The 2026 WPT World Championship schedule landed this week — three Day 1 flights December 13-15, a final table on December 20, and a fresh $1 million in cash bolted on purely for mystery bounties — which is as good an excuse as any to go back and look at how last year’s edition actually ended. Because it didn’t end with a grind. It ended with a mugging.
Rewind to December 2025. Schuyler Thornton, a 36-year-old from Corpus Christi who mostly plays online MTTs and high-stakes cash, came to the six-handed finale in second chips behind Soheb Porbandarwala, a bracelet winner and WPT champ who had spent the previous days looking untouchable. On paper it was Porbandarwala’s tournament. In practice, the final table turned into the Schuyler Thornton show, and the 1,865-entry field’s $18.2 million pool got settled faster than anyone streaming it expected.
The knockouts tell you something unglamorous and important about final-table poker: Thornton kept winning the hands he was supposed to win. Maxx Coleman went out sixth getting A-10 in against Thornton’s A-Q — both made trip aces, the kicker decided it. Jeremy Becker followed in fifth with A-2 into A-10. Same shape, same result. Thornton’s own verdict afterward was refreshingly blunt: he said he made roughly one bluff all day and had it every time. He walked with $2,258,856, more than doubling his career earnings in an afternoon.
The strategic lesson isn’t “run good.” It’s that Thornton credited his edge to a specific combination — being comfortable with ICM from online final tables plus the pot-geometry instincts you build in big cash games. Those are two different muscles, and most players only train one. Meanwhile Porbandarwala’s massive lead evaporated because a chip lead at a six-handed TV table is a weapon that expires; sit on it and the second stack grows into you. It’s the same trap we wrote about in playing a monster stack without blowing it.
Season 24 closes at the Wynn on December 20. Thornton defends. Pressure’s a funny thing to hand a man who insists he just ran hot.
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