By Sean Chaffin
Kitty Kuo (pictured) is a familiar face on the WPT and with several deep runs on her record, she makes the tour a big part of her poker life. Among the field at the WPT Borgata Poker Open, Kuo hoped for yet another big finish.
Fresh off an eighth-place run at the WPT Legends of Poker for $58,265, she now has seven WPT cashes including two final tables for a total of $471,392. She began playing more WPT events after reducing her traveling schedule for EPT events a bit.
“I like the structures here and that you can re-enter the main events,” says Kuo, who is originally from Taipei, Taiwan. “If you fly here, you don’t want to just play one event. So if you bust out, you can play again. I like that way better.”
Despite busting out at the end of Level 12, she feels the level of competition is a bit better in the Northeast than in California.
“The field at the Bike was pretty good,” she says. “But I think the player level here is better because I think the average player is worse in L.A.”
Her best WPT finish came in Season XVI in the WPT Bobby Baldwin Classic, where she finished runner-up to Darren Elias for $248,380. At WPT Malta in Season XI, she took fourth for $51,409.
“So far this year I haven’t won any poker tournaments, but on the World Poker Tour I keep going deep,” she says. “I just haven’t won yet”
In total, Kuo has more than $2.1 million in lifetime live tournament winnings and is a sponsored pro of Natural8, an online poker and gambling site catering to players in Asia and Australia. She now plans on heading to WPT Maryland in late September and then the WPT bestbet Bounty Scramble in October.
Twitter has become a popular forum for Kuo and many players get a few laughs from some of her posts.
“I don’t try to be funny, but I just try to post the story of what happened today,” she says. “If I have a bad day, then I can read all my past hundred posts and be happy. Some days I’m happy and some days I’m sad, so I try to post every day about what happens to me.”
What did I learn in Beverly hill today? Need to make more money at poker to shop all the items I like pic.twitter.com/UzivKtvov1
— kitty kuo thomas (@kittykuopoker) September 5, 2019
Her occasional unintentional word usage mistakes have also provided some humorous responses for other players. After playing the LearnWPT GTO trainer on Day 1a, she posted that she wasn’t planning to be chatty and would instead be a “birch” at the table.
— Darren Elias (@DarrenElias) September 16, 2019
Elias was quick to superimpose Kuo’s image atop a birch tree. A fellow player responded that the four-time champion was being a “son of a birch.” Kuo laughed about her mistake on Tuesday.
“I said I wanted to be a bitch today because normally I talk all the time,” she says, “but that day I wanted to be a bitch. I didn’t even know what a birch was, but now I know it’s a tree.”
Sean Chaffin is a freelance writer in Crandall, Texas, and his work appears in numerous websites and publications. Follow him on Twitter @PokerTraditions.