“You know, when you’re a teenager, you look at your parents like, ‘Who are these idiots?’ when they’re telling you what to do.
I just want to see the look on their faces when it sinks in that their dad actually made the final table. Of course, their dad is an idiot, but at least he made the final table,” said
father of three, Steven Begleiter, who will sit at the final table of the 2009 WSOP with the third largest chip stack.
From Chappaqua, New York, 47-year-old Begleiter won his WSOP Main Event seat via his 20-person poker league, the Newcastle Poker Tour, with which he plans on splitting
20% of his WSOP winnings. This group is apparently very tight nit, traveling together to poker events to support each other.
Begleiter explained, "These guys have a piece of me," he said of his fellow leaguers with a smile on his face. "They've all been supporting… me.”
He added, “Doing it with a shared experience with these guys is really unbelievable. They all show up at these games convinced they can beat me."
He actually expects at least 200 people to show up in November to cheer him on, much as they did in July. No other player had as many supporters as Begleiter at the Main Event this year.
One thing that may be in Begleiter’s best interest is his experience working under pressure. As a former employee of the global investment bank and securities trading
brokerage firm, Bear Stearns, he saw the company through a tragic failure that eventually resulted in a buyout by JP Morgan last year. After working for Bear Stearns for 24 years, serving the last
nine as head of corporate strategy, he’s been through some tense times.
He’s very open about talking about it though, and explains, “If you look through the old Bears Stearns annual reports, you’ll see my picture in them.
And if you read some of the books that come out about the demise of Bear Stearns, you’ll see my name in them.”
He continues, “I was there the day we were sold to JP Morgan last year. I did well there, but obviously it didn’t end well.” And as for his ex-co-workers, he has nothing
bad to say about them and adds that they were “a great group of people.”
Now with all that behind him, he works for a private equity firm, which he names as his dream job and says he plays poker for the social aspect and doesn’t take the
game as seriously as some of his opponents. He also admits that he is under experienced than most of his opponents.
This year was only his second year at the WSOP (last year he didn’t make it to cash), but he’s interesting enough to watch out for. Begleiter is proof, once again, that you
don’t need a “professional poker player” title after your name to play poker and be good at it.
Read about all the WSOP 2009 November Nine.
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