World Series of Poker Steven Begleiter went from Bear Stearns to the Las Vegas poker tables. Last week, he won $1.26 million. LAS VEGAS — Fifteen months ago, Steven Begleiter’s fortunes could not have seemed worse. The Bear Stearns head of corporate strategy from Chappaqua, N.Y., had just helped close the deal that handed over the failing investment house to JPMorgan Chase & Company, disbanding the only employer he ever had and casting his life into a sea of uncertainty.
That was then. Mr. Begleiter’s luck has clearly changed.
Early last Thursday, the 47-year-old became $1.26 million richer as he outlasted a field of 6,494 others to be one of nine card players to earn a berth at the final table of the World Series of Poker this fall. He will vie in November for a top prize of $8.6 million, the biggest and most prestigious award in gambling, but he has already been paid out for coming in at least ninth.
Right now, he is in third place and en route to Europe to join his wife on a vacation, a trip that had been planned for a while. The $10,000 Buy-In Texas Hold ’Em tournament began on July 3, but Mr. Begleiter thought for sure he would be knocked out long before Wednesday, when the final table was set, so the travel plans remained intact.
“My 11-year-old was pretty sure that I wouldn’t make it through Day 1,” Mr. Begleiter said, laughing, while riding in a taxi to the airport in Las Vegas on Thursday afternoon. “This is an insane amount of money to win playing poker.”
All of that is surreal for a man, who in April 2008, was part of the talks with JPMorgan Chase over the sale and was part of the 75-year-old institution becoming a harbinger and symbol of the current financial meltdown.
Mr. Begleiter referred to this ride as “the total opposite end of the spectrum” from that weekend in April 2008 when he was Bear Stearns’s head of corporate strategy and, months earlier, had been tapped to take over the firm’s asset management division.
The New Rochelle native, hired by Bear Stearns straight out of Haverford College in 1984, bristled when asked about the company’s downfall. “There have been books written about that,” he said tersely. “Read Cohan’s book.”
That’s “House of Cards” by William D. Cohan, which discusses Mr. Begleiter’s presence at those final meetings. Mr. Begleiter is now a partner in a private equity firm Flexpoint Ford.
“There’s a lot of populist nonsense going on right now but I’m very proud of my people,” he said. “We did a lot of good, gave a lot of money back to the community and it’s a shame, it’s just a shame.”
He would rather talk poker, about how in the past two weeks of play in the tournament have been so nerve-racking that he has hardly slept, lost weight and avoided caffeine and alcohol to keep his game fresh. He believed his background on Wall Street prepared him to remain cool under pressure and compared himself with the Giants outwitting the New England Patriots in the 2008 Super Bowl despite being the weaker football team.
“It’s not about the money, really, I just like to compete,” Mr. Begleiter said. “At 47, there’s only two ways to compete — golf and poker.”
He said that his golf game was subpar, so he chose poker. “And I was competing against all these 22-year-old hot shots,” he added.
Mr. Begleiter marveled, “It’s kind of amazing.”
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