Is Player Season 1 completed?

Yes — Player Season 1 aired all 14 episodes on OCN from September 29 to November 11, 2018.

Where can I watch Player Season 1?

Player Season 1 is available on Viki, The Roku Channel, OnDemandKorea, Tubi, and Apple TV, alongside its original OCN broadcast.

Is there a Player Season 2?

A continuation, The Player 2: Master of Swindlers, premiered in 2024 with several cast members returning, including Song Seung-heon.

Who is 'The Man' in Player?

'The Man' is the season's central antagonist — a fixer protecting the corrupt officials Ha-ri's team targets, whose identity is tied directly to Ha-ri's own past.

📺 K-Drama Guide · Action · Crime · Thriller

Player (Season 1)

플레이어 · 2018

✅ Completed · 14 eps
🎬 OCN · The Roku Channel · OnDemandKorea · Tubi · Viki · Apple TV
⭐ 8.4 / 10 MDL 🔞 15+

⚡ Updated · Jul 24, 2026

📋 Drama Overview

Everything you need to know before you hit play.

CompletedHEIST THRILLER PICK

Player (Season 1)

플레이어 (Peulleieo) · 2018 · South Korea

WriterShin Jae Hyung

DirectorGo Jae Hyun

Episodes14 eps · ~62 min each

AiredSep 29 – Nov 11, 2018

GenreAction · Crime · Thriller

Content Rating15+

OCNThe Roku ChannelOnDemandKoreaTubiVikiApple TV

HeistVigilante JusticeCon ArtistsCorruptionTeam Dynamic

Kang Ha-ri doesn’t rob people who can afford it — he robs people who’ve already stolen from everyone else and gotten away with it, which is a much more satisfying kind of theft. Player builds its entire premise around that distinction, assembling a four-person crew of a con artist, a fighter, a hacker, and a driver whose combined skill set exists specifically to take money the law never managed to touch.

The show works best as a puzzle-box procedural in its first half, watching the team plan and execute increasingly elaborate takedowns of corrupt executives and officials. It shifts gears at the midpoint into something closer to a conspiracy thriller, once a shadowy fixer known only as ‘The Man’ turns out to be protecting nearly every target the team has hit. Song Seung-heon anchors both halves with the same coiled patience, playing a man clearly more invested in this mission than he initially lets on.

Episode Progress
14 / 14 ✅ Completed

⚡ Quick Verdict

One box. Everything you need to decide.

⭐ Worth it?Yes — a tightly plotted heist thriller that earns its conspiracy twist

⏱️ Commitment14 episodes · 60–65 min each

💛 VibeElite con-artist crew robbing corrupt elites who’ve already beaten the legal system

📺 Skip if…You want your heist show to stay case-of-the-week instead of building toward one big conspiracy

⭐ 8.4 / 10
· MDL Score · 10,761 ratings

▶ Official Trailer

🎭 Cast & Characters

The four-person crew — plus the prosecutor who decides to work with them instead of against them.

Song Seung-heon

Kang Ha-ri

Lead

Tae Won-seok

Do Jin-woong

Lead

Lee Si-eon

Im Byung-min

Supporting

Krystal Jung

Cha Ah-ryung

Supporting

Ahn Se-ho

Investigator Maeng

Supporting

Kwak Ja-hyung

Cheon Dong-sub

Supporting

Kim Won-hae

Jang In-gyoo

Supporting

Kim Gwi-seon

Director of Prosecutors’ Office

Supporting

Park Jin-woo

Nam Won-hak

Supporting

Yoo Ye-bin

Cho Yeon-hee

Supporting

Park Eun-woo

Byun Young-ji

Supporting

Lee Cheong-mi

Yang Hae-joo

Supporting

🍿 Where to Watch

Stream Player (Season 1) on these platforms.

OCN The Roku Channel OnDemandKorea Tubi Viki Apple TV

📺 Episode Guide

Spoiler-light recaps — enough to remember where you left off, nothing that ruins the ride.

EP 01 EP 02 EP 03 EP 04 EP 05 EP 06 EP 07 EP 08 EP 09 EP 10 EP 11 EP 12 EP 13 EP 14 · Final 🏁 Ending

EP 01

Robbed before His Eyes

Sep 29, 2018

Player wastes no time proving its team can do the job: Kang Ha-ri, fighter Do Jin-woong, hacker Im Byung-min, and driver Cha Ah-ryung target loan shark Cheon Dong-sub and walk away with his illegal fortune before he even realizes what happened. The heist itself is less the point than the introduction — four specialists, four skill sets, one very specific kind of justice that doesn’t involve a courtroom.

EP 02

The Price of Justice

Sep 30, 2018

The team’s second target, Ji Seong-gu, comes with a harder problem than money: he’s a chairman’s son accused of sexual assault, and the evidence they gather gets destroyed in a gangster attack before it can matter. It’s the show’s first real acknowledgment that wealth doesn’t just buy better lawyers — it buys the ability to make proof disappear.

EP 03

A Dangerous Proposition

Oct 6, 2018

Prosecutor Jang In-gyoo finally gets his arrests — Chairman Ji Mok-hyun and his son both go down — and Ha-ri responds by doing something nobody expects: he makes Jang an offer. Not a bribe, not a threat, something closer to a partnership pitch between two people who’ve both concluded the system alone isn’t enough.

EP 04

The First Target

Oct 7, 2018

With Jang now effectively read into the operation, the team and the prosecutor pick their first joint target: Hwayang C&T president Na Won-hak. The plan they build together is more elaborate than anything the team has run solo, and watching a swindler and a prosecutor start speaking the same strategic language is its own kind of satisfying.

EP 05

The Money Laundering Scheme

Oct 13, 2018

President Park’s money laundering operation gives Im Byung-min his moment — this is a hacker’s case, built on tracing digital money trails rather than physical cons, and the episode leans into just how much of modern corruption lives inside a spreadsheet instead of a briefcase.

EP 06

A Betrayal Unveiled

Oct 14, 2018

Gangsters strong-arm Cha Ah-ryung into driving for them during the Park case, and Ha-ri reads it — reasonably, given how little he actually knows about her past — as betrayal. It’s the first real crack in the team’s trust, and it lands harder because the show has spent five episodes selling their chemistry as effortless.

EP 07

The Truth Beneath

Oct 20, 2018

A new case cracks open into something bigger: a shadowy figure known only as ‘The Man’ who’s been operating behind every corrupt official the team has taken down so far. The show quietly shifts gears here, from case-of-the-week heists to a season-long conspiracy with an actual architect.

EP 08

The Real Mastermind

Oct 21, 2018

Ha-ri and Jang put the pieces together: ‘The Man’ isn’t just connected to their targets, he’s been directing them. That reframes every case the team has run so far as one small piece of a much larger board, and it makes their next move considerably more dangerous.

EP 09

Unmasking the Shadow

Oct 27, 2018

Taking down a target is one thing; exposing an entire network of corrupt officials in one coordinated move is another. This is the most technically demanding con the team has run — every member’s specific skill gets tested at once, and there’s no margin for one person’s mistake.

EP 10

A Personal Vendetta

Oct 28, 2018

Ha-ri’s connection to ‘The Man’ turns out to be personal, not professional, and that single reveal recontextualizes everything about why a con artist this skilled chose vigilante justice over an easier, quieter kind of crime. Revenge and justice stop being separate motives here — they collapse into the same thing.

EP 11

The Trap is Set

Nov 3, 2018

The team builds an elaborate operation to finally corner ‘The Man,’ and he sees it coming anyway. That’s the uncomfortable truth the episode sits with: their opponent isn’t outmatched by their skill, he’s just been three steps ahead the entire season.

EP 12

The Reckoning

Nov 4, 2018

Ha-ri and ‘The Man’ finally meet head-on, and the confrontation costs the team more than a clean win would. Alliances shift, someone pays a price that can’t be walked back, and the show makes clear that beating this particular villain was never going to be free.

EP 13

The Unfinished Game

Nov 10, 2018

The team gets their victory, technically — ‘The Man’ is exposed — but his network doesn’t collapse with him, and the finale-adjacent quiet here is doing real work. Corruption this systemic doesn’t die with one arrest, and the show is honest enough not to pretend otherwise.

EP 14

The Players’ Legacy

Nov 11, 2018

The season closes with the team dismantling what’s left of ‘The Man’s’ organization and Ha-ri finally getting something close to peace after avenging his past. Cha Ah-ryung finds the family she never had in this group of outlaws, while Byung-min and Jin-woong settle into the identity they’ve been building all season — professionals at operating just outside the law, because the law keeps proving it isn’t enough on its own. It’s not a triumphant ending so much as a sustainable one: the fight continues, but now it has a team built to keep fighting it.

🏁 Ending Explained

Full spoilers ahead — everything that happens in the finale and what it all means.

⚠️
Spoiler Warning — This section covers the full finale of Player (Season 1). Stop here if you haven’t finished the series.

What actually happens The finale wraps up the season’s central conspiracy: the team, working alongside Prosecutor Jang, finishes dismantling ‘The Man’s’ remaining network and makes sure none of his corrupt allies walk away clean. Ha-ri gets the personal closure the season has been building toward — not a clean, uncomplicated win, but enough of one to let him stop looking over his shoulder.

Player (Season 1) (2018) — The team confronts The Man's network in the Player Season 1 finale

Who ‘The Man’ really is The season is deliberately vague about exactly who ‘The Man’ is beyond his function — a fixer who’s been protecting nearly every corrupt figure the team has taken down, which is the point. He’s less a single villain than a stand-in for how deep institutional corruption actually runs: take out one target and there’s always someone like him one level up, coordinating the next cover-up.

Kang Ha-ri’s real identity, explained Season one plants the idea that Kang Ha-ri isn’t the con artist’s real name, and that his history with ‘The Man’ predates everything the team has done together. The specifics of that past stay largely under wraps by design, but the show makes clear early that Ha-ri’s entire vigilante career — the skill, the discipline, the refusal to ever actually keep the money for himself — traces back to something ‘The Man’ took from him first.

Player (Season 1) (2018) — Kang Ha-ri's past catches up with him in Player Season 1

Why Cha Ah-ryung stays Ah-ryung’s arc resolves quietly compared to Ha-ri’s: after a season of the team questioning her loyalty because of circumstances she never chose, the finale lets her choose them back, fully and on her own terms. It’s a smaller beat than the big conspiracy payoff, but it’s the one that gives the show’s found-family framing actual weight instead of just stating it.

The KDW verdict Player ends its first season the way the best OCN crime dramas do — with a clear villain defeated but the larger rot left visibly intact, because pretending otherwise would undercut everything the show spent fourteen episodes arguing about how corruption actually works. It’s a satisfying close with just enough left open to justify why this team keeps doing this instead of retiring.

Player (Season 1) (2018) — The team's found family by the end of Player Season 1

✍️ KDramaWorlds Editor’s Take

Our honest read on why this drama is worth your time — and who it’s for.

🎭 Con Artists With A Code
🕵️ Heist-of-the-Week
⚖️ Justice Outside The Law
🔥 Slow-Burn Conspiracy

What separates Player from a straightforward heist show is how little interest it has in the mechanics of any single con. Ha-ri’s team pulls off elaborate schemes almost as a formality — the show is much more curious about why four people with these particular skills would choose to spend them on vigilante justice instead of just getting rich and disappearing. That question puts Player in conversation with Vigilante, another story about people who decide the legal system’s failures are their problem to fix.

Player (Season 1) (2018) — cinematic still

Song Seung-heon plays Ha-ri with a stillness that reads as confidence right up until it doesn’t — the character’s calm is clearly a performance for most of the season, and the show is patient about letting cracks show only when it matters. Krystal Jung gets less to work with early on, but the mid-season betrayal arc gives Cha Ah-ryung an actual interior life instead of leaving her as the team’s utility driver. It’s a smaller-scale ensemble than Money Heist: Korea, but the team dynamic does a lot of the same emotional work.

The case-of-the-week structure works well for the first half of the season and starts to feel a little mechanical by the time ‘The Man’ takes over as the central thread — not because the conspiracy isn’t compelling, but because the early episodes set a standard for standalone plotting that the back half doesn’t fully sustain. It’s a minor complaint about a show that otherwise knows exactly what kind of satisfying it wants to be.

👍👍👍 BEST FOR 👍👍👍

🎯 Fans of heist shows that care as much about the team as the con itself
⚖️ Anyone who likes vigilante justice stories aimed squarely at untouchable elites
🕵️ Viewers who want a slow-burn conspiracy without a 20-episode commitment

⚖️ Final Verdict

What works

•Song Seung-heon’s controlled lead performance sells a character built on withheld information

•The four-person team dynamic gives every member a genuine specialty instead of padding

•The season-long ‘Man’ conspiracy earns its reveal instead of stalling for time

What to know first

•The case-of-the-week format cools off once the conspiracy plot takes over in the back half

•Krystal Jung’s arc doesn’t fully pay off until the mid-season betrayal episodes

•There’s a 2024 continuation, The Player 2: Master of Swindlers, with a mostly new setup

8.4 / 10— A heist thriller that trusts its team dynamic as much as its cons, even when the back-half conspiracy plotting runs a little ahead of the character work.

💬 Helpful? Share this guide →

WhatsApp Post Share Copy Link