For most poker players, pocket Kings is a play-no-matter-what hand pre-flop. But most poker players aren’t Kristen Foxen. This week, Foxen did just that at the final table of the Triton Poker Jeju $100K Main Event, stirring debate in the poker community as to whether or not she made the right play.
There were just nine players left from the original 178 entries, with blinds at 75,000/150,000 and a big blind ante of 150,000. The ninth place payout was $385,000 and first place was $3.766 million. The pay jumps for each spot on the ladder were sizeable, to say the least.
Felipe Ketzer began the action by moving all-in pre-flop with Q♠-J♠ for 1.175 million chips. Elton Tsang called with two red Tens. It then folded to Philip Sternheimer, who went all-in over the top with J♣-J<font color=”red”>♦</font> for 3.775 million.
Now it was on Foxen, sitting with the second-smallest stack, and staring at two black Kings. The announcers thought she was going to shove for sure, but she sat there and seriously pondered her decision. Two players were all-in ahead of her, and one more could do the same. Aces were certainly a possibility, but even if nobody had her beat, she was nearly guaranteed to move up a spot on the pay table. And the more opponents, the more bullets she would have to dodge, even if she had the best hand.
After a long tank session, Foxen finally folded, to the shock of the announcers.
Tsang also folded, and Ketzer and Sternheimer flipped over their cards. In the stream, it sounded like Foxen told the table what she folded and while there wasn’t a ton of discussion, her opponents definitely seemed surprised.
In the end, the board helped neither Ketzer nor Sternheimer, which meant that Ketzer took his leave from the tournament in ninth place.
The kicker (no pun intended), though, was that the turn produced a King, which meant that Kristen Foxen would have won the hand and made a power move up the chip counts. Despite remaining one of the short stacks, though, Foxen did hold on to finish in fourth place for $1.449 million, the biggest payday of her career.
Ben Tollerene went on to win the tournament and the $3.766 million first prize.