APT Jeju

The Asian Poker Tour is one of the biggest live poker brands in Asia, and South Korea has become one of its regular homes, with Jeju Island as its flagship stop⁶. The APT Main Event there now carries a guarantee of KRW 2.2 billion, and the 2024 edition drew a large enough field to pay more than 140 players, with Xixiang Luo taking the title and KRW 429,292,500 for first place⁶. If you are visiting Korea and play tournament poker, these festivals are the largest live events you will find in the country, and they sit inside resort casinos that are open to foreign visitors. For the wider picture of what you can play as a visitor, see gambling in South Korea.

APT Jeju: dates, venue and what to expect

APT Jeju is the tour's main Korean festival, held at Jeju Shinhwa Resort on Jeju Island. The 2026 edition runs from September 25 to October 7, making it a 13-day festival with 135 events on the schedule¹. That is a huge amount of poker: on most days you will find several starting flights, turbo events running into the night, and satellite tournaments feeding into the bigger buy-in games later in the week.

The previous edition, APT Jeju 2024, ran April 26 to May 5 at the same venue, a 10-day festival offering more than KRW 5 billion (about USD 3.76 million) in guaranteed prize money across all events². The resort partnership matters practically: the festival is run with Landing Entertainment Korea, the operator behind the Shinhwa complex, so the poker room, hotel, restaurants and entertainment are all in one place². You can sleep, eat and play without leaving the property, which is how most attendees experience the festival.

What should you expect on the ground? A large tournament room with dozens of tables, a mix of no-limit hold'em and pot-limit Omaha formats, buy-ins from a few hundred thousand won up to the Main Event level, and a heavily international field. The 2024 Main Event alone drew 1,089 entries from 583 unique players, the largest tournament field in South Korean history³. Expect long days if you run deep, and expect the room to be busiest on Main Event starting days and the final weekend.

Jeju itself is a resort island off Korea's southern coast, a short flight from Seoul, with beaches, hiking and a relaxed visa-free entry policy for many nationalities that makes it an easy destination for regional players. The same island also hosts several foreigners-only casinos year-round, covered in casinos in Jeju.

Main Event: KRW 2.2B guaranteed

The headline event of APT Jeju is the APT Main Event, and the 2026 edition carries a guarantee of KRW 2.2 billion¹. A guarantee means the organizer commits to at least that much prize money regardless of entries; if entries fall short, the tour covers the difference, which is rare at a stop this popular.

The 2024 edition carried a KRW 2 billion guarantee (about USD 1.5 million) and comfortably beat it: 1,089 entries built a final prize pool of KRW 2,376,742,500, roughly USD 1,726,125³. The Main Event ran April 29 to May 4 in 2024, with multiple starting flights and registration open until the start of Day 2, so late arrivals could still get in².

The structure follows the standard APT Main Event format: multiple Day 1 flights, combined fields on Day 2, and a final day that plays down to a winner. At APT Jeju 2024, 15 players returned for the Final Day, and every one of them was guaranteed at least KRW 21,410,000 (about USD 15,550)³. That is worth knowing if you make a deep run: reaching the final day alone is a five-figure payday in dollars.

Alongside the Main Event, the 2024 schedule included two cheaper versions on the closing weekend: a Mini Main Event with a KRW 800K (about USD 600) buy-in on May 4 and 5, and a Micro Main Event at KRW 400K (about USD 300) on May 5². These give players on smaller budgets a Main Event-style structure at a fraction of the price, and they are a good first taste of a big-field tournament.

Buy-ins and entry fees

Buy-ins across an APT festival span a wide range, so you can build your own schedule around your budget. Here are the headline numbers from recent Korean stops:

For comparison, the APT's online series events show how the tour splits a buy-in from its entry fee: a Main Event at USD 475 plus a USD 25 entry fee, a Mini Main Event at USD 200, and championship events at USD 760 plus 40 and USD 374 plus 26⁸. Live Korean events quote a single figure, but a portion of every buy-in covers the entry fee rather than the prize pool.

There is also an online route in. The tour's Country Exclusive events on Natural8 run for players in Thailand, Taiwan and Hong Kong: a Thailand event with a ฿1,000 (about USD 25) buy-in, a Taiwan event at NT$2,560 (about USD 80), and a Hong Kong event at HK$1,200 (about USD 150)⁹. Each of these awards Main Event packages worth USD 1,903 plus USD 750 in online credits toward flights and accommodation, with the final table of each event played live at APT Jeju for an additional cash prize and the APT trophy⁹. Six players per event win a package, 18 across the three countries, and if you win the Main Event itself after qualifying through one of these events you are eligible for a USD 50,000 bonus on top⁹. One catch: if you qualify and then cannot attend the live festival, the package is forfeited entirely and your stack is blinded out⁹.

Past Main Event results and prize payouts

The APT Jeju 2024 Main Event produced the biggest score in South Korean poker history. Xixiang Luo of China came through a record field of 1,089 entries to win KRW 429,292,500, about USD 311,735³. He defeated Jianfeng Sun of China heads-up, with the runner-up collecting KRW 257,880,000³.

The full final table payouts from that event give a sense of what a deep run is worth¹⁰:

Payouts ran deep into the field: 10th place paid KRW 26,550,000, 40th place KRW 7,510,000, 72nd place KRW 5,280,000, and the last paid spots around 144th place took home KRW 3,970,000¹⁰. In other words, in 2024 roughly one in seven entries cashed, and even a min-cash returned more than the KRW 2.5 million buy-in.

Jeju has also hosted the highest-stakes poker in the world outside the APT. Triton Poker Series held its Jeju festival in March 2026, where the USD 100,000 pot-limit Omaha Main Event drew 65 entries for a USD 6.5 million prize pool, won by Austria's Matthias Eibinger¹¹. That is a different universe from APT buy-ins, but it shows the scale of poker the island now attracts.

Where the APT has played in South Korea

The tour's Korean history is short but busy. The first visit was announced in 2012: the APT Asian Series Jeju, described at the time as the tour's first-ever stop in South Korea⁶. Jeju has since become the anchor venue.

The second regular stop is Incheon, the coastal city that serves Seoul's international airport. APT Incheon 2023 ran August 25 to September 3 with 72 events and a Main Event guaranteeing KRW 1.3 billion⁷. The festival returned bigger in 2026, running August 7 to 16 with 106 events⁴. Incheon's venue sits on Yeongjong Island, the same district as the airport and the Paradise City casino complex¹², which makes it one of the easiest poker festivals in Asia to reach: you can land at Incheon International Airport and be at the tables within minutes.

Seoul itself has hosted major international poker, though under a different brand: the Asia Pacific Poker Tour ran APPT Seoul in September 2009, with a USD 3,000 Main Event¹³. That event set the pattern the APT now follows, holding poker in foreigners-only casino venues near the capital.

For context on the venues that host these festivals, see casinos in South Korea, and for the year-round poker scene beyond the tour stops, see poker tournaments in South Korea.

Who can play: locals prohibited, visitors welcome

One rule shapes everything about live poker in South Korea: the casino floors that host these festivals are open to foreign visitors only. Under the Tourism Promotion Act, South Korean residents are not permitted entry into licensed casinos, with a single exception in Gangwon Province⁵. The rule is enforced at the door, not on paper: venues such as Seven Luck Casino in Busan and Paradise Casino Jeju Grand describe themselves as foreigners-only, and casino rules bar staff from letting Korean nationals into the foreigner-only gaming areas⁵.

So in practice: if you hold a foreign passport, you can register, buy in and play any APT event in Korea. If you are a Korean national, you cannot enter the host venues, and the same rule applied to the earlier Seoul events, where Korean nationals were prohibited from participating¹³. Overseas permanent residents of Korea should check their status carefully, as some venues admit foreign nationals and overseas permanent-residence holders only¹⁴.

This is why the APT fields in Korea are so international: Chinese, Taiwanese, Thai, Hong Kong, Japanese and Western players dominate the entries, exactly as the 2024 final table shows. The Country Exclusive online route exists partly for this reason, letting players from Thailand, Taiwan and Hong Kong qualify from home and then fly in for the live festival⁹.

Getting to Jeju and practical notes

Jeju Island is reached by air from Seoul (about an hour from Gimpo Airport, with dozens of daily flights) or by ferry from the mainland ports. Most international players fly into Seoul and connect, or arrive on direct international flights to Jeju where available. Once there, the Shinhwa Resort complex in Seogwipo hosts the festival, and taxis and rental cars cover the island.

A few practical points for your trip:

• Book accommodation early. A 13-day, 135-event festival fills hotels around the venue; staying at the host resort is the simplest option¹.
• Cash and cards. Tournament buy-ins are paid at the registration desk; plan for Korean won, and see gambling payments in South Korea for how to handle money.
• Jeju is visa-free for many nationalities for short stays, which is part of why the island draws such a large regional field.

If you have downtime between events, Jeju also has year-round foreigners-only casino venues, each small compared with the festival room, but they give you a place to play cash games outside the tournament schedule.

One more note for Korean residents reading this: because the host venues are closed to nationals, the practical route to playing an APT event is to travel to one of the tour's other stops, such as Taipei or its festivals elsewhere in Asia. The tour runs multiple series per year across the region, and the gambling trips abroad from South Korea page covers what that involves.