Steven Begleiter Talks Poker on Bloomberg

Steven Begleiter ponders his future in the game.

While 2009 WSOP Main Event champion Joe Cada has been on a publicity tear since his victory, not much has been heard from the other members of the November Nine. Well, Phil Ivey has been winning millions in high-stakes online poker action, but the other seven guys have been pretty quiet. Steven Begleiter, former Wall Streeter and sixth place finisher in the Main Event, recently came out of seclusion to discuss his poker future on Bloomberg.

Joining news hosts Mark Crumpton and Lori Rothman, Begleiter implied that he’s not going to give up his day job to devote his life to poker any time soon. He said that during the break awaiting the November final table, he played quite a few poker tournaments to help prepare himself. But now that that’s over, he’s “probably back to being a one tournament a year guy.” That, despite the fact that his final table appearance earned him approximately $1.6 million dollars for a few days work.

He also went on to say that many of the same traits that make a poker player great, would easy cross over to a job on Wall Street. He even said that if his former company Bear Stearns hadn’t exploded during the banking collapse, he’d probably have been trying to hire some of the players that he met during his WSOP run.

During the interview, it was pretty clear that Bloomberg News was interested in Begleiter more for his background, than out of a greater interest in poker. At least that was the impression given when one of the hosts mistakenly stated that the WSOP Main Event was a $10 million buy-in tournament. It seems that kind of mis-information runs in the Bloomberg family.