Image courtesy of World Poker Tour
When Squid Game Season 3 aired in the summer, it felt like the Netflix hit came to an end too abruptly. Many of the show’s fans wanted a longer wrap-up, even more had already missed the main protagonists, and plenty advocated for the inevitable U.S. reboot, which is rumored to be directed by Seven’s David Fincher in 2026.
One poker professional just proved that real-life drama is alive and well in the gameshow version, but could Steven Jones outwit one of the greatest challenges of his life and walk away with $4.56 million?
How the Scene Was Set
A post-pandemic society, scarred by worldwide suffering due to COVID, showed its humanity and hubris in 2020, until Squid Game came along. Providing a comment on the devastating effects of poverty, the show caught the public’s imagination. A gameshow spin-off, Squid Game: The Challenge, was inevitable and aired in November 2023.
Back then, the winner was – spoiler alert – Mai Whelan, a.k.a. ‘Player 287’, a retired U.S. immigration adjudicator and a former petty officer in the U.S. Navy.
While many of the games were physical, the final game of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ put the final two players to the test in a solely mental challenge. The runner-up, Phill, believed it to be a game of luck. Mai Whelan understood the truth – that it was a game of skill. All of which came before the series’ return in November, just four months after the television drama concluded.
My first thought was that I really hoped there would be a poker player in the mix. I wanted this for many reasons; it would be entertaining, they would have a terrific chance of winning, and they would also have an opportunity to shine a light on the skill and craft that carving out a profession in poker demands.
Step forward, Steven Jones. The WSOP Main Event runner-up of 2023 saw Squid Game: The Challenge as his next adventure after cashing for $6.5m as runner-up to Daniel Weinman in Las Vegas.
After trawling through auditions and filming the series across three weeks in London, we now know whether Jones became the winner of Squid Game: The Challenge Season Two or whether he fell dramatically short.
The Opening Games
As Steven himself admitted post-show, his tactics from the opening challenge through to at least halfway through the series were pretty simple – to stay out of trouble.
Jones enjoyed the same fortune as half of the entrants in surviving the first game, The Count, which split the 456 players into two halves and asked one player from each team to accurately count to 456 before pressing a large red button in the middle of a room.
Neither team could hear or see each other, so the election of an accurate ‘counter’ was vital. Jones’ team did the right thing and enlisted the services of a musician for the task, and their timekeeping was 10 seconds more accurate than the other team’s.
No tactics there from Jones, but a little like surviving the opening levels of a big tournament like the WSOP Main Event, his strategy was simple and effective: don’t bust early.
Pretty soon, Jones was thrust into Six-Legged Pentathlon, but while he passed, footage of the event, which featured five games – Ddakji, Flying Stone, Gonggi, House of Cards, and Jegi – and eliminated a further 112 competitors, did not feature Jones on screen.
Physical Control
While the opening two games didn’t rely on Jones’ poker skills, other than possibly how he chose teammates in Six-Legged Pentathlon, the next game did at least force him to perform physically.
The literally titled Catch appeared to be a simple test of hand-to-eye coordination for the players, but with throwers and catchers at risk of elimination should they drop a tennis ball-shaped sphere, the game was a far more psychological game than it at first appeared.
Standing nearer the front of the four lines of players guaranteed an easier catch, and Jones managed to get himself in a strong position. This preserved his life as he made an easy catch, thanks to his pre-game mental skills.
Soon, it was time for a game outside of the dormitory room, and one of the most popular from the Netflix drama, Mingle. In the show, the game is brutal: players wait in abject terror on a spinning carousel as a disembodied voice calls out a number, then must form groups of that number, hurrying to one of dozens of doors around the outside of the arena.
Shut yourself in a room with the exact number of players, and you progress to the next spin of the carousel. Fail to get inside a room, fall short of or exceed the designated number, and you are eliminated. In the drama, the game ended as a bloodbath.
I thought that the choice of including Mingle for Squid Game: The Challenge was an interesting one. In the series, players literally fight for their lives to reach the doors with the requisite number of people on a team. The reality show contestants weren’t fighting to stay alive, but with only 72 of the initial 456 players involved, the battle to reach the next round was very intense and even got a little too physical.
Players with physical strength, speed, and the capacity to exert coercive control had a big edge. Jones was immediately able to place himself in a strong group and, throughout four brutal rounds, always found a way to help control the group and determine which players needed to either leave their number or join them.
With 28 players eliminated, the remaining 44 players were asked to go into rooms in pairs, but instead linked arms and agreed as a collective to refuse another spin of the carousel.
Out came the Front Man, the de facto figure in charge of proceedings, or at least the ‘face card’ of the operation – Studio Lambert definitively ran the rule over the players in Squid Game: The Challenge – to talk to the players.
Rather than chastise them, he applauded their solidarity… before decrying that the pairs would now play the most personal round of all against each other.
A Mental Edge
In Marbles, each member of the pair started with 10 marbles. Within the time period, the pair, who were typically the closest friends, would battle with each other in a game of their choosing to determine a winner. These games were often emotional in the Netflix show, and the same was true here.
Player 72, Perla, won her marbles by her brother Jeffrey handing over his 10 marbles, and others had luck along the way as they threw marbles closest to a wall, or nearest a target.
The father-daughter pair of Curt and Zoe saw Curt lose a best-of-three game of tic-tac-toe, although he seemed to let his daughter win. What man could advance at the expense of his offspring? Not him, that’s for sure.
There was no such hardship or emotional handwringing for Jones, a.k.a. Player 183, who we can assume picked the unsuspecting victim to be his paired teammate in a clever pre-game choice on the Mingle carousel.
Playing a ‘guessing game’ of whether marbles were in Player 232, Emily Xia’s hands, Jones easily read her face before winning the other way around, using his ‘poker face’ to advance as one of 22 survivors with barely a mental scratch on him.
From 456 players to ‘three tables?’ Child’s play for the World Championship runner-up.
The Ladder
Having survived Marbles, Jones dodged the next raft of eliminations, which came outside traditional games. Three ‘hall monitors’ were selected, and they did not include Jones, who watched on as the three monitors picked three other players to take them on in a fairly mean challenge.
That challenge saw each trio weigh up offering one of their number as a sacrifice. Whoever sacrificed themselves would exit the game, but by doing so, they would also take out the entire other team of three players, weighing up the same choice. It was a cruel way to go, as the team that sacrificed second would all be shot down as a result.
While Jones wasn’t participating in this game, he got a bit of luck when some very strong players lost, including many of the male players remaining.
Another strong male player, 409, shot himself in the metaphorical foot when he told a player with the power to eliminate that he would no longer be a kind opponent. Having signed his own death warrant, he had the temerity to feel aggrieved on the way out of the dorm. There’s always that player who shoves light and blames bad luck, right?
In the next official game, Slides and Ladders, a larger-than-life-sized version of the classic board game Snakes and Ladders, Jones came into his own… but also painted a target on his own back.
Every time players landed on or were sent to a ‘slide’ square, each pair of players would decide between them who would go on which slide. One player would go first, and if they were successful, the slide would drop them back down the board. If they were out of luck, the slide would shoot them out of Squid Game: The Challenge in its entirety.
Jones was picked for a slide early on with his partner Kevin, whom he declared was his best friend in the game. The pair picked slides, and Kevin went first and was shot into the abyss and out of contention. Jones slid down the other slide and remained in the game.
At this point, emotional tilt got the better of Jones. A momentary red mist descended at his own admittance, and he targeted the pair that had sent Kevin to his doom. Picking them for a mystery slide at the first opportunity, he got unlucky when Perla, his nemesis, survived the 50/50 chance. Both players made it through the game, however, and would meet again.
Jones survived but played the game too strong and established himself as someone who took pleasure in others’ defeat. This may have been his weakest strategic moment of the entire show.
Trust in the Lord
In the next game, Circle of Trust, Steven Jones was at his absolute best. The game is simple. Each of the remaining 10 players sat in a bright, white room. Each player puts on a blindfold, whereupon the game’s ‘guards’, bedecked in the garish pink of the show, walk around them, eventually tapping one on the shoulder at random.
That person then takes off their blindfold and creeps silently to a table in the middle of the room to pick up a gift box and deposit it in front of a blindfolded opponent.
Retaking their seat, the ‘gifter’ then removes their blindfold on the command of the guards, with everyone else. Whoever the player puts the box in front of must then work out who did the deed and declare their number.
If they are correct, the gifter is eliminated. If they are wrong, however, they themselves are taken out of the game. Jones actually had to gift the deadly box twice, but both times got away with it, convincing his ‘opponent’ in the circle that he had nothing to do with it.
Only six players made it through the game, including Trinity Savon, who sat out Slides and Ladders as the odd number out and was allowed to pass to the next round without completing the game.
Only five out of the final six saw dinner and a tuxedo in a nod to the penultimate stage of the game. One more player, Jones’s last remaining strong ally, Kate Row-Ham, was taken out in a round of Shuffleboard.
Jones was exemplary at the game and never in danger of losing out, but he was finally marooned from anyone who had his back. In a surprising moment, the only other male player left in with a chance of winning the $4.56 million winner’s prize, Trinity, sacrificed himself in the next game at dinner, where whoever ended up with the black disc would face elimination.
Chanting religious rhetoric, the young player committed the only selfless act of the series in removing himself from contention. It was a touching moment, but in the cold light of day, it seems crazy.
If, as he declared, Trinity was not motivated by money and wished others success in his place, why did he take the place of someone else who might have needed the winnings by participating in the first place?
However, after everyone looked at it, only four remained, and Steve Jones was the only man left in the race. And it would be a race that would decide the game.
A Classic Race
The final game of Squid Game: The Challenge was an iconic one, as Red Light, Green Light played out with a twist to bring the game full circle after Season 1 (both the drama and challenge series) began with the game, reducing a field of 456 players to hundreds fewer.
This time, however, it was for the win, and the rules were clear. Go on green, stop on red, and if movement was detected while the light shone red, you were eliminated. Whoever could reach the finish line first would take the money.
Jones was in an incredibly difficult position in terms of allies and foes, with both Perla Figuereo and her ally in the game, Dajah Graham, a policewoman, on either side of him.
Lining up with the trio was Player 17, Vanessa Clements, but she was eliminated almost as soon as the starting gun had fired, failing to skid to a halt quick enough in the sand, slipping and being shot down by the blood packet hidden inside her shirt.
Three-handed, Jones was slightly ahead of both Perla and Dajah as the doll spun its head and sang again, the light turning green. Jones ran, but as he attempted to fall to his knees to manage the last yards, his grip on the sand failed, and he stumbled.
Motion detectors sense Jones’ movement and applied the punishment, as he was cut down with just two opponents left. On the next turn of the doll’s head, Dajah felt a pop and dropped from a static position in agony as her leg flared, leaving Perla-Jones’ nemesis to claim victory.
Outwitting his opponents in psychological games? Check. Mastering mind games to take control of a room full of people or opponents in close-minded combat? Raise all-in for the WSOP Main Event runner-up. Running in dress shoes across sand? It was one last race that Steven Jones couldn’t win.
In Squid Game: The Challenge, as in poker, you’ve got to win your races.
Here’s every “death” as it played out in the series:
