Scott is Playing in the 2026 WSOP Seniors and Super Seniors Tournaments

I had a burger and onion rings with a Diet Pepsi for dinner in my room.  I really wasn’t up for a crowd. Instead, I needed a little quiet to reset and recharge. I have been experimenting with meditation at home, and I kind of wish I was adept enough to have done a little after eating, but I don’t think I could slow myself down. I am taking deep breaths and writing this.  I can feel it helping somewhat, but this has always been my danger point.  The last two hours of the day are when bad ideas somehow become good ideas, usually resulting in dumb calls or stupid bluffs.   I just need to count the minutes to bagging.  120 minutes.  I’ve already played 960 minutes, 120 ain’t no thing. And of course, right after writing this, I get whomped by quads.  777A is the board, and I have an ace, but the other guy has a 7.  I lost 20,000 chips and he stood up to take a picture of the hand, which offended the table.  The guy has Joe Pesci energy, which make...

The table is finally broken and I have been sent to the Horseshoe, Table Red 536. This seems to be a weirdly polite table so far.  When I bluffed at a flop in a battle of the blinds from the big blind, the small blind raised me and I folded.  He then showed me his hand, top pair, and said, “I just wanted you to see that I wasn’t making a play, I really had it.” The table is not preflop raising much either.  It’s like there is a collective thought that doing that is a little déclassé.  Or, they are setting me up.  It’s happened before. New guy just sat down and when the guy to my left raised 3x the blinds, he went all in.  Ah, we see that not-so-rare specimen, the Poker Maniac, whose lifespan extends until someone comes into a better hand.  All or nothing! I am playing too passively.  I folded 99 instead of calling an all-in which would have tripled me up.  I folded 66 which would have won against 33.  I think the folds were right, but ma...

I am staying disciplined through the first four hours of the tournament.  My poker buddy Bill “The Banker” told me many years ago that he did the same thing every hand he played: cover the cards in front of you with a card marker and wait to look at them until it is your turn. It’s a very basic principle: don’t expose your reactions until you have to, don’t give information to people acting before you.  And almost no one waits.  The allure of the unknown calls out to you, and while your eyes may not bug out like Roger Rabbit’s, your involuntary reactions - the way you reach for chips and look around the table, your posture, your skin tone - these are all in play when you see your cards.  Don’t look and no one can know what you have. At some point, however, I may backslide and start looking.  It’s human nature.  I will try to put that off as long as possible. New player has replaced the gray haired guy on my right.  Jean Colinet, two cashes.  He lo...

Back from the break.  New players to my right and my left: Jenny Marczynski, who has 13 cashes; and Samuel Choae, who has 20 cashes.  Marczynski looks like a PTA mom, and she just felted poor generic Raymond Padgett, who’d gone all in for 3500 with Q10h.  She showed AJh and at the end, she had AAA33 to Padgett’s nothing at all.  Bye Ray. Choae and her are in a hand now and she’s giving him the Mom Stare before folding.  I’m not sure I could stand up to that kind of scrutiny. At the break, I ran into my HRM pals Doug and Mark.  Mark has a 90-year-old at his table who apparently has some controversial attitudes about race.  This is one of the baked-in aspects of a tournament that is comprised of old folks: racists and sexists feel like they are in a friendly crowd and well, they express themselves.  The WSOP has a code of conduct and Mark’s tablemate could be sanctioned for being offensive, but I get the impression that no one is going to sanction a...

Here we are.  For some reason, my phone will not let me post pictures on the blog, so I will add my pictures at some point in the future. First hand: Q3 off suit.  Easy fold.  Watching Rudijanto play aggressively, before folding on a flush  Second hand: 29 off in the big blind.  I flop two pair, but the board is all diamonds.  When the river adds a fourth diamond, I am done. Third hand: J3 off.  Jack on the flop.  I bet 200 and get one caller.  Next card is a blank, so I bet 400 and the guy goes away.  I am now 100 up in the tournament! First impressions: Rudijanto is absolutely tiny, a small bald Asian man.  The guy to his left, Gary Groff, is wearing a hat that says “Kiss My Bass” and is already showing a little recklessness.  Michelle Belanger is a hatchet-faced woman wearing a black and yellow hat that says “ICE immigration” and a shirt that seems to say “Hello Masks My Old Friend.”  Not sure what that’s about.  T...

I had a good night sleep and have now put on my tournament uniform: black suit, white dress shirt. I don’t know why I prefer appearance over comfort, but the suit seems to give me some confidence and, hopefully, some credibility.  I am representing competence, wealth, and professionalism, but I could also be representing insecurity, cluelessness and pretense.  Who knows what people really think? I will have a danish and a Diet Coke for breakfast when I get downstairs.  I will eat better at lunch. Random thoughts before the tournament: *   I had pleasant dreams last night, including getting on a glass elevator that roamed the countryside.  I like to think this is a metaphor for the creative mind: not A to B, more A to F to Q to J to wherever I feel like going.  I’m not sure if poker is a creative game, however: it’s more like restaurant cooking, making the same dish over and over and now and then throwing out an unexpected special to keep things interesting....

The night before the tournament is always interesting. I am two hours earlier than home, which is a little discombobulating. I want to gamble a little bit too, which I do by placing a small bet on the Astros. (A good rule when in Las Vegas: do not bet on the Astros.) And then Bert and I join our poker buddies Wojo, Larry and Billy and their wives for dinner at the Bonefish Grill.  I have corn chowder and something called Unicorn fish, which turns out to be pretty good. The company is great as I listen to Wojo’s theories about pro football karma (in a nutshell, if your city has been through some kind of trauma, your sports team will win a championship), and to Bert and Tammy trade true crime stories. Notably, there is very little talk about poker.  This makes sense: we will be neck-deep in bad beat stories tomorrow, and not much to be learned tonight. Instead, we relax. It’s midnight here, 2:00 a.m. in Houston.  Time to get some sleep for the long day tomorrow.

“It’s not gambling if you never lose.” That’s my standard line when I am asked about whether I worry about losing money playing cards.  It usually gets a laugh, but only after a moment passes in which the person I am talking to peers at me to see if I actually believe this.   That moment always happens when I say that - every single time - because everyone knows a problem gambler and they know the rationalizations problem gamblers make to justify their behavior and they know the damage problem gambling does, like anything a person does to excess. So they try hard to see if there is something else going on in my eyes when I tell them I never lose.  Because in asking me about it, they are already worrying. I worry too.   I spent the first five months of this year working on an unexpectedly difficult case, losing sleep, doing what lawyers do, gaming out the worst case scenarios, trying to anticipate all the possibilities.  When it was over - at least for now -...

First good omen: Our gate at Hobby is Gate 40.  This runs counter to Scott’s Immutable Law of Airports. which is that my departing or arriving gate is always the one furthest away from security or baggage claim.  It never fails. Except today.  Gate 40 was the first gate nearest to the security screening.  When I got there, my friend Greg was already seated, and he told me that Bert was having lunch.  (A quick aside: if you had to guess what Bert is doing at any given time while he is awake, you really can’t do better than “eating” as an answer, except during sleeping hours, and maybe even then. In short, he eats a lot.) First bad omen:  About five minutes later, the Voice of the Airport announced that we were moving to Gate 21.  I assumed that was going to be a nineteen gate slog, thus reaffirming Scott’s Immutable Law of Airports. Second good omen:  It wasn’t nineteen gates.  It was the first gate on the other side of the food court.  A...

I think this is my tenth trip to Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker.   The first trip was in 2015, which I know because I was 51 years old and played my first Seniors Tournament, which is open to players who are 50 or older.   Why didn’t I play in 2014, when I was 50?  It happened that my daughter was graduating from high school the same weekend that the tournament started , and despite my assurances to my wife and daughter that I would not miss her graduation from college (which is the graduation that really matters, right?), they would not let me chase my poker destiny. So 2015 was the first year.  And I think I took 2016 and 2020 off for reasons lost to time.  So 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019 , 2021 , 2022 , 2023 , 2024 , 2025 , and now 2026.  I have linked my live-blogs above from when I started doing them in 2019. Two of those years, I played in the Main Event, which costs $10,000 to enter.  I did not actually spend that much money to play - ...