The first time Steve Zolotow cashed in a major poker tournament was 40 years ago. It was in a $5,000 Pot Limit Omaha tournament at the 1984 Grand Prix of Poker at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas and, by that point in his life, Zolotow, a born and raised New Yorker, had been honing his poker skills at home in the games that had taken over the world-famous Mayfair Club.
Zolotow probably wouldn’t have imagined that four decades later, at 79 years old, he would still be in the mix, trying to win World Series of Poker bracelets. And he’d also still growing out his signature long, gray mustache. But that’s exactly where he found himself over the last week. Deep in another Pot Limit Omaha tournament, at the 2024 WSOP, Zolotow found himself three-handed for a third career gold bracelet, and his first since 2001.
In fact, Zolotow was a single card away from holding a 2.5-to-1 chip lead in a heads-up battle with Dylan Weisman, until Chino Rheem spiked a river flush to change all three of their fortunes. Zolotow went on to finish third, which was still good for $140,077, and his fourth-best career tournament result.
Five of the first six tournament cashes of Zolotow’s career were in Omaha including an improbable run of three consecutive final tables in the same $2,500 PLO event at the WSOP, in which Zolotow finished exactly fifth each year. But for large chunks of his career, tournaments were a secondary priority in Zolotow’s poker career, if they were even that high.
Most of that can be attributed to a two-pronged advantage Zolotow enjoyed in cash games – his ability to compete at considerable stakes, and the flexibility those games allowed him in his life.
“To me, I’ve always been much more of a cash player than a tournament player. And even though something like today, getting to a final table is very exciting, I hate the fact that you’re a slave of the tournament that you’re in,” said Zolotow. “Yesterday, we played over 12 hours. I’ve played in bridge tournaments. I played in chess tournaments. I know of no other game, certainly not football, baseball, basketball. Mind sports, whatever you call them – Scrabble, chess, bridge – never comes close to putting you through the grinder that way.
“Really, they’ve made tournaments much less of a skill game and more of an endurance contest. As I say that, it’s exciting to reach the final table, but also the fact that stakes double all the time, means you have to keep staying lucky for longer periods.”
To hear Zolotow wax on about some of the pitfalls of modern tournament poker, you might wonder why he’d subject himself to that kind of grind at his age. In truth, it seems Zolotow has caught the tournament bug over the last few years.
It started back in 2021, when the staff at the PokerGO Studio started to notice Zolotow popping up late in the registration period in some of their events. Between June and July of 2021, Zolotow recorded six final table appearances and recorded over $445,000 in cashes. From that point on, the experience reeled Zolotow in in a hurry.
“They’re actually much shorter days than this, with the shorter fields,” Zolotow said. “[And where] the World Series has to deal with huge masses of people there they’re dealing with, you know, a big field [at PokerGO] might be 100 people, and you can order in meals from fancy restaurants, and it’s a much more gracious way to play poker.”
While the summer schedule at the WSOP can be intense, the schedule and structures – especially for the tournaments with buy-ins of $10,000 and up – allow for a little extra leeway in terms of alleviating at least part of the grind in the early stages of these big field tournaments.
“One nice thing they’ve done now is they let you enter late, so you can do a Day 1 that isn’t too punishing, even though Day 2 and Day 3 may be punishing,” said Zolotow. “But on the other hand, it lures you in. You start Day 2 at noon, you’re knocked out at 4, and there’s another one you can play and suddenly you get roped back in again.
“It really is a mystery to me why they can’t put onto the calendar X number of tournaments where the maximum you play is six or eight hours a day,” said Zolotow. “Because they all sort of follow the same long, drawn-out format.”
Even as he’s enjoyed some of the most significant tournament successes of his career over the last three years, Zolotow still carries a deeper appreciation for cash games. The stakes there might not be as high as they once were, but they offer everything that he wants at this stage in his life.
“I got to be 70, which unfortunately is a while back and, I kind of retired from high stakes cash games,” said Zolotow. “So now I’ll do something like $5/$5 with a rock at the ARIA, where a big winning day would be $10,000 or something like that, so I’m not playing with these huge swings. But the main thing about cash is if you’re not feeling well, or you’re tired, or you want to have dinner, take a break. You’re at a bad table, change tables.
“Tournaments, you know, as an older man, if you really have to go pee and it’s 20 minutes till the break and you don’t want to, you know, have to be blinding out, it’s that stuff is very frustrating.”
These days, the summer is one of the primary windows in which Zolotow focuses almost exclusively on poker. He moved out to Vegas as his primary residence early on his career, but his roots still run deep in New York. Zolotow bookends his summers of poker with two months back home in the spring and fall, among other travel plans, as he enjoys a certain measure of balance.
“My wife is not a big fan of Las Vegas, especially when it’s 110 degrees, so she doesn’t want to spend any time here,” said Zolotow. “But she’ll come here occasionally, and spend time in San Francisco. So now my time is kind of split up among the three.”
While Zolotow is in his poker zone, though, he’s clearly in his element. During three-handed play against Rheem and Weisman, the steady stream of banter at the table brought Zolotow back to his early days in poker when talking wasn’t so closely policed at the table.
“I’ve always thought poker is a game designed to be sociable and be friendly,” said Zolotow. “One of the things that’s interesting is in cash games, there’s much more talking. One of the terrible rules that they’ve tried to stick down poker players’ throats is no talking, no showing cards, no doing this or that.
“There even used to be an F-bomb penalty, you know? People want to go and have fun. They don’t want to be there and have someone say, ‘Oh, you exposed your hole card. You have to take a round off. It’s a dead hand,’ or whatever.”
Something about what Zolotow is doing is just clicking right now. Playing in those PokerGO events appears to have had the effect of sharpening Zolotow’s game to a point where his first WSOP bracelet in over 20 years doesn’t feel too far out of the realm of possibility. Less than a week after his top-three finish in the PLO, Zolotow was back for another Day 3 in the $10,000 Deuce-to-Seven Triple Draw event, among the final 13 with names like Phil Ivey, Jason Mercier and Benny Glaser.
And for all of the small things that Zolotow laments, his enthusiasm for the opportunities at hand is clear.
“You know, one of the things that I love about the World Series is they do have a lot of different tournaments you don’t get a chance to play,” said Zolotow. “The fact that there’s a HORSE tournament or a razz tournament or a stud tournament, I definitely want to play a bunch of those. It’ll depend on how I feel and if I’m rested.”