ever WPT® Seoul INSPIRE Championship

We have a winner. China's Dongli Shen is the inaugural WPT® Seoul champion.

To win, he topped a 1,033-entry field at the new YY Poker Club inside the INSPIRE Entertainment Resort near Incheon. He goes home with the WPT® Seoul INSPIRE Championship, banking KRW 252,378,000 (about $185,000). The win followed a heads-up deal, and he also secured a $10,400 WPT® World Championship seat.

It makes him the first-ever champion of a WPT® main event in Korea. Here's all you need to know.

Shen carried a commanding chip lead into the final table and didn't let go. To seal the deal, he closed out the title in a heads-up match against Japan's Yosuke Sekiya. The KRW 1,750,000 buy-in drew 1,033 entries across four starting flights and built a prize pool of KRW 1,561,896,000.

That's about $1.14 million!

It comfortably sails past the KRW 1 billion guarantee on WPT®'s first-ever stop in South Korea. A total of 128 places were paid.

With play down to two, Shen and Sekiya struck a heads-up deal. They locked up KRW 252,378,000 and KRW 246,238,000 respectively. It left the title, a further sum and the Vegas seat to play for.

Shen won, so the trophy, the $10,400 WPT® World Championship entry and the inaugural champion's place are his. (The pre-deal advertised first prize had been KRW 301,816,000; the deal reshaped the top two payouts.)

It was an international final nine. We had Chinese, Japanese, American and Mongolian players among the last to fall. It's fitting for a stop that drew from across the Asia-Pacific region.

Shen started the final table with 13,300,000 chips, nearly double the 6,775,000 of his nearest challenger, Jun Li. Not one to give up his lead, he spent the whole day in front. Li finished third, and Sekiya emerged as the last challenger standing.

However, once the two struck the deal and played on, the chip lead proved decisive. Shen closed it out to become the first name in the WPT® Seoul record book.

Japanese players dominated almost everything at INSPIRE except for the biggest one.

Japanese players swept the festival's warm-up events and claimed the lion's share of the side-event titles across the 11 days. Five of the final nine in the Championship itself were Japanese. Yet the marquee title went to China's Shen, who beat Japan's Sekiya heads-up for it.

For a 11 days, the Japanese contingent seemed to win at will. However, the biggest trophy left the country for China.

The 11-day WPT® Seoul festival (46 events) closed on November 9.

There were some notable results alongside the main event. Russia's Nikita Ustiuzhanin won the KRW 3,500,000 High Roller (KRW 84,254,000, ~$61,700, from 101 entries). Japan's Satsuki Suzuki took the Mini Championship out of a 416-entry field.

It's a strong set of turnouts that, with the Championship's 1,033, made WPT®'s Korean debut a clear success.

For Shen, the next step is Las Vegas.

His $10,400 ticket sends him to the WPT® World Championship at Wynn Las Vegas (December 13–20). He'll play at the Season 24 finale, one of the richest tournaments on the calendar. A debut title in Seoul becomes a shot at the biggest WPT® prize of the year.

It's the perfect path from the tour's newest stop to its flagship, and time will tell how he performs.