Kristen Foxen's Final Hand at the 2024 WSOP: Analysis

A few days ago, we looked at Phil Galfond's newest YouTube posting entitled "Kristen Foxen’s FEARLESS WSOP Bluffs [Hand Review]." In this posting, Galfond looked back at a couple of bluffs from the 2024 WSOP Main Event involving Canadian poker star Kristen Foxen.

Foxen, a popular poker player who has opened 2025 with a roar, won a PokerGo Cup event last month.

Having already offered some supplemental analysis of the first hand in the video, let's now take a look at the second hand. Sorry for the plot spoiler, but the second hand is where Foxen goes out of the 2024 Main Event.

Players: Kristen Foxen, Joe Serock

Tournament: 2024 Main Event at the World Series of Poker

Situation: There are only 13 players left in the 10,112-player event (ie. a spot at the coveted Final Table is still up for grabs -- and within reach)

Galfond claims that only 1 in 1000 players would shove in the situation that Foxen is in. I see things differently.

I think he's way off and that a lot more players might shove there, hoping for AQ or any hand with a Q to fold. That doesn't mean it's the 'average' play by a good player but more than one in a thousand will blunder there.

The play-by-play announcer says in the video that it's "her biggest misstep of the last several days." In No Limit poker, a big misstep will often either cripple you or take you out of the tournament - unless the cards save you. In this case, the cards did not save Foxen and the misstep eliminated her from the 2024 Main Event. I do wonder if fatigue factored in at all.

What I would like to suggest is simply that Foxen's blunder could be age related.

I've written a lot of sports betting tips in the past where I've tipped against tennis players because of their age. But tennis is much different than poker: one is a sport and the other is a game.

Endurance doesn't normally matter that much in games but in the huge multi-day tournaments, like the Main Event, I think fatigue will factor in a lot.

As a case in point, it was just over a week ago that Phil Hellmuth announced that he would not play in the 2025 Main Event because, at the age of 60, he doesn't feel he has the endurance to compete anymore.

Foxen was not 60 but was 38 years old at the time of her 2024 WSOP blunder. One could point out that the eventual tournament champion, Jonathan Tamayo, was similarly aged. 

But most of the players at the Final Table were younger than Foxen and some were much younger. Only one player, Jason Sagle, was significantly older but even he wasn't exactly Hellmuth's age.

Jonathan Tamayo (winner): 39

Jordan Griff (runnerup): 30

Niklas Astedt (3rd): 34

Jason Sagle (4th): 44

Boris Anzhelov Angelov (5th): 27

Andres Gonzalez (6th): 30

Brian Kim (7th): couldn't find his age but Grok (X.com) said 35-40 was a good estimate

Joe Seroc (8th): 36

Malo Latinois (9th): 28

How does being older than most of the players in a tournament affect your chances? 

It is double-edged because experience certainly helps. 

But I think the 35+ crowd is generally disadvantaged. Staying in a huge multitable tournament means staying focused and staying patient. I think the older players will lose their focus and their patience faster than younger players, in general.

Is that what caused Foxen to blunder? We'll never really know. But I do think such blunders, from good players, often result from mental fatigue.