Steve Gee Trying To Recover From World Series Of Poker Main Event Disaster'It's Supposed To Be The Highlight Of My Career, But It Has Been Like An Albatross On My Back' |
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Steven Gee is still haunted by the main event final table in October of last year.
Entering the final nine fifth in chips, Gee failed horribly at building his stack, and after a huge bluff gone wrong versus Russell Thomas, Gee was out in ninth. He was devastated.
Fast forward to June 2013, and the poker pro is still feeling the side effects of outlasting more than 6,500 players only to fall just eight places short of $8.5 million.
“It’s supposed to be the highlight of my career, but it has been like an albatross on my back,” Gee said Wednesday during a break in action in a small buy-in event at the WSOP.
Gee said that he erroneously didn’t consider the massive money jumps. He thinks he probably would have moved up on the pay ladder had it not been for his reckless play.
“I was out of control,” he admitted.
Gee said that he also failed to take into account that Thomas, prior to busting Gee after picking off his bluff, probably had knowledge of the fact that Gee had run a three-barrel bluff on him previously. The main event final table aired the hole cards of each player on a short time delay.
“He didn’t want to let me three-barrel him again, plus that river card really hurt me,” Gee said. “It made my hand range very polarized. I wish I hadn’t stepped over the line.”
Gee sees his final table experience more as a loss than anything else, since he missed out on so much. In his mind, the prize of $754,798 he actually did win pales in comparison to what could have been wired to his bank account. Such a mindset is common among gamblers far and wide, including poker players. It’s always about the money you didn’t win.
“In my mind, it was like I lost $8 million,” Gee said. “It was also that I was eight players away from being the world champion. How many chances are you going to get to do that?”
He still thinks about the failure months later, admitting that it’s on his mind before he goes to sleep at night. It has also been tough for him to play cash games like he used to, because he had previously grinded out the mid-stakes no-limit hold’em games. They could never yield profits anywhere close to those of the mammoth tournament he busted.
In a quest for redemption, Gee said he’ll be playing a lot of tournaments in 2013 and 2014. He wants to get the awful taste out of his mouth. For him, the main event hasn’t been what it’s cracked up to be. “People always say the main event is life-changing; not really,” he said.
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