Japan’s Yuna Kanaizumi made the trek to South Korea for the 2026 Triton One Jeju festival, marking her debut on the live poker tournament circuit.
What a start it has been.
Kanaizumi cashed in three events across four days. She capped off the run with an outright win in the $5,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em mystery bounty event, topping 836 total entries to earn $395,000. She also walked away with $67,500 in bounties.
Combined with her 12th-place showing in the $2,000 bounty quattro event ($2,800) and a 110th-place finish in the $3,000 QQPK Genesis tournament ($6,000), she now has nearly $404,000 in recorded scores to her name.
“I’m very excited, happy, honored,” Kanaizumi told Triton reporters after coming out on top.
Kanaizumi And Nguyen Emerge As POY Contenders
This breakthrough triumph came with 1,824 Card Player Player of the Year points for Kanaizumi, enough to catapult her inside the top ten in the 2026 POY standings presented by CoinPoker.
Kanaizumi is not the only player to surge up the leaderboard thanks to this event. Her heads-up opponent, Thi Xoa Nguyen, earned $240,000 and 1,520 points as the runner-up. This was the second final-table finish of the series for the French player. Just a couple of days earlier she placed seventh in the aforementioned $3,000 event for $79,000 and 360 points. With a total of 1,880, she now sits in eighth place in the rankings.
When it’s your time, it’s your time.
Yuna Kanaizumi could not be stopped. pic.twitter.com/cUU07OhI73
— Triton ONE Poker (@TritonOnePoker) March 10, 2026
This was the second runner-up finish in a Triton event for Nguyen, who placed second in a $10,000 mystery bounty tournament at the inaugural Triton One festival last fall at the same venue. These two impressive showings in Jeju account for $435,000 of her nearly $1 million in career earnings.
The strong turnout for this event made for a prize pool of $2,130,456, with 135 finishers making the money. Among the notables to run deep were Nacho Barbero (26th), Georgios Sotiropoulos (25th), Stephen Song (21st), Winfred Yu (14th), and Manuel Fritz (13th).
Final Table Results
| Place | Player | Payout | POY Points |
| 1 | Yuna Kanaizumi | $395,000 | 1824 |
| 2 | Thi Xoa Nguyen | $240,000 | 1520 |
| 3 | Elmer Kalaquian | $169,000 | 1216 |
| 4 | Yunpeng Bai | $127,000 | 912 |
| 5 | Chih Wei Fan | $99,000 | 760 |
| 6 | Tien Pham | $73,000 | 608 |
| 7 | Kirill Beketov | $52,056 | 456 |
| 8 | Chen Chanshu | $37,000 | 304 |
Photo credit: Triton Poker.
