It would be easy to label Richard Lee, the sixth place finisher in this year’s WSOP, a sore loser after he repeatedly ripped WSOP champ Jamie Gold as a horrible player in a radio interview he did 12 hours after busting out.

Granted, there’s a saying regarding something about glass houses that may be applicable here, as we’ve called people way worse things in the past for much, much less. So we’ll tread lightly.

And perhaps Lee is entitled to voice his own opinion of Gold without much deference to grace. Perhaps he earned that right after eight grueling days of poker and outlasting more than 8,700 players, only to get knocked out by Gold when Gold had…um…a much better hand and Lee failed to account for the former Hollywood agent’s tendency to not laydown easily in the face of a massive reraise. We also understand that it all may have been said in the heat of the moment, the fog of battle, or perhaps, the haze from many long hours of poker followed by an early morning of drowning away sorrows and drinking away thoughts of a WSOP title that might have been.

And if Lee simply stopped there during his interview, with his own opinion of how the play went down, we’d maybe give him a pass, especially considering he has hot daughters who may or may not end up as future Wicked Chops Poker Friday Night Parting Shot Girls. Unfortunately though Lee didn’t end with his own assessment of Gold. Finding company for his misery, Lee shared what some pros had told him about Gold’s play, and in particular, Lee discussed a private telephone conversation he had with legendary L.A. poker player, Bobby Hoff (at right), who Gold ironically mentioned himself a number of times during his improbable run at the WSOP. But while Gold praised Hoff as “maybe the best player in the world,” the admiration apparently wasn’t mutual.

“Only problem is, Jamie’s not a particularly good player,” Hoff allegedly told Lee, when the two were privately discussing the hand that sent Lee home.

To refresh your memory, Gold had been getting the best of Lee and pretty much everyone else at the final table with aggressive big stack play and a nice run of cards. Feeling that it was time to play back at the chip leader, Lee believed he had the hand to do it with when Gold limped from the cutoff for 240k and Lee, in the small blind, looked down at pocket jacks (suck). Lee bumped it up to 1.2 million, but Gold didn’t scare and fired back with a 4 million reraise.
Lee, thinking Gold didn’t have pocket Aces or Kings and he’d fold if he had anything less, made the all-in reraise. But Gold quickly called and turned over queens. The board came K-K-3-6-10.

“Your play was great. His play was horrible,” again Lee recounts Hoff as saying. “You’re not gonna get Jamie to laydown a hand. He’s a call horse. He’s a terrible player.”

How putting your tournament life on the line with pocket jacks against an aggressive, fearless, maybe reckless but certainly massive chip leader was a great play beats us. To us, it was part desperation and part bad timing. And likewise, disclosing to the world 12 hours after busting out that Bobby Hoff personally told you that Gold was a terrible player was also part desperation, and part bad timing. Like getting sucked out in an online SNG or taking a bad beat in a live tournament, it takes class and character to walk away without saying something negative about your opponent. And it takes even less to realize you shouldn’t share publicly what others have told you privately. Considering that Hoff and Gold regularly square off in L.A. area ring games, it will be interesting to see if Gold catches wind of what Hoff allegedly said about him, and no doubt, we’re probably helping to make sure he does.

We understand the tendency to crack on out-of-nowhere WSOP winners. Varkonyi and Moneymaker haven’t exactly carried the mantle of “world champion” to a sustained, successful poker career. But both Greg Raymer and Joe Hachem certainly have proven their wicked poker chops over and over again since winning their WSOP ME bracelet. So why wouldn’t Jamie Gold? It’s not like the WSOP ME was his first ever cashing. And he fucking dominated play from Day 4 until capturing the title, ending each day with the chip lead.

We wonder if Lee had hit his miracle Jack on that hand against Gold and sucked him out, and eventually went on to win the WSOP, would Gold show the same lack of class in interviews.

Probably not.

Listen to Lee’s interview on San Antonio’s WOIA here and draw your own conclusions.

Tagged as: Jamie Gold, poker, Richard Lee, WSOP

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