Poker A Nice Fallback

When Leo Wolpert was a senior at Thomas Jefferson High, his quiz bowl team lost in the first round of Mac McGarry's "It's Academic."

"I was absolutely devastated, crushed," Wolpert told me. "I probably cried like a little girl afterward. I was just in a rage."


When Wolpert was a freshman at TJ, he was cut from the baseball team.

And this week, between writing memos about civil liberties, he borrowed a few thousand dollars from a -playing friend, entered a World Series of Poker event, made it to the final pairing of the heads-up no-limit Texas hold 'em event, endured a final match that lasted more than eight hours, and won a WSOP bracelet, walking away with more than $650,000.