Kristen Foxen transfixed the poker world when she went on a super deep run in the 2024 WSOP Main Event. At that time no woman had made the final table since Barbara Enright in 1995.
It ended for Foxen in 13th place, as recounted at the time by Brad Willis, when she took an aggressive line in a hand against Joe Serock.
“Serock raised under the gun with 
and Foxen called out of the big blind with 
. Serock continued for four million on a 
flop, and Foxen called. On the 
turn, Serock fired six million, and that’s when everything started to change for Foxen. Watching it later, fans will likely analyze it to death, but in the moment, no one could see what was happening in Foxen’s mind. Fans only heard her say, “all-in.” Serock didn’t hesitate on the call.
Foxen turned to her rail.
“I need a ten,” she said almost apologetically before settling into the “I’m not going to watch the river” pose she used to stay alive earlier in the tournament when she needed a miracle. On that day it worked. Today, it didn’t. The river bricked, the eyes of the people on Foxen’s rail changed in real time from hope to a reflection of Foxen’s despair."
Foxen hasn’t talked about that Main Event experience, or the aftermath, much since, and now, for the first time, she reveals what it was really like to process what happened in The Interview. The full episode drops next week, but you can get a sneak peek of the conversation below.
‘That experience sucked’
“People ask me a lot to talk about the Main Event experience, and for a while I was like, ‘I don't really want to talk about it.’ I didn't even know what to say, to be honest. And then recently I was doing a podcast with Chance (Kornuth) and he asked me about it and I realized that I could just say it: ‘That experience sucked.’
“You know, I got 13th in the Main Event. Yuck. That is just not fun. I don't think I need to come at it necessarily from the point of view of it being a great run because it didn’t feel that way. Actually, I was very upset and very disappointed."
‘The poker world can be harsh sometimes’
“I made the mistake of opening Twitter or going online, and you see one negative comment, and it's so true what they say. It could be 200 or however many positive comments, but you see one negative thing, and it just gets to you, and there's just that feeling of, 'Oh, I want to talk to this person in real life,' and I know that this person wouldn't say that to my face.
“And then the poker world can be harsh sometimes. There was all that support, and I really appreciate that, but then, you know, there are the peers that I want respect from... that might never happen, and maybe just realizing that and accepting that, and seeing that in a way it's not going to be their job to respect me or compliment me, and that's kind of the nature of poker. If I'm going to play poker against this guy, why would I do that if I thought he was such a great poker player that I couldn't make money versus him?
“It's an interesting thing putting yourself out there playing on a stage like that, right? And then you get people questioning your intelligence or whatever it might be. The experience was very bittersweet."
'I came back stronger'
"But what it did do, I think, is it definitely shook me a little bit energetically or emotionally, not necessarily in a negative way, but it's almost like I lived many poker players’ worst fear of punting deep in the Main Event, which I'm not going to say that I did.
“But, I think that I obviously took a line that was non-standard and a very aggressive line. People might play on a stream and be very afraid of doing something like that. Right? Okay, I did it, and it didn't work out for me.
"I got a lot of positive comments, and I got some negative comments, and I'm still alive, and everything is okay, and it's like now we can move on. I would be lying if I said that it didn't take a little bit of work to get over that.
“And I think that when I played poker immediately after that, there was a little bit of trepidation or self-doubt. I wasn't really playing from the most confident state, and I had a lot of attention on me, and it was a little bit of a challenge. And then I think a few months later I kind of came back stronger, and I really feel like that's where I am now.”
The full episode of The Interview with Kristen Foxen drops next week — in both video and audio versions — at PokerOrg, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts.
