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Five years have already passed since Nick’s WPT victory, and he is still the youngest winner of a WPT event.

There are certain rites of passage commonly associated with turning 21. A lot of them involve waking up hung over somewhere unfamiliar with more questions than brain cells. Born and bred Manhattanite Nick Schulman hasn’t necessarily been there, but that’s not the only reason his entrance into legal adulthood strays from the norm. As far as we can tell, very few 21-year-olds mark the occasion by going out and winning the World Poker Tour’s 2005 World Poker Final at Foxwoods. In fact, no 21-year-old has ever done anything like that, which is why the native New Yorker has become the youngest WPT champ in history.

“It’s not really what I planned for. I’m not complaining, it just seems so strange,” said Schulman, when he became $2.1 million richer with the victory. “I just like the game. You can’t force yourself to get good at poker. You can’t want to live the lifestyle and play without loving the game.”

While it might not necessarily have groomed him to become a World Poker Tour champion, the underground poker clubs and pool halls of New York definitely had a hand in shaping Schulman as a player and a person. Starting out in area pool halls at 15, young Schulman managed to make friends shooting stick with characters nicknamed “Snake” when most of his peers were playing tag at recess. “I just went for fun and fell in love with the game. By the time I was 15 or 16, I was really competing,” says Schulman. “For whatever reason, I’m just wired to gamble. With the transition to poker, I just never really had a choice.”.

By 18, Schulman and his friends had graduated to New York’s poker clubs. As clubs were closed down by the New York Police Department, his crew was constantly forced to find other venues for that next game. “Some of them were a little seedy, but for the most part they were just poker rooms,” says Schulman, who cut his teeth tapping the felt across from an interesting mix of New York rounders and degenerate gamblers. “I guess it’s a rougher crowd in the clubs. Management didn’t really take as good care of their players and the money wasn’t well protected. But for the most part most of the clubs I played at were cool.”

Nick grew up frequenting New York poker clubs with his friends, but things changed when he turned 21; Schulman was free to enter himself in tournaments and finally challenge the big boys on a considerably larger stage. He kept playing cash games, but always figured there was more money to be made in tournaments.

He had no idea where they would take him, especially after busting out early in his first tournament at the Borgata. A $2.1 million payday seemed pretty far away by the time he descended on Foxwoods two weeks before the World Poker Finals. Enjoying the action at the tables, he still wasn’t convinced that entering a tournament was the right move. The debacle at the Borgata certainly didn’t help to squash those fears. But a satellite tournament victory won him an entry in the $10,000 buy-in tournament. That’s where things got interesting.

“I was just looking to have fun with it. I was obviously going to try to play my best and things started going really well,” says Schulman. “After two days, I realized I might have a shot, so I started to take it seriously.”

After amassing a serious stack early on, Schulman only needed four hands to dispense of tournament runner-up Tony Lincastro. On the final hand, Schulman was dealt 6-9 of spades and turned a flush. With that, history was made.

Crowned the WPT’s youngest champion ever, Schulman returned to a hero’s welcome in New York. Local television and newspapers jumped on the story of the $2-million poker product barely old enough to drink. But Schulman knows that his place as the WPT’s youngest champ could be tenuous. At the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, a WPT event held in the Bahamas in January, the winner was 22-year-old Canadian Steve-Paul Ambrose, who beat a final table that included two 18-year-olds.

So after five years, Nick is still a poker pro and he has added a WSOP bracelet to his list of winnings. His total live tournaments winnings are about $3,800,000.

Tags: Bahamas poker, Borgata casino, flush draw, gambling age, poker clubs, poker rounders, PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, satellite tournament, WPT, WSOP bracelet