“It was very frustrating coming in second,” she says laughing. “But I was very happy.”
At the turbo final table, Lisa was also joined by Scott and he took runner-up for $8,096. He followed up the runner-up finish with yet another second-place finish in a $250 DeepStack event for $4,486.
In total, Scott finished with four cashes for $20,182 and was named the player of the series. His background as a LearnWPT student certainly helped, he says, and everything seemed to come together.
“It was one of those times where I was using moves to make moves and running well too,” he says. “When those two go together you can be unstoppable. It was just a really good trip.”
The couple, who have two grown children and a grandchild on the way, have family in the area and spent some time with them during the trip. Scott didn’t even realize he was in contention to be casino champion.
“We didn’t play a lot of the events just because we were seeing family,” he says. “We skipped several events, but if I had known I was in contention I definitely would have played a few more.”
Scott began playing poker in 2005 with some friends and online. He cashed in smaller tournaments and then won a $235 event in Las Vegas in 2017 for $20,108 followed by another big win a year later for $11,348.
Lisa wasn’t into the game like her husband however, and it took her a while to appreciate poker.
“I’d sit behind him when I was done playing Blackjack after losing money,” she says. “The TV was always on the poker channel [the WPT included], and I wasn’t really watching him play, but I started knowing all the players because of all the little vignettes they ran about them. Scott would come over while he was playing online and say, ‘Look I have such and such hand. What do you think the nuts would be right now?’”
Lisa would answer and often would be correct. She didn’t have much interest in the game but seemed to be picking it up. To her, the game just looked boring with the people looking “all serious and unfriendly.”
One night at a casino, Lisa planned to play Blackjack but her husband convinced her to take a seat at the tables. That first night she played Limit Hold’em holding a card with the ranking of hands.
“I won four hands in a row at one point,” she says. “I couldn’t even stack them fast enough because I didn’t know how to handle chips. I was so excited.”
She left the tables with some winnings, and some confidence. Her poker life took off from there – and that hand ranking card hasn’t been needed since.