Steven Jones Compares Squid Game Run to WSOP Main Event Runner-Up Finish
Steven Jones has made two deep runs in high-stakes competitions. One paid him $6.5 million, and the other a whopping $0.
The poker player from Arizona nearly conquered the $4,560,000 winner-take-all Squid Game: The Challenge reality TV game show on Netflix earlier this week. But he suffered a soul-crushing ending to the final challenge and left the game with nothing.
PokerNews caught up with Jones — Player 183 — on Wednesday during the Celebrity Poker Tour (CPT) Invitational at PokerGO Studio in Las Vegas. He dished on his highly-publicized feud with the runner-up, Dajah Graham — Player 102 — and comparisons between running deep in the 2023 World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event and the Netflix competition.
Jones Discusses Squid Game: The Challenge Run
Jones fell just short in a field of 456 competitors on Squid Game: The Challenge, a nine-episode show that concluded on Tuesday, although it was filmed in early 2025. The 2023 WSOP runner-up to Daniel Weinman said he had applied to appear on a different game show but "then I got an email saying 'we're also casting for Squid Game,' and I was like all right, I'm here, so I'll just apply, and I got a call back.
Squid Game: The Challenge, in its second season, is a spinoff of the iconic Squid Game, a South Korean drama series. Jones had seen the original version, but was unfamiliar with The Challenge before he was selected to compete.
"So, after I got casted, I had to go back, watch The Challenge, and be like, all right, what did I just sign-up for?" he said.
Despite having minimal knowledge of The Challenge, he didn't spend much time preparing for the competition, although he had a solid idea of the type of games he'd need to master to run deep. But the limited preparation was more than enough, as he maneuvered his way through 451 players to reach the five-player finale.
Squid Game: The Challenge differs from a poker tournament in that one player wins all the money. Jones, when he finished second out of 10,043 players in the 2023 WSOP Main Event, knew long before the tournament ended that he was guaranteed to win money. That wasn't the case on the reality show, but he said The Challenge was "way less stressful" than his Main Event run.
"I went in there just not stressed at all, because I'm going in for fun, not thinking, 'oh, I'm going to win $4.5 million," Jones explained. "I wasn't stressed at all. The Main Event, the whole time obviously you're just stressed until you're busted."
That said, Jones considers his Squid Game elimination "way more soul-crushing" than his heads-up defeat to Weinman, who won $12.1 million.
"My heart sank," he said. "When I got squibbed, I just, I knew I messed up."
Losing out on winning the money was rough, but he'd struck up a bitter feud with Graham late in the game. Seeing Graham reach the final two while he sat on the sidelines following elimination wasn't easy. Graham relished in the fact that Jones had been eliminated, and he admitted he wasn't exactly upset when his rival lost at the end to Perla Figuereo (Player 072). But he said the beef has recently been squashed, as the finalists have been out together on the interview tour.
"We're all on good terms now. But in that moment, I was laughing she didn't win," Jones said.
Figuereo won $4,560,000 and was the only player who received a penny. It's customary in poker tournaments for players at the final table or final few players to reach a chop agreement and split the prize pool. But Jones explained that there was no chop reached on Squid Game.
"I tried, man," Jones said of his efforts to propose a chop. "People didn't understand the chop. I was trying to talk to people, and they were just nervous about it. They just didn't get the whole chop."
The producers of the show won't facilitate chops, so even if the players had verbally agreed to a chop, Jones cautioned that there would have been a "trust factor" in play. He'd built up some enemies, which made it even more difficult to arrange a deal. But he said had he reached the final two, he "one-hundred percent" would have proposed a chop.
Jones didn't win any money, but he enjoyed the experience and gave the poker community a sweat. Squid Game: The Challenge, all nine episodes, is available exclusively on Netflix.
