Poker Stories Podcast With Kristen Bicknell

Poker Stories is a long-form audio podcast series that features casual interviews with some of the game’s best players and personalities. Each episode highlights a well-known member of the poker world and dives deep into their favorite tales both on and off the felt.

Age: 31
Lives: St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada
Live Tournament Earnings: $2 million

Top Five Tournament Scores

Kristen Bicknell is only 31 years old but has already accomplished quite a bit in the poker world. The St. Catherine’s, Ontario native started with online cash games and earned Super Nova Elite status on PokerStars for three consecutive years before turning her attention to live tournaments.

Bicknell has two World Series of Poker bracelets, having won the ladies event in 2013 for $173,922, and a $1,500 bounty event in 2016 for $290,768. She has been on quite a run in the last six months, having won an event at the Five Diamond Classic for $199,840 and the APPT Macau high roller for $284,960. Most recently, she chopped the $5,000 MSPT event at the Venetian DeepStack Championship Poker Series for $200,000, with her boyfriend Alex Foxen of all people.

Highlights from this interview include the perils of pre-workout, racing against the boys, a different college experience, 24-tables at once, spewing in ladies events, a love for European cities, relationship heaters, nailing a hole-in-one, army pants and black eyeliner, romantic heads-up battles, an intense focus on Daddy Yankee, and bluffing it off on Poker After Dark.

The Highlights

On growing up with a race car-driving dad and competing with the boys…

“My family has a business where they build stock cars, and my dad is a stock car racer. He races what’s called 358 modifieds, which are custom cars that race on dirt tracks… He’s kind of the best at what he does. He’s in the motorsports hall of fame in Canada. So, I grew up doing that. I was at the racetrack with my dad every weekend. I actually raced go-karts myself until I was about 16 or so. I grew up [competitive] and in a male industry, racing go-karts only against boys basically. I never felt like I couldn’t do what they did. I honestly felt like I could beat them, and that’s kind of how I feel in poker as well.”

On earning PokerStars Super Nova Elite status three years in a row…

“Online poker came pretty quickly for me. At the time, I think that I had previously tried playing tournaments, and probably wasn’t doing that well. I think I had made like $30,000 a year, maybe $40,000 for a couple years in a row. I was just feeling really frustrated with tournaments… and then I heard about Super Nova Elite and I was like, ‘wow, I can basically guarantee $100k+ a year if I just play this many hours of this game.’ The one thing I’ve never struggled with is putting in time, because I just truly love playing poker. If you tell me that I have to play eight hours a day, that’s not hard for me because that’s what I want to do. I was playing 24 tables at a time. You get used to it. It’s a mental muscle you work up to. Even that first year I ended up getting…. $120,000 in rakeback. I wasn’t the best poker player, I still don’t claim to be, but I have work ethic, I have grind, I have a pretty decent mental game, and I can focus for a long time. I built on my strengths.”
On the relationship heater she’s been on since she started dating fellow poker pro Alex Foxen…

“It’s really crazy. I was kind of looking at the numbers, I forget what it is exactly, but since we’ve started dating, I think we’ve both been on the biggest heaters. And it’s been in some weird ways… We went to [APPT] Macau together. I win this event… and we get matching trophies. He wins [the $25,000 event] at the LAPC, and they give him this [Hublot] watch, and I recently just won the same watch. We were at the Bellagio Five Diamond in December and I win the $5k, and the next event he finishes second. And yeah, we ended up getting heads-up in [a $5,000 event at the Venetian DeepStack Championship Poker Series]. I’m not going to lie, I think it was two days later that I wrote him saying, ‘Did that just happen?’ And we had just made a final table in Barcelona, getting seventh and eighth… So we’ve gone on this insane heater together, and I don’t know what it is, but the energy is very positive and real between us.” ♠

You can check out the entirety of the interview in the audio player at the top of the page or download it directly to your device to play on the go from iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Catch up on past episodes featuring notables such as Daniel Negreanu, Nick Schulman, Barry Greenstein, Michael Mizrachi, Bryn Kenney, Justin Bonomo, Mike Sexton, Brian Rast, Scott Seiver, Freddy Deeb, Joe Cada, Maria Ho, and many more. If you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe to get the latest episodes automatically when they are released.