Nits? No! Not Nits!

As a general rule I like to get seated in a poker tournament before its scheduled start time, but the Wynn Fall Classic made that close to impossible. It was a little after ten when I rushed into Encore and inadvertently stumbled across the temporary poker area. Ray was at the podium.

“Hey Kat, what table?”

“Huh?”

“Where are you sitting?”

“Oh I… not registered yet, thought we were in the… uh…”

“We’ll take care of you here,” said Ray breezily and traded me a seat card to the Senior’s tournament for six bills.

“Great man, cheers. I’m… uhm… Hang on.”

I downed a five-hour energy shot, re-focused on my seat card and looked inquiringly at Ray.

“Second table on the right, Kat. G’luck.”

I sat down in the seven-seat, handed the dealer my ID to confirm I was the idiot who decided to get up this early and that I was sufficiently old to participate, and scanned the table. The dealer pitched the cards. Everybody folded to the blinds.

“Chop?” said the small blind.

“Sir, this is a tournament, you can’t chop,” said the dealer.

The small blind folded. I tweeted the incident and tagged it #AARPInvitational #NitFest.

Since I am vain I should point out that I have only been eligible for senior’s events for less than two years, and while I loathe the ridiculous start time I’ve found them to be profitable. They also tend to throw up unexpected situations and questions and the one that had got buried in my still waking brain as the folding continued unabated was: Why were we in the Encore? The old folks tourney typically draws a smaller field than the $300 dailies during the Classic, and I knew they were to be held in the regular Wynn poker room.

As my eyes ran over the unfamiliar surroundings, the answer suddenly presented itself. While access to the main poker room is super convenient from the parking garage, the area outside the poker room is often crowded with smokers and window shoppers at the Ferrari store. The Encore, in contrast, has large, marble floors ideal for parking a fleet of electric mobility scooters.

And there they all were. Hoverounds, Little Rascals, Invacares, chrome sparkling in the bright casino lights like some grim parody of a muscle car show.

I was shaken out of my reverie by Ray informing the room that dinner break would be at 4:45 pm.

In addition to being vain, I readily admit that adjusting to being slightly-older-than-fifty is not something I am finding easy. Fifty may be the new forty for some, but due to a dissipated and extended youth my body has high mileage. If I were an electric mobility scooter I’d be one of the three-wheeled numbers with dents and dodgy bearings, squeaking erratically along the Strip and hopefully scaring small children who shouldn’t be there in the first place.

However, I do not wake up with the dawn chorus and I don’t eat dinner at 4:45 pm. And being associated with silver-haired nits was starting to piss me off, if only because of the reminder that the passage of time is only going to make everything worse.

And then I noticed something.

The players at the table were not nits. They may have been playing nitty for the first level, conceivably because they were also still waking up, but an hour in to the tournament we were going five and six to the flop.

It then occurred to me that I didn’t recognize anybody. These were not the grumpy old cash game grinders I’d see at weekly freerolls. I was dealing with a completely different demographic: well-dressed seniors with expensive watches and haircuts. Some of them even had suntans. I overheard a couple of them talking about a trip to Hawaii the following week. Another was describing last winter’s skiing in Aspen.

And finally, in a flash of revelation that might be reasonably represented by an exploding lithium battery overheated by the Vegas sun, I remembered that I’d gone through this process of discovery the last time I played a seniors tournament. I guess the mind really is the first thing to go. And this is one reason I am writing it down now.

The salient points for me to remember are the following. Most of these people are well-heeled. The amount of money involved is meaningless to them and thus they feel no pressure. They are also terrible at poker, but in a very different way than is typical of aging cash-game players. They like seeing flops, they like making hands, but they are much stickier post-flop than you might conclude from their ear hair.

And some of them have lucky horse-shoes jammed in the traditional orifice, gg me.

I recognize that most of you are not receiving literature from the AARP, but it turns out you can find these old not-nits in tournaments quite easily. I played the $300 at Wynn the next day, and half the field was made up of wrinklies who had not survived to day two of the Seniors. Still seeing lots of flops, still paying off. I just can’t figure out where they hid their Hoverounds